If there is anything we learned from the final two weeks of the regular season, it’s that we were all fooled last season when Antonio Brown won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers.
There was never a redemption story with him in Tampa.
It’s not just with him faking is vaccination card. His most recent antic was him throwing a tantrum on the Bucs’ sidelines, then taking off his jersey, his pads, and his undershirt, throwing said undershirt to the stands as he ran to the locker room. The Bucs were not penalized even though he was gesturing to the crowd in the end zone.
After all the whole eruption of frustration, Bruce Arians said that AB is no longer a member of the Bucs.
“He is no longer a Buc,” said Arians. “That’s the end of the story. Let’s talk about the guys that went out there and won the game.”
Mike Evans and OJ Howard tried to calm Brown down, but they could not stop him from all that show of frustration. It’s another episode to the soap opera involving him, in addition to his three-game suspension for the fake vaccination card.
Brown was not benched; one source told Jenna Laine of ESPN that “he quit.” He did not fly on the team plane after the game.
He even asked state troopers for a ride to the airport, but his request was denied. He was later picked up by Saquon Barkley’s personal driver, Danny Chalet, who made several posts on his Instagram story showing him on FaceTime with Brown, and showing him driving Brown, with Brown even saying, “Man, this is gonna make my Netflix series!”
MetLife Stadium security even said that they thought Brown was a fan who jumped onto the field.
“We thought he was a jumper,” one security officer said. “He was shirtless and didn’t have his wallet.”
Brown released his side of the whole story later, saying that he refused to play through an ankle injury that sidelined him since Week 6. He didn’t specify which ankle was hurt, through a statement released by his attorney, Sean Burstyn, he said an MRI showed broken bone fragments, a ligament tear, and a cartilage loss “which are beyond painful. You can see the bone bulging from the outside.”
If he said that he was injured, how is it that Arians said the day after the game that Brown did not claim he was injured when he refused to continue playing?
But that didn’t stop Brown from claiming the Bucs forced him to play through the injury.
“Because of my commitment to the game, I relented to pressure directly from my coach to play injured,” he said. “Despite the plan, I suited up, the staff injected me with what I now was a powerful and sometimes dangerous painkiller that the NFLPA has warned against using, and I gave it my all for the team. I played until it was clear that I could not use my ankle to safely perform my playing responsibilities.
“On top of that, the pain was extreme. I took a seat on the sideline and my coach came up to me, very upset, and shouted, ‘What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?’ I told him, ‘It’s my ankle.’ But he knew that. It was well documented and we had discussed it.
“He then ordered me to get on the field. I said, ‘Coach, I can’t.’ He didn’t call for medical attention. Instead, he shouted at me, ‘YOU’RE DONE!’ while he ran his finger across his throat. Coach was telling me that if I didn’t play hurt, then I was done with the Bucs.”
Here’s the fishy part: Yes, he was on the injury list throughout the season, but if Brown said that he was forced to play injured, why does the injury list say on the Wednesday heading into the game that his absence from practice was “not injury related – personal?”
It still didn’t stop him from alleging the Bucs were participating in a cover-up.
“I didn’t quit. I was cut. I didn’t walk away from my brothers. I was thrown out,” said Brown.
“Being fired on the sideline for having a painful injury was bad enough. Then came their “spin.” Coach denied on national television that he knew about my ankle. That’s 100% inaccurate. Not only did he know I missed several games with the injury, he and I exchanged texts days before the game where he clearly acknowledged my injury.”
In the ongoing controversy, Brown released alleged texts between him and Arians, with Brown saying that he “[can’t] get to full speed.”
Burstyn said the Bucs terminated Brown’s contract for failing to show up to a doctor’s appointment that he could not make, calling the move a “surprise attack” in a series of tweets.
“We were in the midst of scheduling an appointment with the Bucs’ chosen surgeon when we learned, via Twitter, that they terminated AB on Thursday for not seeing that very same surgeon,” tweeted Burstyn. “...The Bucs picked an arbitrary appointment time outside of normal business hours early Thursday morning. They also fumbled around with a Wednesday afternoon appt at the last minute. (Bucs’ new interest in AB’s health was a surprise. Wasn’t AB ‘not a Buc’ on Sunday night?)”
Burstyn even wrote that they were trying to reschedule and said the Bucs claimed that Brown was “refusing to show up to a doctor’s appointment” as justification for his release.
