More on the meeting between Antonio Brown and Art Rooney II, and what happens now.
Rooney meets with disgruntled wide receiver
The Steelers didn’t need a meeting with Antonio Brown to determine what they were going to do with their star receiver.
But if there was any doubt, Mr. Brown spelled it out Tuesday on social media when he said he and the Steelers had finally agreed on one thing — it was time for him to move on.
The next step for the Steelers: Find a team willing to trade for a productive but truculent wide receiver and determine what value they might be able to get in return for a player whose off-the-field behavior could be overshadowing his on-field abilities.
Mr. Brown and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, met with Steelers president Art Rooney II, general manager Kevin Colbert and vice president of football and business administration Omar Khan Tuesday morning at the Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Fla., not far from Mr. Rooney’s winter home.
It was the first time Mr. Brown had spoken with Mr. Rooney since the final regular-season game, against the Cincinnati Bengals on Dec. 30.
The meeting was not an attempt at reconciliation by the Steelers; rather it was Mr. Rooney’s intent to determine what triggered his AllPro receiver’s insubordinate and bizarre behavior since the final week of the season. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last month, Mr. Rooney said he was “personally trying to understand what happened” when he made several attempts to speak with Mr. Brown, who did not return his phone calls. The Steelers did not issue any type of statement regarding Tuesday’s meeting. But Mr. Brown posted a picture of himself with Mr. Rooney and said “both [sides] agreed that it is time to move on.”
The Steelers cannot officially trade Mr. Brown until March 13, the first official day of the 2019 NFL calendar season. He is due a $2.5 million roster bonus by March 17, so it is likely a trade will be executed by then.
If Mr. Brown is traded, he will count $21.1 million in “dead money” — the amount of his pro-rated signing bonus for the next three years — against the team’s salary cap in 2019. Mr. Rooney has said “we’ll figure out how to deal with that” if a trade is made.
A trade for the most productive receiver in any sixyear period in NFL history, however, might not attract as many suitors as expected because of Mr. Brown’s incessant rants on social media that depict him as perhaps wanting a new contract once he is traded.
He has three years remaining on a contract that will pay him $36.4 million — a salary-cap-friendly deal that would be attractive to another NFL team. But in a message on Twitter last week in which he effectively was saying goodbye to Steelers fans, Mr. Brown used the hashtag “#NewDemands” that could indicate he might want to renegotiate his current deal with a new team.
That could reduce the number of teams interested in Mr. Brown and, in turn, affect the Steelers’ bargaining power.
On paper, Mr. Brown’s gaudy receiving numbers — an average of 114 catches, 1,524 yards and 11 touchdowns each of the past six seasons — would suggest he is worth at least a No. 1 draft choice, and probably more. History has shown that is possible.
In 2000, the Dallas Cowboys traded their No. 1 picks in the 2000 and 2001 drafts to obtain receiver Joey Galloway from the Seattle Seahawks. That same year, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers gave up two No. 1 picks to the New York Jets to get receiver Keyshawn Johnson.
Early in the 2018 season, the Cowboys gave up a No. 1 pick in a trade with the Oakland Raiders to obtain receiver Amari Cooper. That gave the Raiders three No. 1 picks in the upcoming April draft, making them a potential target for a trade with the Steelers for Mr. Brown.
Last April, the Raiders gave up a third-round choice to obtain troubled receiver Martavis Bryant from the Steelers — a surprisingly high draft pick for a player with Mr. Bryant’s off-field drug suspensions.
The Steelers, though, would like to control where they trade Mr. Brown. For example, they would not want to trade him to any of their AFC North opponents — Baltimore, Cincinnati and Cleveland — teams they face twice a year. And it is thought they would want to avoid sending him to their other nemesis, the New England Patriots.