Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown might be the best wide receiver in the game, but so far this season he's been making headlines off the field. That continued on Monday when Brown failed to show up for work, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“We will talk about it and other things,” head coach Mike Tomlin said on Tuesday. “I’m not going to get into whether he was excused or not.”
Brown's absence on Monday was even more conspicuous considering the tweet he fired off after a fan falsely claimed he'd be nothing without quarterback Ben Roethlisberger:
The sort of speculative inferences using body language and tone to convey meaning soon followed, despite the lack of concrete details:
Tomlin says Brown didn't ask to be traded, and he expects Brown to be a big part of their team moving forward:
Perhaps sensing how prickly things have been between player and team, Brown's agent, Drew Rosenhaus, spoke with Mike Schefter in a series of bromides to explain how the tweet and playing hooky on Monday is a "non-story that's been blown out of proportion."
Whenever an agent stridently tells the public there's nothing wrong with their client and his team, it almost always means the opposite.
