Old-school NFL finds itself swimming against live stream

With his smartphone-powered broadcast from the Pittsburgh Steelers’ locker room last week, wide receiver Antonio Brown shoved Twitter aside and made live streaming football’s No. 1 enemy when it comes to social media.

Brown proved once again that if you give athletes a social media tool, they will find a way to screw up with it. And he set up an old school-new school conflict — coach vs. player — that the latter predictably lost.

But while it gave traditionalists reason for pause, does anyone think this is going to put the brakes on our access to places that use to be off limits? Considering how deep social media has already taken us into athletes’ lives, this locker-room controversy seems silly.

Brown’s shenanigans may have provided a temporary distraction as the Pittsburgh Steelers prepared to face the New England Patriots in Sunday’s AFC championship game. His 17-minute Facebook Live stream from the winning locker room a week ago resulted in the star wide receiver being shamed for sharing. He apologized on social media, then in real life.

Of course, his apology press conference was delayed by almost an hour because he was getting a haircut — something reporters knew because he was posting about it on Snapchat.

Brown’s contrition was more about the team trying to control their players’ behaviour than it was about the technology, which we’re only going to see more athletes use, likely to good and ill effects.

Football is a sport that loves to be old school, so Steelers coach Mike Tomlin gave good theatre, gruffly talking about how the player violated the sacred trust of the locker room. Brown’s stream mostly featured him preening, and silly dance moves from teammates.

There was further comic relief when Patriots coach Bill Belichick joined the discussion, commenting to reporters: “Yeah, as you know I’m not on SnapFace and all that, I don’t really get those. I’m just really worried about getting our team ready to go. I’m not really too worried about what they put on InstantChat, or whatever it is.”

The NFL was investigating Brown’s actions last week and the receiver will likely get fined.

The trickier question is whether Brown was paid to do live stream from the locker room. He hasn’t admitted it, but he was reportedly one of a group of celebrities that were being paid to use Facebook Live by the company as a means to get average folks to watch and start using it themselves. Brown had been using it during the season, often broadcasting his workouts. Facebook Live has benefitted most from all this publicity.

It’s hard for a fan to be mad at Brown. He gave the kind of behindthe-scenes access we want. My criticism of the video is I found much of it unwatchable. It was too long, although I may be used to Snapchat’s comparative brevity.

But thanks to the Internet, once it became news, I had to watch for myself. By then it had been pulled down off Facebook, where it had been viewed a million times, but posted to YouTube , where it had already been viewed almost a million more. I might have found it unwatchable, but it was authentic.

There were two other interesting developments this week that show the appetite for more access to the athletic world. The Player’s Tribune, the site started by Derek Jeter that specializes in first-person athlete’s stories, announced a $40-million round of funding, a significant investment. And TNT announced a “Player’s Only” experiment, five Monday night NBA broadcasts, starting Feb. 27, where the entire broadcast team will be former athletes, including the host and playby-play roles traditionally filled by professional broadcasters.

It won’t be long before we drop the social and it’s all just media. Despite all the criticism the last week, it’s hard not to think the next generation of player-friendly coaches will really embrace social media and let their players have an even freer hand with this stuff. It’s a key to an athlete’s personal branding that, so far, we can’t get enough of seeing.