Denver Broncos: Antonio Brown may miss week one…or more

The Denver Broncos, by most accounts, have had a really good offseason. The Raiders with the Antonio Brown saga have not. Here’s the latest.

The Denver Broncos have had a pretty good offseason, on many accounts.

The hiring of Vic Fangio seems like a good one. The additions this team made — including Joe Flacco — seem to be good ones.

The young players seem to be progressing.

Just like every other team in the NFL, the Broncos have question marks heading into the season, but imagine being an Oakland Raiders fan right now…

Brown is apparently causing such a stir in the Raiders’ front office that he is now in danger of — worst-case scenario, here — being cut and losing nearly $30 million, the guaranteed money the Raiders agreed to give him as part of his new contract with the team.

These details are absolutely nutty:

This story has gone from one level of crazy to another in a matter of weeks.

Let’s look at this timeline, which dates back to 2017 as far as we know.

• January 2017: Brown does a Facebook live of the Steelers’ locker room celebration after the team beat the Kansas City Chiefs (haha) in the playoffs. This is a violation of league policy and also caused head coach Mike Tomlin to have to apologize publicly for things he said in the video.
• January 2017 (follow up): Brown was fined by the Steelers ($10,000) for his Facebook antics and it was learned he was being paid by Facebook to create content for them.
• December 2018: Brown skipped practices after an argument with Ben Roethlisberger escalated to the receiver throwing a ball at his quarterback, leading up to a week 17 game with possible playoff implications. He was benched for the final game of the season against the Bengals.
• February 2019: Brown took to Instagram saying it was time for him to ‘move on’ from the Steelers.
• March 2019 (a): Brown declared to ESPN’s Jeff Darlington that he did not ‘need to play football’ if he didn’t want to.
• March 2019 (b): The Steelers agreed to trade Brown to the Buffalo Bills, but he refused to report to Buffalo and nixed the trade.
• March 2019 (c): The Steelers agreed to trade Brown to the Oakland Raiders for third- and fifth-round picks.
• May 2019: The NFL de-certified Brown’s preferred helmet, causing him disagreements with coaches, leaving practice, and spray-painting the helmet he wore in Pittsburgh to try and sneak it onto the practice field.
• July/August 2019: Brown was placed on the non-football injury list to start training camp for what would later be revealed as complications from wearing the wrong footwear in a cryotherapy chamber, completely destroying the soles of his feet.
• September 2019: The latest obviously involves a verbal altercation between Brown and Raiders GM Mike Mayock, who fined him just under $54,000 for missing practices. Brown didn’t take well to being made an example of and posted the notification of his fines on Instagram.

Now that you’re all caught up, you know why Brown may not be playing against the Broncos when they take on the Oakland Raiders in the Black Hole on Monday Night Football, and he may never play for the Raiders.

At this point, even Jon Gruden has to be fed up.

The Raiders’ skill spots without Brown look a lot worse with him not included in the plans…

With the Broncos’ starting secondary shaping up to be fully healthy, it stands to reason that Denver has a clear advantage especially with Vic Fangio orchestrating the defense.

We’ll see how this whole situation turns out but right now it looks horrible for the Raiders.