Funny, it didn’t look like his ankle was bothering him much when he jogged off the field after his tantrum. I guess it’s his word against the coaching staff, team doctors, and the rest of his teammates. Who ya gonna believe?
It’s been a long-running controversy since it happened - you’re definitely not the only one that saw it.
Please do not mistake my posting this information as a defense of Brown, who I think is a complete asshole, but he does address that point in his statement:
But I could not make football plays on that ankle. Yes, I walked off the field. But there’s a major difference between launching from the line and taking hits, compared to jogging off the field with a rush of emotions going through your mind.
Yeah, I did something to my foot where it doesn’t hurt when walking, but if I try to run or make a sudden stop/turn it reminds to not do that.
Oh I didn’t think you were defending him. I was just commenting on what you quoted, which made me go 
.
On the one hand, there’s nothing in what Brown accuses Ariens and the Bucs of doing which, if true, would surprise me in the least.
On the other hand, I am not sure that I trust Brown as a “reliable narrator.”
It’s official.
The most telling part of the Bucs statement: "The team said in a statement Thursday that while Brown did receive treatment leading up to Sunday, he was cleared by the team’s medical staff and “at no point during the game did he indicate he could not play.”
“We have attempted, multiple times throughout the week, to schedule an evaluation by an outside orthopedic specialist, yet Antonio has not complied,” the Buccaneers added."
I’m wondering if they waited in case another team picked him up specifically to get a look at their playbook.
I suppose one still could, but that would be presumably an NFC playoff team that would have to make the decision to cut a current (and presumably useful) player for one they had little intention of actually playing and who would bring a 3 ring circus of drama with him at a critical point of the season.
I think that’s an overrated myth that teams sign guys to learn their opponents playbook. Most NFL teams run all the same plays anyway and have diverse enough mix of plays and formations that getting your opponents’ playbook won’t give you any discernable advantage. That goes triple considering the amount of option plays (RPOs, leverage dependent route running, and hot reads) that are used.
So…is it really true that Antonio Brown was okay until Vontaze Burfict hit him in the head one day and that’s where all his behavior troubles began?
Agreed – it may have been a thing in the past, where there was more diversity in offensive systems. I could see where learning an offense’s snap-count system could be useful, but I’d also suspect that teams change that up regularly, anyway.
I’ve heard more than one person cite that hypothesis. As I noted upthread, there definitely seemed to be a turning point in his behavior late in his tenure with the Steelers; I have no idea if there is any connection with that particular play or not.
Article about that very thing (Sorry, it’s Deadspin).
It points out AB has a history long before the Burfict hit. Abuse of women. Expelled from college. Missing practices. Hell, his NFL draft stock was greatly affected by his misdeeds and prima donna attitude rather than his clear talent.
He’s been an asshole his entire life.
Plus, in the modern age there are assistants who spend their time mapping out all the plays from each game. There are undoubtedly a handful of trick plays every coach has that haven’t been called yet, but the value of learning about those seems negligible.
Not saying it’s useful or that the Bucs think it’s a real risk, but I could see somebody over there thinking “well, maybe some other team would try this against us”.
NFL teams are notorious about still doing things even they know don’t make a lot of sense because “it’s the way it’s done”.
If a team signs AB to pick his brain and form a game strategy around the information he gives them, they deserve the inevitable shellacking that would happen.
There are a lot of things a player can provide to another team - codewords for audibles, schematic information like how the team approaches changes at the line, how they adapt to different situations, what the strengths and weaknesses of the players that the coaches try to compensate for is, etc. Generally, how a team thinks, how they do things, how they develop schemes, how they make adjustments, how they communicate. It’s not a decisive advantage, but there’s certainly useful things you can glean from that sort of information I’d imagine.
Yeah, again, not thinking any sane team would do it but more along the lines of the Bucs thinking “why even risk it?”
I imagine, in part, because not cutting Brown would mean backpedalling from Ariens’ statements during and immediately after the game on Sunday; it appears, from the Bucs’ statements over the past few days, that they are maintaining that the incident was entirely Brown’s fault.