“The Bucs did this because they know that Coach Arians’ on-the-field termination of AB was degrading, inhumane, abusive, and unlawful. So they tried covering it up using their latest dirty trick: ‘Surprise attack’ medical care that they [never] reasonably planned for AB to receive,” tweeted Burstyn. “This was pure gamesmanship to create a pretextual termination. All Antonio did was ask to be seen in a reasonable hour by a doctor with current medical records. When AB spoke up about his health this week, he was fired. On the field, then on Twitter.”
Burstyn also added that he believes the Bucs used Brown’s history (11 games missed because of suspension in the last two seasons, an arrest for assaulting a moving truck driver, and two public allegations of sexual assault) against him. Brown said he has “made mistakes” in his statement, but he and Burstyn argue that his legal history shouldn’t preclude him from feeling pain and speaking out when he felt he was too hurt to play.
Yes, Arians said that while he and Brown discussed the ankle injury during the week and that the disgruntled wide receiver didn’t participate in practice in the Thursday and Friday leading up to the game, Brown participated in Saturday’s walk-through and was cleared to play. Arians was not made aware of how bad Brown’s injury was and that the frustration was more to do with a lack of targets. The Bucs head coach emphasized that he would never ask for a player to play through an injury.
Brown’s comments on the Full Send Podcast even show that he was increasingly frustrated with his salary: $6.25 million, a $2 million signing bonus, and $3.1 million guaranteed that he agreed to before the start of the 2021 season.
Bucs general manager Jason Licht told Adam Schefter of ESPN that Brown’s agent approached the team about guaranteeing the $2 million of incentives.
The Bucs declined.
Licht also told Schefter that the Bucs made two appointments in New York, where Brown was still leaving after the game, so they could place him on IR and pay him the remainder of his salary for the season. Licht added that Brown never returned the texts nor the phone calls, nor did he send over his medical records, including the MRI that Brown had, which they requested.
The collective bargaining agreement says that a team-appointed doctor must perform a physical for a player to be placed on IR. A player can get a second opinion, which the NFLPA encourages. Burstyn said they never got a request for the medical records.
“Show me a request for medical records. We never got one,” Burstyn told ESPN, adding the team called on Wednesday and asked for a response. “Did not tell us what the call was about. Said to call back at our ‘earliest convenience.’ We had an internal team discussion Thursday morning to go over options before calling back. By noon, they went ahead and took the most drastic action: fired.”
Here’s the counterargument: Yes, he was on the injury list throughout the season, but if he says that he was feeling so much pain on his ankle, why was he running and jumping on his way out of MetLife Stadium? If anything, he looked as if he was not in serious pain.
And even Brown went on a public tirade against his former teammate and current roommate, Tom Brady.
Brady was largely responsible for Brown signing with the Bucs. Before the team’s Super Bowl run, he helped Brown sign a one-year deal, and even invited the wideout to live with him and his family, and later convinced the Bucs to sign him, despite Arians calling Brown a diva.
But with Brown’s recent tirade, it shows he was not grateful for all that Brady did for him, saying that the QB has not done enough for him.
“To me, a friend is someone who’s got your back,” Brown said on the episode he was featured on the Full Send Podcast. “Not everybody in sports is going to be your friend. Tom Brady’s my friend, why? Because I’m a good football player. He needs me to play football. People have different meanings of what friendship is. You can’t really expect anyone to be your friend in the business of football. In the business of football, our business is winning. Brady and I like winning. We have that in common. That’s what makes me want to be around him, makes us jell, makes us great. I’m out here getting prove-it contracts, you say you’re my friend, I shouldn’t be playing on that type of deal when I came here and we won a Super Bowl.”
Excuse me, what?
And to make this more mind-baffling, Brown even had the audacity to call Brady the general manager of the team.
“He’s the guy my agent made the contract with, he’s the middleman and politician,” said Brown. “I talked to Tom, and he knows I’m not going to play.”
To debunk this, Brown was a free agent before he landed with the Bucs. Brady did not make the final decision to sign him. Brady convinced the Bucs to sign Brown, and Brown took what Jason Licht and the front office offered him because of Brady’s convincing to the front office. That was his only offer; no other team wanted him in the middle of the soap opera surrounding him.
