Report: Steelers benched Antonio Brown for season finale over skipped practices

Injury was not the reason Antonio Brown sat out the Pittsburgh Steelers’ season finale, according to a new report.

According to Gerry Dulac and Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Brown voluntarily skipped team practices last week after an unspecified dispute with a teammate, and the team opted to bench him as punishment, not because of a knee injury.

On Wednesday morning, Brown had some sort of heated dispute with a teammate and threw a football at him in a fit of anger during the team’s walkthrough. From that point forward, Brown chose not to practice, and was an unexcused absence for Saturday’s walk-through and team meeting.

The report states that Brown showed up Sunday expecting to play in spite of this, much to the surprise of teammates, and left Heinz Field at halftime after being benched despite the fact that the Steelers were playing for their playoff lives. One anonymous player called the situation “the worst I’ve seen,” and felt that the handling of it impacted his play.

The Steelers were quite evasive with what they called a knee injury during the week, but this indicates much more was going on. This is not Brown’s first clash with the organization in 2018, and if the report is remotely true, it calls into question his long-term future with the team.