Antonio Brown freaked out on one of his fellow Steelers last week, then pouted, then was placed on the injured list with a mythical or exaggerated injury, then was held out of a game the team needed to win Sunday at Heinz Field.
Yeah, not much to see there, right?
Yikes.
We're still cobbling together as much information as we can, and there's undoubtedly more to come, but be patient, please, and we'll keep adding to this file with what we can confirm with certainty.
For now:
• Brown lost his temper during practice last Wednesday morning at the Rooney Complex and, possibly, threw a football at a teammate in anger. It's not clear who was targeted or what the dispute was. That portion of practice is off-limits to media, coming before the main session in the afternoon.
• Brown didn't practice the rest of the week. That meant full sessions Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as well as the Saturday walkthrough. On Wednesday, he was listed on the team's injury report as "coaches' decision." On Thursday, he was given the unusual designation "coaches' decision/knee." The same day, Randy Fichtner, the typically jovial, easygoing sort, snapped when asked about Brown in the weekly interview session with coordinators, saying he wouldn't talk about him. On Friday, Mike Tomlin described Brown as having knee pain after playing on artificial turf in New Orleans. He spoke for about 90 seconds and didn't take questions.
• Despite not having been part of any practices, either Tomlin or Brown -- depending on the story being told -- thought he'd be a gameday decision upon reporting to Heinz Field. But once he reported, the only one among the Steelers' injured players who was afforded the right to argue that he should play was James Conner. Tomlin agreed to let Conner play.
• Brown walked out to the Steelers' sideline for warmups, dressed in standard clothing, and engaged in apparently light conversation. Our Matt Sunday photographed him in the picture seen above. He was not on the sideline for kickoff, and he wasn't seen again. After the game, his locker was empty.
From there, it starts getting piecemeal.
On Dec. 28, I received the following anonymous tip, and I'm sharing it verbatim, errors and all: "Antonio Brown is not injured. He’s refusing to show up for not being named team MVP. Also mad at Ben and wants to be traded."
I had no idea what to make of that and, honestly, we all get stuff like that all the time, and most of it's worthless.
Dale Lolley, our beat writer, also heard about the practice spat but not to the point it could be fully confirmed. Dale also inquired about the MRI that Tomlin mentioned Brown was going to get on the knee, and Dale confirmed that the MRI did, in fact, take place. So, given the potential legal implications of being wrong with a story like that -- or any story, really -- we didn't publish. Questions about AB kept getting asked, but answers were sparse or nonexistent, which was telling in and of itself but, at the same time, not enough to publish.
Now, with a flurry of reports out there on this subject, I'm using this space to share what we know and what we knew.
Oh, and I'm using this space to express the following: AB's got to go.
Enough is enough.
We can't vouch for the various reports -- Post-Gazette, ESPN, NFL Network -- that Ben Roethlisberger was the target of his angry throw, but I sure as heck can say that, if that was the case, that's a violation of irreparable order. Even by the very low bar for behavior set by Brown, particularly in the past two or three years when he's become as aloof as a space alien, this would be the lowest.
Because even if all we know -- and I mean know -- is what's up there in those bullets, that's egregious enough. For reasons so painfully obvious it'd be insulting to list them out. But chief among them is that his team, his teammates needed to win a football game Sunday, and he basically took himself out of practice and, thus, the game. Regardless of the spat, regardless of the target of his throw, that alone is grounds for goodbye.
Add it to all the other transgressions, from Facebook Live to 100 mph on McKnight Road to the Baltimore water cooler, and it's a no-brainer.
Sure, as one team source told Dale this afternoon, "What do you do with that guy? You can’t cut him. You know where he’d end up.”
Right. New England.
And as the source went further, fair trade value would be impossible for a player of that caliber.
Whatever. Figure it out, adjust the cap as needed, and move on.
It can't stop there, either. And you know what I'm about to say next.
Tomlin needs to divulge, in explicit detail, every bit of what happened, not least of which was his own part. He needs to explain, among other elements, why a player who misbehaved this way and missed practice, wasn't punished or fined in any way other than the benching itself. He needs to explain why the injury listing changed to "coaches' decision/knee" a day after it was just "coaches' decision," when the New Orleans game had occurred four days earlier. He needs to explain what happened Sunday morning at Heinz Field and who made the call to not play Brown, whether it was his own, whether it came from above or whether something else might have been involved.
He also needs to speak to the general state of his team as it pertains to discipline. Because no player can be above it, not even a future Hall of Fame wide receiver. Because his team has been beset by such problems, not just with Brown, for years. Because his team has badly underachieved, never more than in 2018, and there have to be underlying reasons beyond the occasional bad refs, fumbles and the like.
Dysfunctional behavior doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's got a core, a root. And if this coach can't figure out what that might be or is unwilling to address it, then an entirely new level of ugliness will have been unearthed.
Think it was any coincidence that Roethlisberger went well out of his way Sunday to heap praise upon JuJu Smith-Schuster and James Washington?
The question was simply about what might have been running through his mind, and this was the full response: "Honestly some disappointment in the season. I’m trying not to reflect right now, but it’s hard not to. I just got done seeing my linemen, so I think pride in my guys. Pride in the guys that stepped up today, that had to move around to different positions. James Washington ... his big catch down the sideline was the exact same call that he missed in Denver. The exact same call. We are on the sideline and Randy said, 'Who do you want, JuJu or James?' I said, 'I want James.' I came in the huddle and I told them, 'Hey, we're going to call the same thing we did in Denver. I want you to make the play.' And he did. I’m just so proud of him."
And we wonder how this group came with such inconsistencies on the field.
As I wrote from Heinz Field after the playoff elimination Sunday, this is where Art Rooney II needs to take over. Seize the situation to make the moves that likely were needed long ago, only to have been obscured in regular-season success.
Wow. What a mess.
What's worse, how could anyone trust Tomlin to be the one straightening it out?