Antonio Brown still hasn’t gotten over the day he ran off the field shirtless during a game between the Jets and Buccaneers on Jan. 2, 2022.
Brown, on Tyreek Hill’s “It Needed To Be Said” podcast which dropped Saturday, blamed former teammate Tom Brady for not throwing him the ball enough that day after “gassing” him up by saying he would get a lot of targets, while adding Tampa Bay treated him “like a dog.”
“Tom [Brady] called me like ‘Yo, this week man, the Jets man, they sweet man imma hit you with like 10 to 12 [targets],’ ” Brown said on the podcast. “So, he gonna gas me up so you know me, that’s all I need to hear like yo, you gonna throw me the ball, this is like me saying like I got a new crib like you know me, you know what I’m saying.”
Brown, who has long maintained the Buccaneers forced him to play through an ankle injury, said he was hurt, but only played because Brady promised to get him heavily involved.
“We [were] about to play the Jets and I am already hurt,” he said. “So I took pictures to send to the coach and told him ‘Look, If we’re going to win the Super Bowl I’m going to need to take these last two weeks to recover up so I can give you my best when we go to win the Super Bowl,’ but the coach [Bruce Arians] called me saying that I wasn’t resting.
“So then Tom [Brady] called me and told me he’d hit me with 10-12 [passes], so he gassed me up, and that’s all I needed to hear. But you know as a player, if you f–king up, but your team needs you then you just suck it up for the game and for the team.
When Brown didn’t get the targets he felt he had been promised during that game, he decided that he wasn’t going to stay on the field and made a controversial exit in the third quarter.
Up to that point, Brown had caught three passes for 26 yards on five targets. The mercurial receiver, who is now 34, was upset. OJ Howard and Mike Evans tried to calm him down, but it didn’t work.
“You don’t want to throw me the ball and you making me like I’m crazy, so, I was like, ‘I’m crazy, f–k all you motherf–kers, I’m out of here.’ ” Brown, who also played with Brady when both were members of the Patriots, said on the podcast.
Arians and the Buccaneers kicked Brown off the team after the game.
The Jets-Buccaneers clash was the second game back for Brown after he had been suspended for three games for using a fake vaccine card to get through COVID-19 protocols for unvaccinated players.
He had 10 receptions for 101 yards a week earlier in the Buccaneers’ win over the Panthers.
Brown hadn’t forgotten that past history either in the interview with Hill.
“I already know [the Buccaneers] were being fake to me the whole time I was there. I got suspended [for breaking COVID-19 rules] and I came back and they had some guys hurt, so they wanted to get everything out of me — they treated me like I’m a dog.”
He also took a shot at Brady and his trainer in the interview and recently alleged that the seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback cursed out his agent, Ed Wasielewski, over Brown’s contract.
Brown also has been in the news recently for other reasons than bashing Brady.
The Albany Empire team Brown owned was booted out of the National Arena League on June 15, six days after they played their last game, a loss at the Orlando Predators.
The league said it ousted Brown’s club over “failure to pay their league mandated and overdue assessments.”
According to a recent report by the Times Union of Albany, Empire head coach Moe Leggett said members of the team are planning a class-action lawsuit against Brown after all the players and coaches discovered the paychecks from their final game were pulled from their bank accounts.
“I’m frustrated,” Empire head coach Leggett told the Times Union. “I’m frustrated. I tried to give [Brown] the benefit of the doubt. I tried to work with him. I was trying to be the peacemaker, the mediator to make sure things ran smoothly and just under the radar. But I can no longer do that.”