Deciphering a ‘brand’ new NFL year
The National Football League’s New Year rang in raucously Wednesday at 4 p.m., but the hangover could smash all records for length, intensity, disorientation, creeping dread, nausea, vomiting (particularly if you watched that press conference from Oakland), guilt, recriminations, plus assorted additional unpleasantness not yet defined.
All that’s missing is a live tiger that will necessitate a visit to Mike Tyson’s gated Las Vegas mansion, but hey, we’re just waking up.
My first inclination is to blame Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield for everything.
That’s right I said it. Mayfield is the brilliant rookie who drove the road-dawg Browns to the Baltimore Ravens’ 39-yard line in the final minutes on the final day of the 2018 season, but instead of completing even one more pass to set up a winning field goal, he threw three consecutive incompletions and an interception that meant, among many other things, that 249 miles away, the Steelers’ season ended with a crash.
And that Antonio Brown had played his last game as part of Pittsburgh’s most prolific touchdown tandem ever — Roethlisberger to Brown — which connected 74 times (Bradshaw to Swann is a distant second with 49 TDs).
And that Le’Veon Bell, Jesse James, and Marcus Gilbert had played their last here, as well.
Had Mayfield completed that drive Dec. 30, maybe Mike Tomlin and Kevin Colbert and Art Rooney II would have trail-blazed a path forward with Brown, soon to be described in the nation’s wire copy as “prolific but disgruntled,” instead of determining that, from now on, they were only interested in players who were fully gruntled. After all, had Mayfield completed that drive, there would have been a Steelers playoff game to get ready for in five or six days, an enticing circumstance from which not even a stone narcissist like Brown could have stayed away.
But here, just 11 weeks later, Brown is an Oakland Raider, Bell is a New York Jet, the words “Cleveland” and “Super Bowl” are getting put into sentences that somehow do not include the words “never,” nor the phrase “don’t be daft.” The Detroit Lions are busily re-branding their personnel profile to Patriots Midwest, long-time Raven and Steelers nemesis Terrell Suggs has moved to pre-retirement Arizona, and an offseason that has still nearly six months to go has already stopped making sense.
For all of the dizzying news of this first week of free agency, though, mapping the topographical brain of Antonio Brown remains the most nettlesome by the length of a football field. To comprehend A.B., you’ve really got to talk with someone like Ishveen Anand, the 29-year-old digital entrepreneur honored by Forbes Magazine’s 30-under-30 list and the CEO of a marketing synergy called OpenSponsorship. She was kind enough to decipher Mr. Big Chest to me in a phone interview this week.
As I heard it, Brown and many athletes exist in the parallel universe of social media in a way that exerts a unique leverage their bosses are not adept at countervailing, or in some cases even understanding.
“Part of it is obviously his brand, and brand today is very tied to social media,” Ishveen said. “With him having over 3 million followers, and I’ll give you a breakdown on his followers, but we also look at engagement, and comments on posts. They way we do things at OpenSponsorship is we put people in brackets. Everyone over a million followers is [considered] international, the label we give the internationally well-known. When Antonio Brown posts on social media, he gets 75 percent above average “likes” and 157 percent above average comments vs. other people in the bracket. All that really means, just to give you a general sense, is that there are many people who are super famous but their content on social media is not that exciting. It might not be that personable or funny or engaging. He leverages a lot of other celebrities which obviously works really well, LeBron James and a lot of the rappers, as well. He’s just like a big personality and social media kind of backs that up.”
Uh-huh. But personable, funny, and engaging are not currently among the top 500 adjectives swirling through Western Pennsylvania regarding A.B.’s digital profile. Is there no damage to a player’s social media profile inflicted by engaging in behaviors that might be judged harshly in — what do you call it, the opposite of virtual reality, oh yeah — actual reality?
“I don’t think it’s completely unrelated,” Ishveen said. “I do think it has an impact on your social. A player who got cut from his NFL team was telling me how every time he tweets, he loses followers because his followers realize he’s not playing with the team anymore and they unfollow him. You definitely have a fan base who you’re going to lose. However, you’re also — in social you’re moving up and down every day — but every day you have other people who are gonna come along and say, ‘Oh that’s so cool; he took a stand. He’s controversial.’ For him, that outweighs what he loses with his off-field antics.”
So the Steelers woke up on New Year’s Day holding a thirdround draft pick, a fifth-rounder, and $21 million in dead money where the greatest receiver in franchise history used to be, but fret not, just a cursory glance around the league should put their particular hangover in broader perspective.
New York Giants general manager Dave Gettleman woke up in the New Year a crazy person. Not two weeks after stating flatly that he had no intention of trading Odell Beckham Jr., because that would be crazy, Gettleman sent the NFC equivalent of Antonio Brown to Cleveland for a first-round pick, the last pick of the third round, safety Jabrill Peppers, and a coupon for $1 off a footlong at Subway (void where prohibited).
Gettleman had just last summer handed Beckham $20 million to sign a $90 million deal with some $40 million guaranteed, so no one can figure out what had gotten into Gettleman, except that two factors came up again – social media and rappers. On social media, Beckham and Browns wideout Jarvis Landry had long tried to recruit each other to each other’s teams, apparently, and it was on Twitter that former NFL lineman and SiriusXM host Ross Tucker speculated, “My guess is the [rapper] Lil Wayne interview where OBJ knocked Eli (Manning) was ther beginning of the end or the final straw. Any chance Lil Wayne gets a ring if the Browns win the Super Bowl?”
“Two years ago, Odell Beckham Jr. was the Number 1
highly engaged athlete on social media; it was all about engagement,” Ishveen said. “Now he has 12.6 million followers. He (and the Giants) had a terrible season, but with 12.6 million followers, his sponsorship dollars are not affected at all by team performance.”
What a relief. Elsewhere on the faux rap scene, Bell dropped a mix tape that -G music critic Scott Mervis swatted as “a dismal dive into mumble rap,” this after ESPN reported the erstwhile Steelers running back had used social media to feel out potential suitors Baltimore and Indianapolis with a blitz of emojis.
As NFL New Year’s Eve approached, Dallas Cowboys defensive end David Irving announced his retirement on Instagram while smoking a joint, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson posted on Instagram a cell phone video of himself driving 105 miles per hour, and the owner of the New England Patriots again quietly went about assembling the very best talent, except that this time Robert Kraft was acquiring high-powered lawyers to defend him against charges of soliciting prostitution.
Twice.
At a Florida strip mall. The second time on the day of the AFC championship game.
If you’re wondering, Stephen Colbert’s late-night riff of nine consecutive massage parlor jokes at the expense of the owner of the current Super Bowl champions was an NFL record.
Inescapably, what new adventures this new year shall bring is a matter of acute foreboding in a lot of places, not the least of which is Oakland, where the arrival of No. 84 could trigger the next great NFL cliché of 2019: subtraction by addition.