If Antonio Brown’s goal this season was to figure out who would have his back no matter how he behaves, then he seems to have chosen a good way to go about it, because the Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver has produced a diversity of opinions over the course of the past month or so.
Opinions have even varied greatly from his former wide receiver teammates. Plaxico Burress, for example, has had his back. He talked about it yesterday, and even went on FaceTime with him during an interview, which is about the closest we’ve gotten to a sit-down chat with him.
The guy who came into the league with him, however, has seemingly had about enough of his antics. Wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders, who was a third-round pick in 2010 when Brown was taken in the sixth, served as a guest analyst last month and was critical of his former teammate’s behavior.
Brown responded to Sanders with some criticism and even suggested that he chose to forego rehab (he Sanders suffered a season-ending injury late in the year) to go on tv to criticize him, but the Broncos wideout stood his ground.
He was recently approached by TMZ to offer his thoughts on Brown as they stand now. When asked about the Pro Bowler, all he had to say was, “who’s Antonio Brown?”.
It seems that a lot of his former teammates who have gone on television to talk about the situation have been saying less than they know, speaking from their own experiences without actually elaborating upon what those experiences were with him.
I’m sure that relationship between Sanders and Brown was mostly a positive one, albeit competitive (the latter has mentioned the ‘two dogs, one bone’ approach multiple times in a negative fashion, as though he should have never had to compete for his role), but could there have been issues as well? And how has he observed changes from afar? Brown did get his money after just two seasons.
Some have suggested that Brown is a calculated person but it’s hard to see a logic to his current strategy, if he has one. At the moment, it seems more as though he’s just doing and saying whatever he feels like at the moment, whether that indicated pro- or anti-Steelers sentiment.
It was just two days ago as the Super Bowl was kicking off that he seemingly reached out to fans to get feedback about whether or not they wanted him to stay into Pittsburgh. Yet as far as we know, he hasn’t reached out to any of the significant players or staff on the Steelers.
