A common school of thought says that NFL teams don’t care about an athlete’s personal conduct as long as he can play at a high level. In this version of pro sports, there is no behavior so heinous that a football team won’t tolerate it so long as the player reaches a minimum threshold of talent and production. If he’s not in jail, he’s in the lineup.
That has never been true. The latest chapter in the awe-inspiring, maddening, and increasingly saddening career of Antonio Brown is a good illustration.
Brown was a Tampa Bay Buccaneer until Sunday. Late in the third quarter of what became a comeback win over the New York Jets, Brown stood on the sideline and talked angrily with fellow receiver Mike Evans. Brown then took off his shoulder pads and jersey and tossed them away, ripped off his undershirt and glove and chucked them into the stands, and ran off the field and down a tunnel while exhorting the crowd to cheer.
Brown kept running until the Bucs released him, as head coach Bruce Arians announced in his postgame press conference.
So, Brown is out of an NFL job, at least for now. That’s not because of who he is—and a lot of people have speculated a lot over the years about what’s going on with him—but because of who he wronged on Sunday. After a career of allegedly breaking various laws and most recently getting caught in the most flagrant violation of the NFL and NFLPA’s pandemic rules, Brown broke the wrong rule at the wrong time: He quit on his team, and he did it during a game. It wasn’t the most serious thing Brown has done wrong in the last few years, except that in football terms, it was.
The reason we’re having this discussion in the first place is that Brown, 33, was an astonishingly good player for an astonishingly long time. A sixth-round pick in 2010 out of Central Michigan, he became the best receiver in the NFL while playing most of the next decade with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He’s not big, but he was a devastating route runner with baseball mitts for hands. Statistically speaking, Brown is a Hall of Fame receiver. He cleared 100 catches every year from 2013 to 2018 and led the sport in bunches of categories while making obscene catches time and again. He has waned over the last few years, but Tom Brady targeted him plenty during the Bucs’ title run last year, including for a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.
Between Brown’s dominant run in Pittsburgh and release by Tampa Bay, he had a lot of what NFL broadcasters would euphemistically call “off-field issues.” His relationship with Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger deteriorated to the point that Brown demanded a trade and spoke so critically of the Steelers that they had little option but to give it to him and send Brown to the now-Las Vegas Raiders. In his first training camp with the Raiders, he clashed with general manager Mike Mayock and coach Jon Gruden (also now gone) and got released after he recorded and published an argument between himself and Gruden about his commitment to the team.
After the Raiders cut him, Brady’s New England Patriots quickly signed him. Before Brown’s first game with the Patriots, his former trainer, Britney Taylor, sued him and alleged he had sexually assaulted her three times in 2017 and ‘18. The team didn’t release him then. But after his first appearance for New England, another woman accused Brown of an unwanted sexual advance and shared threatening text messages she said he’d sent to her. At that point, the Patriots released Brown under public pressure. The next year, Brown pleaded no contest to battery and burglary charges in a separate case. His sentence included probation, an anger management course, community service, and a psychiatric evaluation.
Before the 2020 season, the NFL suspended the free agent Brown for eight games. The Buccaneers signed him after the suspension lapsed, looking for receivers to help Brady. “I think he’s matured, and I believe in second chances,” Arians said at the time. He added, “He screws up one time, he’s gone.”
When it came out that Brown had thrown a bicycle at a security guard a week before the Bucs brought him in for a workout, Arians said the team had been “totally aware” of that incident. On the field, the signing paid huge dividends, as Brown became a useful piece of the Bucs’ Super Bowl puzzle. Off the field, Arians said the wide receiver had been a “model citizen.”
The Bucs re-signed Brown for 2021, and he settled Taylor’s sexual assault lawsuit before the season. And then, in early December, the NFL suspended him for three games after finding he had submitted a forged vaccination card and evaded more stringent protocols for unvaccinated players. That vaccine card revelation came out via a personal chef who said Brown owed him $10,000.
There was some speculation that Brown might be done with the Bucs at that point, given Arians’ “he screws up one time, he’s gone” decree. But Tampa is low on wide receivers, and Brown was back on the roster when his three-game suspension was done. Arians said of people wondering why he’d changed his mind: “I could give a shit what they think. Only thing I care about is this football team and what’s best for us.”
It was an honest distillation of NFL decision-making, and it’s also why Brown is now, today, off the team. The collective tonnage of civil and criminal cases against Brown didn’t do it, because he could still catch passes from Brady. On Sunday, though, the Bucs were losing to the miserable Jets, and Brown simply rolled on out of there. It’s not clear why—the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that it all began with a dispute over whether Brown was healthy enough to play, which may or may not mesh with the Bucs’ version of events—and the why doesn’t really matter, because the Bucs get to be judge and jury here. Arians didn’t want to talk about it beyond saying Brown was off the team. Brown released a rap song, raising the critical question of whether he’d pre-recorded it in the event of getting cut or taped it in the heat of the moment. Brady said Brown needed help and struck a compassionate tone.
The NFL is not a moral enterprise, and Arians stopped pretending it was when he decided to keep Brown around after the vaccine card suspension. But fidelity to the franchise comes first, and Brown couldn’t survive publicly walking out on his team. Whether it’s silly or not is beside the point, because football decided many generations ago that one of the only things that’s beyond the pale is not being available to play when the coach demands it.
Brown is an effective receiver, but with less ability and therefore less equity than he once had. There were transgressions he could withstand at this point in his career, and there were others he couldn’t. His problem on Sunday was that he pissed off people inside his organization rather than outside its walls. That offense could keep him out of the NFL for good, or at least until someone desperately needs a wideout.
Update, Jan. 3, 2021, 6:40 p.m. ET: ESPN’s Adam Schefter reports that the Bucs haven’t yet officially released Antonio Brown. We’ll see where this goes.
