For years, you would hardly ever hear Antonio Brown speak. He would go about his business, tearing up defensive backs and establishing himself as one of the biggest threats at the wide receiver position.
For all nine seasons of Brown’s NFL career, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was throwing to him. The presence of Big Ben, and his propensity to pound the ball to AB, is what helped Brown emerge as a star.
That’s over now, and Brown will now be relying on the questionable arm of Derek Carr in Oakland. While players switching teams certainly isn’t anything new or uncommon, it is rare that a relationship crashes and burns quite as dramatically as Brown’s relationship with the Steelers.
Brown has been taking shots all summer, essentially forcing a trade. Even when the Steelers were nearing a trade with the Bills, Brown managed to squash that because he didn’t want to go to Buffalo. Then there were all the strange shots at JuJu Smith-Schuster, who is an objectively likable guy with a promising career in front of him. Most recently, AB set his sights on Roethlisberger.
While the two did definitely butt heads at times, it’s hard to believe that they didn’t have some sort of positive relationship. In fact, fans have been quick to dig up old tweets and photos where it CERTAINLY seems like they were, at some point in time, friends.
