Antonio Brown is apologizing to everyone. To Ben Roethlisberger:
To JuJu Smith-Schuster:
To those in his personal life:
It all paints a pretty clear picture: Brown wants to return to the NFL in 2020. After playing just one game in the 2019 season — that one coming for the Patriots after being traded from the Steelers to the Raiders in the offseason then dropped by the Raiders without ever suiting up — Brown's getting the itch again, and he's slowly making amends for all his wrongdoings over the past calendar year.
Make no mistake: Brown has a long, long way to go, but the wheels are clearly in motion.
All this begs the question: Will the Steelers — who touted the league's second-worst passing offense last year — give the All-Pro Brown another shot?
Take it away, Kevin Colbert:
"You know, and coach [Mike Tomlin] addressed this as well ... Antonio Brown will always be a Pittsburgh Steeler in our minds, from that personal standpoint," Colbert began when asked about Brown by Pro Football Talk. "We'll always be there to support him when he needs help, if he needs help, and that'll never change.
"But as 'Antonio Brown 84,' 'AB,' the football player? No. We've moved on from that, and we're comfortable with that. But our support of him as a person moving forward, that'll never change. It never changes, really, for any of our players that move on from us."
The media appearance from Mike Tomlin Colbert mentions there came with Stephen A. Smith on a recent edition of "First Take." There, Smith asked Tomlin about a potential reunion with Brown, to which Tomlin replied:
“We had great success over the course of nine-plus years with Antonio. We’re always going to be interested in his growth and development as a man, and we’ll be open to assisting him in that. But we have no current business interest at this time.”
It's almost like he and Colbert have discussed this topic together.
Colbert was then asked if there was any level of concern for Brown the person, given everything that transpired since he left the Steelers.
"When we had Antonio, Antonio was the best worker on our practice field, the most competitive guy on the game field," Colbert said. "There was never any question about that. And we knew Antonio Brown the person as well, and we tried to help him grow as a professional football player. And he did during his time with us. What happened after that I really can't address because I don't know all the day-in-and-day-out issues. But we know and he knows that he will always be one of us and we're always going to be there to support him."
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