Don’t blame Antonio Brown for putting himself first. No one else was going to.
The NFL player who puts his self-interest first is always labeled a little crazy. Why is that? Whenever a man bucks the ideology of team fealty, he’s painted as an unpredictable danger and a threat to the entire city’s infrastructure.
Antonio Brown was the most reliably great wide receiver in the league for six years, but suddenly, because he exercised some canny self-determination and busted himself out of a lousy situation, everyone wants to know if this selfish lunatic can sublimate his ungovernable personality. That, or they think he somehow played them.
It’s never the degenerate league owner, or the coach whose hoarse voice holds the rattling of a thousand bourbon-soaked ice cubes, who’s supposed to show some loyalty and discretion. It’s only the player. In this case, Brown wrested his fate into his own hands, outwitted all of those who would have shackled him to bad organizations and outmaneuvered all of the NFL rules that are about hobbling player movement in the marketplace by treating them like third-graders in need of a hall pass, to land with the New England Patriots. Good for him.
Brown is 31, with only a couple of contracts left in him, and he was tired of dealing with a punch-drunk balloon-head of a quarterback in
Ben Roethlisberger on a downward-trending team in Pittsburgh. When they shipped him to a sinkhole in Oakland, he got a load of the chaotic sham-ism and dumpster igniting that Coach Jon Gruden and General Manager Mike Mayock call leadership, and he decided he couldn’t choke it down even for $30 million.