Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown held a question-and-answer session with his Twitter followers over the weekend, and it provided us with some good offseason material. But it wasn’t the kind of thing NFL coaches and front office people like to see.
In fact, Peter King writes in Football Morning in America that he’s heard from one team that was a potential Brown suitor that has become reluctant to trade for him because of his tweets. King thinks other teams feel the same way.
That might be Brown’s aim: He might want to damage his own trade value in an attempt to get the Steelers to release him, rather than trade him. If he gets traded, he’s stuck with the team that trades for him. If he’s released, he can negotiate a new contract with the team of his choosing.
No one denies Brown’s talent, but the combination of his off-field behavior, his issues in the locker room, and his enormous contract may make him tough to trade. A lot of teams just aren’t going to be interested, even if the price is a seventh-round pick.