AP Photo/Adam Hunger
Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Antonio Brown will not be fined for taking off his uniform and running off the field shirtless during the second half of the team’s Week 17 game against the New York Jets, according to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
The Bucs released him on Thursday, four days after the abrupt exit.
Both sides dispute what happened exactly.
Brown released a statement through his attorney, Sean Burstyn, essentially accusing the Buccaneers of trying to force him to play on a badly injured ankle and enacting an “ongoing cover-up” regarding what went down. He also accused head coach Bruce Arians of lying about the injury.
Brown further said that an MRI conducted Monday showed broken bone fragments stuck in his ankle, a torn ligament from the bone and cartilage loss. He said he needs surgery and will be looking to rejoin the NFL next season.
Brown said he saw a top physician, Dr. Martin O’Malley, at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York for an opinion. He then said the Bucs ordered him to see a more “junior” doctor in the hospital for another opinion and to set him up to being cut.
“What the organization is doing now needs to be cleaned up,” Brown said in part. “I do not understand how people publicly claiming to be concerned about my mental health can do these things to me in private.”
Arians addressed some of Brown’s allegations Thursday and flatly denied them.
“At no point in time during that game did he ever ask a trainer or a doctor about his ankle,” Arians said Thursday, per Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz and Lorenzo Reyes of USA Today.
“That’s the normal protocol. You go through protocols during games. I was never notified of it. That was the disturbing thing when we were looking for him to go back into the game.”
Arians also said Brown was upset with his lack of targets in the first half and made his concerns known at halftime.
In the third quarter, Brown was called to go into the game in a personnel grouping and did not do so:
“He refused to go in the game,” Arians said. “That’s when I looked back and saw him basically wave off the coach. I then went back and approached him about what was going on. ‘I ain’t playing. What’s going on? I ain’t getting the ball.’ That’s when I said: ‘You’re done. Get the F out of here.’ And that’s the end of it.”
Regarding the idea that the Bucs were forcing Brown to play, Arians said:
“You can’t force a player to play. They have that choice. It’s their body. He decided to play. He and Mike (Evans) were both on pitch counts. We were trying to manage that as best we could in the first half.”
Brown has cleared waivers since being cut and is now a free agent.
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