It is not as though they did not see it coming. Even at 280 characters per clip, you could fill a book the size of "The Goldfinch" with tweets from Steelers fans who sensed Antonio Brown's ultimate destination would be the Patriots.
AB pushed the Raiders to release him with an alleged threat, an alleged racial slur, alleged subordination and an impossible-to-deny series of absences that consumed a majority of the team's training camp. They were on the hook for $30 million if they kept him around. By choosing to release him, they retain some (small) measure of their self-respect and get back a chunk of money for their 2020 salary-cap budget that can perhaps be used to purchase someone who will actually play football.
As all this transpired, fans who have seen this movie before — albeit with lesser actors such as LeGarrette Blount — felt Brown would find a way to New England.
If you thought coach Bill Belichick would be reluctant to take on a player who nuked two locker rooms in nine months, you've forgotten Blount walked off the field during a game while a member of the Steelers because he was upset he was being treated like a backup. (Even though he was a backup.) Or that James Harrison joined the Patriots at the end of 2017 after being disruptive in meetings — by snoring in a recliner while his position coach was lecturing — and skipping practices.
IYER: Brown deal proves Patriots are the NFL's true mavericks
This apparently is the new NFL free agency: Become so impossible and unprofessional your team no longer can tolerate your presence, then wait for area code 508 to pop up on the iPhone caller ID.
Belichick is the best coach in the game's history, and as great as Lombardi, Walsh, Noll and Parcells were, it's really not close. Whether those other men would have enabled this particular charade is impossible to say, although pretty much all of them made character allowances for those who could help win football games.
There isn't any question Brown can do that. Even when he was relocating his off-field antics into the playing arena, which mostly occurred during the past three years, he delivered 311 receptions and 36 touchdowns. The Steelers were 33-14-1 in those seasons.
It would have been compelling to see what kind of impact he might have had on a team that had been terrible prior to his arrival. The Raiders were 4-12 in 2018 and have made the playoffs only once since 2002. Instead, Brown will become part of a team that has played for the conference championship every year since 2011 and that raised a banner Sunday night as reigning Super Bowl champions.
Fans of the Steelers can take comfort in Brown's unavailability to play in the season-opening game that followed that ceremony, but that seemed to matter little in a game their team lost by 30 points. They can revel in the fact their team received third- and fifth-round draft picks — now in the person of wideout Diontae Johnson and tight end Zach Gentry — from Oakland in exchange for someone who never even appeared in an exhibition for the Raiders.
There was a lot of that as Brown was turning the latter part of last week into the episode "Hard Knocks" wishes it had been around to film. Fans delighted their team no longer had to deal with his shenanigans, pleased to see their concerns about his comportment played out so extravagantly.
That joy was detonated late Saturday afternoon, when news broke that New England had agreed to sign Brown to a one-year contract guaranteed to pay him $9 million on a deal that will make him whole, at least for the year, if he remains on the team until season's end.
MORE: A timeline of Brown's drama-filled summer with the Raiders
Among those the receiver has burned, there remains only the hope that his selfishness indeed is unmanageable, and the first slight — whether it’s being missed when open on a post pattern or being required to attend team meetings like the other Patriots — will turn Brown back into AB, raging against those who would require him to conform.
For those fans, the turbulent hours last Friday and Saturday felt something like celebrating a game-winning touchdown pass in the final 30 seconds of an important game, only to have that score reversed by a specious replay review.
Not that anything like that has ever happened in real life.
