Home Player Spotlight This Time, Brown Has Really Struck a Nerve

This Time, Brown Has Really Struck a Nerve

by Steeldad

As fans we can tolerate a lot of things from our team and our favorite players. We can forgive a dropped pass or an errant throw. We can understand a bad interview or a dumb penalty and we can certainly learn to deal with things off the field as well. Antonio Brown has now entered the “off-field” portion of this conversation and it has many in the Steeler Nation pissed off.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to write specifically about this but then I started to see the reaction to Brown’s Instagram posts of him and a woman who was not the one currently carrying his next child. I witnessed Steelers’ fans on social media who I thought would never say a bad thing about Brown suddenly decide that this was enough. It was at that point that I finally decided the situation needed to be addressed.

For the record, Brown currently has four children. Two with the woman who is currently pregnant and two from a different woman. He is far from the first person or professional athlete for that matter to have numerous kids from numerous women. Travis Henry and Antonio Cromartie immediately come to mind.

The problem as I see it for Brown is that he clearly is not walking the talk. How does a guy who preaches “chest up, eyes up, prayed up” have any credibility when he has behaved in this manner? To make matters worse, he decided that posting another pic of he and his new gal, Instagram model Jena Frumes while the funeral of Steelers’ Chairman Dan Rooney was getting underway. It’s very possible someone else could have posted it on his behalf but it was poor timing and tone deaf quite frankly.

But this is from the same guy who decided it was more important to ‘Facebook Live’ rather than listen to his head coach following a postseason win…

It’s from the same guy who, rather than fight for yards and a chance to keep his team’s hopes alive on the final play against Dallas, chose to stroll out of bounds…

It’s from the same guy who needed the head coach, the quarterback and another team captain to tell him to knock off the celebration penalties…

This latest incident has clearly struck a nerve. I think most could pass off the ‘on-field and football related’ issues as “that’s just AB being AB.”

But this?

There is no one who will deny the hard work and effort that Antonio Brown puts in to prepare himself for each football season. We can not deny his importance to this team and to this offense either. But apparently Brown has hit a very sensitive spot this time and I’m not sure how it plays out.

Oh we’ll cheer when he makes big plays and scores touchdowns but I sense it won’t be with the same fervor it was before. It’s yet another good reason why we should choose our favorites carefully and why we should never expect them to be perfect.

For all of his positive words, Brown has proven to be far from it.

Photo courtesy: The Sporting News

You may also like

1 comment

SCB Steelers' Quick Hitters: The "Firestorm" Edition April 19, 2017 - 8:02 pm

[…] may have seen my article on Antonio Brown last night and while I expected some attention I didn’t quite expect the deluge of comments which is […]

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.