The Pittsburgh Steelers are out of Latrobe and back at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, also referred to as the South Side Facility. We are already into the regular season, where everything is magnified and, you know, actually counts. The team is working through the highs and lows and dramas that go through a typical Steelers season.
How are the rookies performing? What about the players that the team signed in free agency? Who is missing time with injuries, and when are they going to be back? What are the coaches saying about what they are going to do this season that might be different from how it was a year ago?
These are the sorts of questions among many others that we have been exploring on a daily basis and will continue to do so. Football has become a year-round pastime and there is always a question to be asked, though there is rarely a concrete answer, as I’ve learned in my years of doing this.
Question: How much does yesterday’s report of a domestic dispute hurt Antonio Brown’s trade value?
We are getting to about just a month shy of the start of the new league year, and with each passing week in which there is no contact between Antonio Brown and anybody from the team that actually matters, it seems more and more likely that the two sides are heading for a divorce.
Yet one can wonder if yesterday’s news that he was involved in a domestic dispute both helps and hurts his chances of being traded. Obviously any problems that he causes off the field will make the team more willing to part with him, but they still that they have to get reasonable compensation for him.
So what is the tipping point between skill and value here? How bad does Brown have to get, how much does his trade value have to suffer, before the Steelers say that it’s just not worth it dealing him, given that they don’t gain much cap space from parting with him in the first place?
The Steelers are presumably still waiting on Brown to phone them up and come in for a meeting to discuss the entire situation with the people who matter. But one has to wonder how much time can pass by, and how many headlines he can draw off the field, before even that becomes meaningless.
Quite frankly, we have already heard too many opinions from too many people to know anything. Some have expressed confidence that he wants to leave, others that he wants to stay, and others still that he doesn’t particularly have a preference either way and is open to both.
If he does actually want to stay, he isn’t doing pretty much any of the right things that would allow that to happen. If things remain the same, he’s going to be traded, so the ball is in his court to repair his relationship with the Steelers, and getting into domestic disputes does him no favors.
