1a. Last week, in the first hours after Antonio Brown left the stadium mid-game against the Jets, Tom Brady made a plea for compassion and empathy for Brown. He was right. Everyone should be afforded compassion and empathy in difficult times, and Brown’s past doesn’t exclude him. But it’s important to note that, over the past two years, Brady has not offered that same compassion and empathy for those who were mistreated by Brown. They are human beings who were relegated to footnote status in their own traumatic stories as the greatest player in the history of the NFL, someone with incredible power due solely to his athletic accomplishments, advocated for Brown’s return to the NFL.
At no point should Brown have been subjected to any kind of lifetime or even indefinite ban from the NFL, but he—like anyone with a pattern of destructive and abhorrent behavior—should have to earn a path back. That typically starts with some acknowledgement of what they’ve done. Brown, for the most part, skipped that.
He apologized to “the NFL” and his family. But regarding mistreatment of women that has been chronicled in our independent reporting, police reports, and his own social media accounts, Brown had this to say in an ESPN interview: “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 and I’m going to have to face it. 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.’ The media will run with it, so even if I’m not guilty, I already guilty because they already wrote it, put it on TV and put that in people minds. So for me to have to sit here and hear those the allegations of me is just unfair to me every time.”
is a word I’ve used often in reference to Brown. Regardless of what his issues are, we’re well past the point where he’s responsible for getting any help he needs to correct his behavior, especially with the resources available to him as a professional athlete.
Those who were mistreated by Brown don’t know Brady personally and (perhaps more pertinent) were not going to help him win football games, though it makes them no less human. Sports stars have tremendous influence over society at large. Brady is surely aware of that—a restaurant chain he’d never patronize handed him what’s surely an outrageous amount of money to promote their food, he’s likely receiving similar compensation to promote cryptocurrency even though his grasp on it seems tenuous at best, he can charge upwards of $100 for magic pajama… sorry, “recovery sleepwear.” Brady’s words and actions matter, and in regards to Brown they were to minimize his mistreatment of others, even as Brown showed little interest in redeeming himself.
There was a level of hubris at play in this organization, and Brady himself, thinking they would be the ones to change Brown’s behavior. Self-improvement does not move in an uninterrupted upward trajectory, and Brady and the Bucs were consistently willing to volunteer that Brown was improving. But they were never willing to provide details about why, specifically, they felt he was improving, other than emphasizing that he hadn’t been a problem in the locker room (which was clearly their main concern). And there’s little we’ve seen publicly to suggest Brown’s behavior was getting better.
The Bucs cut ties with Brown over behavior much less problematic than what got him cut from the Patriots two seasons ago; he is gone from Tampa because he caused embarrassment for a football team. The star quarterback and organization that enabled him would do well to look at their own role in the now years-long Antonio Brown drama.
1b. The Bucs organization, of course, has not covered itself in glory over the past week (or, when it comes to Brown, the past year). Bruce Arians, specifically, continues to reveal himself as a less-than-skilled communicator.
In this case, Arians’s public statements, the official injury report, and then his subsequent explanation don’t seem to match up regarding the coach’s knowledge of Brown’s ankle injury, which Brown cited as the reason he refused to re-enter the game against the Jets. Arians said Brown essentially didn’t go through proper protocols by alerting the training staff that his ankle was a problem, but Arians also had to know the ankle injury was a issue, and even acknowledged on Thursday that Brown and teammate Mike Evans were “on pitch counts.” Brown is a less-than-reliable narrator of what transpired on the sideline last week, but Arians isn’t inspiring confidence either.
Meanwhile, GM Jason Licht attempted to bolster the Bucs’ side of the story by reaching out to ESPN’s Adam Schefter (perhaps not the bastion of journalistic integrity you’d seek out in such a scenario, but maybe that’s why I’m not an NFL general manager). Licht told Schefter that Brown’s camp had asked for certain contract incentives to be converted to guarantees, and the Bucs had refused. Licht and his colleagues can run their operation as they see fit, but it is a reminder of how dopey contract incentives based on individual statistics are. It goes beyond the fact that football is the ultimate team sport and individual statistical accomplishments don’t necessarily correlate with team success. From the player’s standpoint, Brown realistically could have felt forced to play through an injury in order to hit those numbers and/or was understandably frustrated when the ball wasn’t coming his way, a factor that is largely out of his control. And from the team’s standpoint, if “targets” was indeed was the impetus for Brown’s unhappiness last week, then they just enraged and lost their best receiver—a guy the entire organization debased themselves to bring in in the first place—because they insisted on linking his compensation to a bunch of arbitrary statistical accomplishments.
1c. Regarding Brown’s past seven days, his insistence on airing everything on social media with a complete lack of a filter is ridiculous. He might have a legitimate grievance against the team if they cut him without an injury settlement, but if so he should let his agent, lawyer, and the NFLPA work on his behalf.