Antonio Brown is continuing to burn bridges after Brady was helping him out. Not once, but TWICE.
Brown saying that Brady can’t do anything by himself is ironic because football is a team game. Brady literally won a Super Bowl with a wide receiver core of Julian Edelman, Danny Amendola, Chris Hogan, and Malcolm Mitchell.
Brown is making this salary because he was essentially a distraction to the other teams he played for. He can’t comprehend why he is getting paid less than superstar money after all the drama around him. How is it that Brady helped him land with a team TWICE when nobody wanted him, and Brown is bad mouthing him publicly?
“Hey, Antonio Brown: You say ‘GM’ Brady dictated that you were forced to take an incentive-laden ‘prove it’ deal,” tweeted Skip Bayless. “UH, AB, YOU WERE A FREE AGENT. YOU COULD’VE SIGNED ANYWHERE. YOU TOOK WHAT TAMPA OFFERED BECAUSE IT WAS YOUR ONLY OFFER ... THANKS TO BRADY.”
Those comments are a blatant contradiction from what he said in the past, when he likened the seven-time Super Bowl champion to a “big brother” and called him a “role model” after Brady twice moved in with him.
“We all love him. We care about him deeply. We want to see him be at his best. Unfortunately it won’t be with our team,” said Brady. “I think everyone should be very compassionate and empathetic toward some very difficult things that are happening.”
And even Brown, who was spotted sitting courtside during the Brooklyn Nets’ game against the Memphis Grizzlies, had the audacity to blame the media for fabricating the drama surrounding him.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Brown said after many questions of his suspension. “You guys are all drama. It’s all about football. We’re going to talk about Carolina or I don’t want to talk to you guys. ... It’s a lot of drama you guys create, a lot of drama people create who want stuff from me. That’s a part of life, a part of being in the position. I can’t control what people want from me, what people write about me.”
The irony is that in the past five years, Brown’s career has been nonstop drama, from his fallout leading up to his exit from the Steelers to the debacle with the Raiders to his current situation with the Bucs.
And with his season seemingly done, he turned back to music, dropping a new single: “Pit Not The Palace,” and even was spending his time off with Kanye West and Julia Fox, even having dinner with them. He appeared to show regret over his infamous shirtless breakup with the Bucs.
“It probably wasn’t necessary or professional,” said Brown.
Some may think he was being sincere with his comment, but one reason why skeptics may point to why he is not is because he said that while keeping a smile on his face.
When someone tweeted pictures of Terrell Owens and Antonio Brown, asking who is the bigger diva, Owens responded, “Wow. Respectfully and disrespectfully, there’s no comparison. Clearly, you’ve been drinking the kool-aid.”
That message from Owens to Brown was very clear: All the “best on myself” talk coming applies to T.O. The Hall of Fame wideout made it clear that Brown should focus on his own life.
At the end of the day, A.B., I’m not the enemy, bro. I’m really not. At the end of the day, what you brought on yourself, that’s on you. I have nothing to do with that. Yeah, I’m 48 and I can get down at 48. It doesn’t make any difference, age is nothing but a number for me.
So who are you to say what I can’t do? You even said it in your podcast, you said it shortly after that. I can do whatever I feel like I want to. All I have to do is be given the opportunity.
The common belief after the Buccaneers won Super Bowl LV was that Brown was able to turn his life around. But the truth points to something very, very different.
He hasn’t changed at all.
His shirtless walk-off show was a fitting ending to his Bucs tenure. Him removing his jersey was the only way to show who he truly is: A diva.
In the past two seasons, the Bucs sold the NFL world the misconception that athletic success reflects character, and that Brown’s performance meant he is making progress. The two most important people in the organization, Tom Brady and Bruce Arians, both advocated this at times.
The reality is that when the Bucs signed Brown, he was a great football player with a history of damaging and destructive behavior. That’s not progress. The Bucs reinforced it—as long as he is a great football player, his history of destructive behavior didn’t matter.
Teams should take a hard look at this. It’s the example of what happens when teams, whether it be consciously or subconsciously, view people through the area of what they do on the field and not off the field.
Brown’s success with the Bucs added fuel to the illusion that the Bucs made the right decision by adding him. At first, he needed the Bucs. The better he played, the more he believed the Bucs needed him.
