It’s time for Steelers to dump WR Brown
If Antonio Brown wanted to leave the Steelers, his latest domestic dispute should seal that deal.
It no longer should be about how much the Steelers can get for him in a trade, but how soon they can dump this man, whose danger to opponents on a football field is surpassed only by the danger he poses to fellow humans off it.
According to a report filed by police in Hollywood, Fla., Brown pushed a woman down in front of his home on Jan. 17. She said her wrist hurt and she showed police some scratches with scabbing. While she did report the incident and the police took photos, she later declined to complete a victim affidavit and no arrest was made nor have charges been filed.
An NFL spokesman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wednesday that the league will investigate the incident, and the Steelers said they are looking into it.
Brown’s lawyer issued a statement Tuesday to ESPN that read: “The allegations are baseless and false. It’s unfortunate that the media is trying to use distractions like this and prior stories in an effort to tarnish my client’s name and reputation.”
Brown does not need the media’s help to do that. When Brown did his little Facebook Live routine in the
locker room in Kansas City two years ago, that was a “distraction.” He has since upped the ante to more aggressive acts, all in 2018, such as:
• A lawsuit alleges that he threw furniture off his condo’s 14th-floor balcony in a Miami suburb that nearly hit a toddler. This came after Brown himself called police to say he was robbed of $80,000 in cash and a gun that was in a satchel in his closet. Never mind why that was laying around in the first place.
• Driving over 100 mph on McKnight Road, which is not exactly Interstate 79. Brown and innocents near him are lucky he escaped with only a ticket. It was just Tuesday night that police say speeding on the West End Bridge caused a five-car pileup and one death.
• Threatening to break the jaw of an ESPN writer.
And these are just the ones we know about. They do not include all his peccadilloes on the field, on the sideline and in locker rooms (or absence from them) that ruffle the feathers of his coaches and teammates.
Brown showed up somewhere at the Super Bowl to do a few short interviews. He would have been better off had he stayed home (although maybe not if you are in the shoes of the woman who called the police on him).
His Super Bowl week appearances were not a good look and prompted one former Steeler to take to Twitter to say so.
“For real AB?” Chad Brown wrote. “You look and sound too high to be in public.”
That had to be the reaction of NFL owners and general managers, too, when they saw it. These are the people who will decide what, if anything, to give the Steelers
in a trade for Brown.
When I asked one longtime NFL personnel man last week what he would he would give the Steelers for Brown if he were in position to trade for him (he isn’t), he said maybe a sixth-round draft pick.
What?
OK, he replied, maybe a conditional fifth or fourth depending on how he performs and maybe if the team makes the playoffs.
If that were the case, the draft pick the Steelers would receive would not be until 2020, and it might be in the same round where the Steelers drafted Brown in 2010. The personnel man acknowledged that it would only take one team that really wanted him to jack up the take, the way the Oakland Raiders gave the Steelers a third-round pick for Martavis Bryant last year.
But is there even one left after his latest shenanigans?
Brown might have gotten off the hook with police in Hollywood, Fla., but that doesn’t mean he won’t feel the wrath of the NFL. The league has suspended players for things they did — or thought they did — without arrests being made — Ben Roethlisberger, for one.
But the Steelers are the ones who need to act forcefully. They cannot welcome Brown back for next season. His trade value might have plummeted, but they’ll just have to take what they can get whether another Jon Gruden somehow offers them a first-round pick or if it’s a conditional seventhrounder in 2020.
It’s addition by subtraction. The New England Patriots win with a whole lot less at wide receiver.