Self-destructive

They played football again in the Nash-unal FOOT-ball League yesterday, but the best wide receiver in the game was not on the field. The best wide receiver in the game spent the day blowing up what's left of his career instead.

He was saying he was done with the NFL because they're all a bunch of crooks who are out to get him.

He was calling out the Raiders, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft, for stealing money from him.

He was ripping his former quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, for still being able to play while he, the best receiver in the game, has been cast into outer darkness because of the same sort of sexual assault allegations once leveled at Roethlisberger.

He was blaming everyone for his miseries but himself, the architect of those miseries.

The unraveling of Antonio Brown was fascinating to watch at first and then tiresome and now is just immensely sad, on some level, because it has become starkly apparent he is not entirely in control of that unraveling. If he has done even half of what Sports Illustrated's reporting alleges he has done, he is a seriously disturbed young man. We are allowed to feel some pity for that without excusing any of his actions, particularly the allegations of sexual assault and harassment.

The latest was a series of texts he sent to the artist who claims Brown dangled his junk in her face while she was working on a mural for him in his home. An individual in control of his impulses would have let his attorney simply crank out the usual pro forma denial. But Brown is clearly not a man in control of his impulses, so he allegedly threatened her via text.

That was enough for the Patriots, who didn't care what Brown was accused of as long as it hadn't happened on their watch. It is the NFL, after all. Value turns team officials blind to practically any depravity, unless of course it involves not standing for the national anthem. The Shield is much too invested in stagecraft patriotism to tolerate that sort of heinousness.

And so no surprise that, despite everything, Brown's agent Drew Rosenhaus said Sunday teams are already sending out feelers about AB. Even though he's been sent packing by three teams now in less than a year -- including one team (the Raiders) which was done with him before he'd even played a down for it.

Think about that: The best receiver in the game made himself so intolerable he was let go -- and by the most comically inept organization in football, no less -- before he could even see the field.

That is next level self-destruction. And it is why the overwhelming reaction here is not ridicule or contempt but the urge to get at how Antonio Brown ended up the way he is, and if perhaps it wasn't inevitable.

He grew up abandoned and, for a time, was homeless as a teenager. Nobody gave a damn about him. But he had this marvelous gift for catching footballs, and suddenly people were giving him things and excusing every bad act he committed not because they gave a damn, either, because he could do something for them. And you wonder why he's such a malignant narcissist, with a persecution complex a mile wide?

Which is why the Blob is thinking this, as teams send out their feelers:

Antonio Brown doesn't need another team. He needs professional help.