But what people didn’t know is that every catch he made was one step closer towards the inevitable: Another Antonio Brown thing.
Brown stopped being a great football player during the Bucs’ match against the Jets. That’s when Brady said, “I think everybody should do what they can to help him in ways that he really needs him.”
Brady seemed genuine with that statement, yet he and the Bucs were convincing themselves that playing football helped Brown, when, in reality, it just allowed him to ignore his serious problems.
Second chances (and Brown was getting his 4th chance) are not just about second chances. Opportunity has to come first. People have to be honest about their failures and own them until owning them is essential to them.
The Bucs never did that.
Instead, Arians told Peter King of NBC Sports, “He screws up one time, he’s gone,” which sounded good, but it was very shallow thinking.
Brown has serious problems with him. Saying that he shouldn’t do any act of drama is not a way to help him address them.
The hypocritical part is that Arians said that Brown would be gone if he commits an act of drama, but he was kept on the roster when he had a fake vaccination card and was subsequently suspended three games for it. When Arians was asked about the zero-tolerance policy, he did not give a strong answer.
“I could give a s*** what [people] think,” said Arians. “The only thing I care about is this football team and what’s best for us.”
That’s the Fake Tough Guy response: Spinelessness disguised as hubris. It’s his way of intimidation, by simply dismissing the legitimacy of the questions.
There were more mature ways for him to respond. He could say the questions were fair, but he changed his mind. He could say that he believed in the zero-tolerance policy when Brown was signed but the more he thought about that, the more he came to the realization he should not have taken the absolutist stance.
He did say, “Well, the history has changed since that statement. A lot of things went on last year that I was very proud of him.”
But he didn’t really say what “went on last year.” One can say that he was referring to the Super Bowl.
That’s all that happened. There was no indication Brown learned from all the drama. He did not own up to his mistakes. When he was still unsigned back in January 2020, he told ESPN, “I feel like I never really got in a conflict with no woman. I just feel like I’m a target so, anybody can come against me and say anything [that] I have to face. There’s no support, there’s no egos, there’s no rules in it, anyone can come after me for anything. No proof or whatever. ‘He said, she’s saying.’”
He was given numerous chances during his mandatory media availability before the Super Bowl. All he said was, “I’ve been through some things, but that’s life.”
He never detailed what he did, or apologized to the many people he did wrong. He didn’t even change his behavior. He was dismissing those who questioned him by saying he just wanted to focus on football.
It was obvious that Brown saw his transgressions not as mistakes that he made but things that happened to HIM. There was no redemptions story here. There was no personal growth. It was the Bucs getting considerable production from someone who has not changed at all.
And nobody wanted it more than Tom Brady.
He was the main reason Brown even came back to the NFL. After Brady signed with the Bucs, Arians dismissed the idea of Brown joining the team. But Brady wanted him on the Bucs.
He believes that he knows better ways for most people to live, and he thought he could help Brown. But he boosted Brown into committing the wideout’s next act of drama. That’s not how Brady saw it. But if he reflects, and his love for Brown is sincere, then he could possibly see it.
There are ways to help troubled people. What the Bucs did was a shortcut from the very start. It worked on the field, but only on the field.
It’s easy to be sympathetic to Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, or Michael Phelps for their mental health issues. The struggles were invisible, and their confessions were soft-spoken.
It’s not that easy in Brown’s case.
His pain comes right out loud, in front of cameras and on social media, and it is so mind-boggling and, in some cases, inexcusable, from his sexual misconduct to his fake vaccination card.
It’s hard to think of another field where so valuable an employee is summarily cut when deemed noncompliant. Brown works harder than any player in the NFL to be uncoverable. In no profession to employers demand devotion and repay it with such little loyalty and deem people as expendables.
To their credit, the NFL and the NFLPA have recognized the imbalance and collaborated on benefits to address player anxiety, depression, anger, and other behavioral issues. League policy mandates that every team have a clinician available, at least part time.
The standards vary from team to team, depending on sensibilities that are hard to change. The Bucs’ sensibility in this case is terrible, because Arians was long suspicious of sports psychology and only views it as a tool in competitive sports.
Both sides are at fault. The Bucs should tell Brown he is welcome back, not because they need him to win, but because they should own all of him and the entirety of his human problems.
It doesn’t excuse his actions, but at least they should have shown decency and helped him to the fullest extent.
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