Is former Buccaneers wide receiver Antonio Brown really joining the Baltimore Ravens?
No stranger to controversy, the former Bucs star announced that he’s joining a new team, but with no official word, his statement leaves more questions than answers.
Arguably one of the best wide receivers of the modern era of football, the former Steelers and Buccaneers pass-catcher has been watching from the outside, but according to his statements that could all be about to change.
Antonio Brown claims he is joining the Ravens
It hasn’t been that long since Antonio Brown announced he was retiring from football, which is what makes his statement on Friday even more curious. The former Super Bowl winner declared that he will in fact be taking to the field once again and moreover, he will be joining the Baltimore Ravens.
“Excited to return to the NFL this year,” Brown posted on Twitter along with a photo of himself in a Ravens uniform. To be clear, Brown is not officially known to have signed with the franchise and there has been no word from it to confirm that his claims are indeed true. With that said, this isn’t the first time that Brown has been linked with the Ravens. You may recall that quarterback Lamar Jackson - now the NFL’s highest paid player - pushed for Brown’s signing back in 2020, after the pair had worked out together. In the end, Brown joined Tom Brady and the Buccaneers and went on to win a Super Bowl that very year.
“He’s a cool, down-to-earth guy and he’s passionate about the sport of football,” Jackson said of Brown at the time. “I feel like the locker room here is different from any other locker room. It’s like a brotherhood going on. It’s none of that outside noise; it’s strictly inside. We worry about each other; we worry about what we have going on. We want to win, and I can just tell in him that he wants to win. He wants to play ball.”
What’s up with Antonio Brown?
As brilliant as Brown is, he’s equally divisive and his list of controversial episodes doesn’t help the fact. From falsification of a covid-19 vaccine during the pandemic and an extremely public breakup with the Bucs, to an arrest warrant over unpaid child support and most recently - October of 2022 - a court order to pay a delivery driver $1.2 million after allegedly attacking him; it’s fair to say that Brown’s off the field issues have largely eclipsed the memory of a prolific wide out, quite frankly one of the best to ever play the game. Between 2011-18, Brown was selected to seven Pro Bowls and was an All-Pro each year from 2014-17. During that time Brown played with the Steelers for whom he led the NFL in receptions and receiving yards on several occasions.
Indeed, Brown’s mark on Pittsburgh stands to this day, something that Steelers head coach had no problems speaking to just last summer:
“What I’ll say about AB is this, we had nine great years,” Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said on “The Pivot” podcast at the time. “I appreciate that dude in ways I can’t explain to y’all. ...I don’t think enough gets said about the will of that dude, about the work ethic of that dude, about the fearlessness in which he played the game. ...I’ve never seen him blink on the football field. I’ve never seen him shy away from anything that was uncomfortable on the football field. I’ve only seen him run into burning buildings, as they say, on the football field. We talk about all this other stuff, but we don’t talk about that. ...Unbelievable will. Unbelievable work ethic. ...Unbelievable belief in himself. That’s what I think about when I think about the nine years that I spent with that dude.”