Damaged goods

 You won't get a lot of locker-room moralizing in these precincts on what Tampa Bay wideout Antonio Brown did yesterday. That tire's all out of tread here.

Mostly what you'll get is sadness.

If you follow the NFL and you don't live a hermit's life, you know what I'm talking about. Miffed that he'd been benched, AB stripped off his jersey and his pads and walked off the field bare-chested in the middle of the Buccaneers' come-from-behind victory over the Jets, waving a peace sign at the fans.

Walked off the field, and -- once more -- out of the game.

Tampa Bay head coach Bruce Arians made that clear in the postgame, tersely saying AB was "no longer a Buc." It was abundantly clear that after the civil lawsuit accusing him of forcible rape Brown settled last spring, and the vaccination record he faked, and what happened yesterday, Arians had had enough. And you couldn't blame him, because who'd ever seen anything like that before?

Not me, and I covered Sportsball World for almost 40 years as a professional sportswriter. But what I saw when I watched the video was perhaps not what everyone saw.

What I saw was a drowning man.

A drowning man who keeps clutching at anchors instead of life jackets.

That Antonio Brown has needed professional help for a very long time has been clear for an equally long time, and his bizarre exit yesterday made that as clear as it's ever been. He's an enormously gifted wide receiver with an enormous capacity for self-damage -- the former of which has largely prevented him from dealing with the latter. 

This is because professional football is a bidness, and bidnesses are all about maximizing returns. And so if Antonio Brown can help you win football games, you overlook everything else. That's what the Buccaneers did when they signed him, thinking the grounding presence of Tom Brady would somehow magically solve AB's obvious issues.

It worked for awhile, but yesterday, or something very like it, was always in the cards. Pro football, like any professional enterprise, is very good at shedding assets when they stop being assets. And so off Antonio Brown goes -- off the sideline, through the end zone, out of the stadium, out of the one thing in the world that has kept him at least marginally centered.

A drowning man. And no life jackets in sight.