Ryan Clark spent several years playing alongside Antonio Brown with the Pittsburgh Steelers, so Sunday's bizarre incident at MetLife Stadium hit close to home for the former NFL safety.
Brown took off his pads and left the field shirtless during the Buccaneers' 28-24 win over the New York Jets, ending his tenure with Tampa Bay and sending social media into a frenzy.
On Monday's episode of "First Take" on ESPN, Clark weighed in on Brown's situation, which continued a troubling (years-long) trend of questionable behavior for the All-Pro wide receiver.
"Antonio Brown has been forgiven time and time again. He's been empowered time and time again. He's been entitled to these behaviors time and time again," Clark said, "because he's an elite-level athlete, and he also has an elite-level athletic trait of competitiveness. When Antonio Brown shows up prepared to play a football game, there's no one that works harder, there's no one that gives more, there's no one that cares more about their individual performance than Antonio Brown. And I think that was why people were able to give him time and chance and chance again. He's now taken that away from himself.
"Antonio Brown has quit on teams. Antonio Brown has quit on players, quit on people. Antonio Brown has never quit on himself. And yesterday, he quit on himself.
"Obviously, I'm not going to play Monday morning therapist and say that I think there's certain things going on with him or that we don't know what type of tragedy or what type of trauma from his childhood is now showing up. But yesterday, he took everything away from himself. Yesterday, he sealed it that that would be the last football game he will ever play in the NFL. You used to be able to say that no matter what we know that he will compete. And he no longer will do that. We used to be able to say that no matter what he won't quit on himself or a football team on game day. And we can no longer say that.
"Antonio Brown is now holistically inconsistent as a human. You don't want inconsistent humans in your locker room. You don't want inconsistent players on your team. And you don't want a teammate that you cannot count on, and you can no longer count on Antonio Brown."
Clark played eight seasons with the Steelers from 2006 to 2013. Brown spent nine seasons in Pittsburgh from 2010 to 2018, solidifying himself as one of the best wide receivers in NFL history.
Brown's tenure with the Steelers ended poorly. Just like his subsequent stints with the Oakland Raiders, New England Patriots and now the Buccaneers. But Clark explained Monday that Brown wasn't always a malcontent, thus making Sunday's meltdown even more shocking in the grand scheme of things.
"Antonio Brown was a single father in Pittsburgh. Antonio Brown had his son, Little AB. Little AB would sleep at my house. His first two birthday parties were planned by my wife, and the second I paid for it. And it was because you saw the good in him," Clark said. "It wasn't a situation to where you met Antonio Brown and this is who he was. This is who he grew to be. And I think there were little glimpses and little pieces of the guy we see now. We saw that young. But you never expected it to get to this point. I think the reason some of those things were let go, some of the stuff that we saw outside of the field, some of the things that we saw that didn't necessarily make him the best person, was they didn't leak into football.
"I always said that one thing I respected about him was whatever made him work -- whatever it was, whether it was the fear of being broke, whether it was the ability to have fame, or whether it was just him understanding that this was a way he could make money -- it made him work harder than anybody I knew. And on game day, that showed up. And so for me, to see him get to this point, to where the one thing that I felt like was sacred to him was the actual game."
Brown simply can't be trusted, therefore making it hard to imagine him ever playing in the NFL again. And if his career truly is over, at age 33, it's difficult not to wonder just how much more he could've accomplished had it not been for his constant off-the-field issues.
Tom Brady showed compassion for Brown in discussing Sunday's incident, although the Bucs quarterback since has been criticized by Skip Bayless and Nick Wright, among others.
Clark believes Brady attempted to "save" Brown in Tampa Bay. Unfortunately, the situation ended badly, with Brown's antics again raising questions about what's really going on behind the scenes.
"Initially, when I said something about (Brown), he was on top of the world," Clark said. "And as you continue to watch a person fall and that person continues to make mistake after mistake, or bad decision after decision, it's no longer entertainment.
"We have to speak about this because it has now affected the game of football. But this isn't entertainment, right? This isn't for people to get laughs, this isn't for us to get jokes off, this isn't for us to sit here and critique him and condemn him for what he's going through."
Brown, a four-time All-Pro and a seven-time Pro Bowl selection, has totaled 928 catches for 12,291 yards with 83 touchdowns throughout his NFL career.
