As end-zone dances go, Antonio Brown’s performance during the third quarter of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ win over the New York Jets on Sunday was pretty tame: no twerking, no taunting, no Bennie Biggle Wiggle, for old time’s sake—just a few roof-raising sashays and a peace sign as he ran toward the tunnel. Except that Brown wasn’t wearing a shirt, having stripped off his jersey, pads, shirt, and gloves, tossing some of the items toward a bench and others into the crowd. Also, Brown hadn’t scored a touchdown. Both teams were on the field, and the game was still going on.
Stadium security initially thought that a spectator had streaked onto the field. The crowd and the commentators seemed confused. One sideline reporter said that Brown had been benched before throwing the tantrum; another said that the Bucs’ coach, Bruce Arians, told Brown to get into the game, but that Brown repeatedly refused, at which point Arians told him to “get out,” an order that Brown seems to have taken at face value. In the tunnel, half naked, he reportedly asked state troopers for a ride to the airport. Soon after, a New York City driver with the Instagram handle @dannyboyhustlehard posted a video of Brown in the back seat, now wearing a shirt, along with his custom diamond-encrusted bee pendant with butterfly wings, an homage to Muhammad Ali. “He’s no longer a Buc,” Arians said after the game. Soon after leaving the field, Brown released a new rap song.
“Never seen anything like it in all my years,” Arians added. By this point, though, no one should be surprised by anything Brown does. This is a man who reportedly got frostbite from cryotherapy, and who missed much of training camp one year because he didn’t like his new helmet. The list of his acts and antics is long, and the rest of the list isn’t funny. He was sued for assault and battery after an altercation with a moving-truck driver. (Brown pleaded no contest to related criminal charges and received two years of probation.) He has been accused by several former employees of not paying them. Most seriously, in 2019, his former trainer sued him for rape and sexual assault. (She and Brown reached a settlement last year.) A week after the suit was filed, another woman accused him of sexual misconduct. Brown denied the allegations, then sent threatening text messages to the woman. When those messages became public, the team he was playing for then, the New England Patriots, cut him. It was the third time a team had concluded that his excellence on the field wasn’t worth the turmoil off of it.
But, in the N.F.L., if you’re as skilled as Brown is, there is usually someone else willing to take a chance. For a good stretch of his long career, Brown was the best receiver in the league, and, at thirty-three, he is still capable of helping a team win a Super Bowl, as he did with the Bucs last season. It is easy to be cynical about this, to question why someone should get a second, and a third, and an eighth and a ninth chance, simply because he’s good at running routes. It is even easier to be cynical about the way teams refer to character and culture to justify their decisions. Two years ago, Arians said that Brown was too toxic to sign. A year ago, after signing him anyway—at the urging of Tampa Bay’s new quarterback, Tom Brady—Arians told the columnist Peter King, of Brown, “He screws up one time, he’s gone.” Last week, Arians said that Brown had been a “model citizen” during his time with the Buccaneers, despite the fact that Brown was just then coming off a three-game suspension for faking a vaccination card, which, in addition to misleading and endangering those around him, is a federal crime.
No one really believed Arians when he pretended that signing Brown was anything other than a football decision. As a football decision, it wasn’t a bad one. Brown caught a touchdown in last year’s Super Bowl win, and he’s been even more valuable to the team this year. And it’s not clear that Arians has the expertise to make anything other than football decisions, anyway. In the context of Brown’s past, pulling off a shirt and bailing mid-game is not that serious. But, in the context of professional sports, bucking the authority of a head coach in public and quitting on a team may be the gravest sin.
Still, the real power center of the Bucs is Brady, and he took a different view. “We all love him,” Brady said, of Brown, after the game. “We care about him deeply. We want to see him be at his best. Unfortunately, it won’t be with our team.” The Bucs have yet to formally cut Brown, though it appears imminent. It would be possible to justify keeping him as a moral decision, even if it were really a football one. Brady alluded to Brown’s serious off-the-field difficulties, and Brown himself has been open about struggling, at times, with his mental health. An N.F.L. team might be able to provide a troubled player the kind of support and resources that he might not seek out were he no longer in the league. It is also possible, of course, and probably more likely, that continuing to pay him millions of dollars would continue to enable his worst decisions.
There is a lot of talk about accountability in football, but, in the N.F.L., the only things that people are consistently held accountable to are the standings and the bank accounts of billionaires. That’s why Dan Snyder still owns a football team. It is surely why Jon Gruden felt comfortable making racist, sexist, and homophobic comments to a team president, who was using an N.F.L. e-mail address. (He is almost certainly not the only one.) It’s also why Brown may not have played his last down in the league. And that is the way most fans seem to want it. Even the growing awareness of the risk of long-term brain damage caused by football is no longer the overwhelming story that it once was, though the game is as dangerous as ever. It remains thrilling to watch a long pass drop over the left shoulder of a receiver as he shakes off a defender and lengthens his stride, and victories still bring euphoria. The rest fades. Football is a violent game, and a degree of psychic numbness sets in.
