Antonio Brown showed up to practice today for the Raiders. But Shannon Sharpe remains unconvinced that the tension between Brown and the Raiders is over.
In fact, he's completely certain this marriage is destined for disaster.
"Skip, this is supposed to be the honeymoon," Sharpe said during today's episode of Undisputed. "Look, you plan a wedding. They traded a third and a fifth to get AB, a big-time, big-play potential [receiver]. Had 'Hall of Fame' written all over him. And you give him three years, $50 million, $30 million fully guaranteed. This is the honeymoon!
"Skip, if I have a great wedding, I have 150 people at my wedding, an eight-tier cake and everybody's all happy and I get to the honeymoon and all we do is argue for two weeks, there's a good chance, Skip Bayless, we're probably not going to make it to that silver — that 25-year anniversary mark. There's a good chance that the Oakland Raiders and Antonio Brown, Skip, is not going to make it there three years. I'm afraid that's going to be the case."
To Sharpe's credit, this isn't a new line of thinking for him. He criticized Brown heavily for the infamous locker-room Facebook Live session in early 2017, and now, Sharpe says, Brown's actions with the Raiders only reinforce his previous thoughts.
"Everybody jumped on me, and I told you in early [2017] when he went Facebook Live, what'd I tell you they [the Steelers] should do, Skip?"
Skip: "You said 'Cut bait.'"
"Because I know!" Sharpe continued. "If he's acting like this, Skip, with very little money — at the time, for what he was producing, he was making little money. You give him money, Skip Bayless? Money does not change people. Money makes you more of what you already are. You see what he was when he was in Pittsburgh, and he was making $6 million? Now they give him $16, 17, 18 million. And he's a bigger jerk than what he was in Pittsburgh. And it's only going to get worse."
It gets worse. Sharpe says not only is Brown hurting the Raiders and giving them a serious case of buyer's remorse, he's hurting the NFL at large and his fellow players. The current collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) is set to expire after the 2020 NFL season, and Sharpe believes Brown's actions will negatively impact those negotiations.
"Dumb-dumb, AB, oh, all about him," Sharpe said. "Because you know what's going to happen? Let's just say for the sake of argument, they [the NFL] say, 'AB, you can play with that helmet.' AB gets injured on the football field. Now, tell me what you think's going to happen, Skip. He's going to try to sue the brakes off the NFL.
"So they're trying to protect him from himself, but he's making it all about himself. And therein lies the reason why, Skip Bayless, the CBA? The players are going to lose again. Because you got too many guys like AB that only will be willing to think about themself and not the greater good. Because the greater good is for the NFL to put the safest equipment on the field."
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