Oakland Raiders: 3 Reasons team is better off without Antonio Brown

1. Perfect timing

The glass-half-empty approach says that the Antonio Brown situation in Oakland is an absolute dumpster fire. I won’t argue with you. Finding out that the signature player you were willing to rebuild an organization around won’t play in Week 1 or likely ever for your organization can be devastating.

It makes sense and a lot of it. If there is a silver lining, a faint almost hard one to see, it is that Oakland still has 16 games and 17 weeks to overcome the loss of the consummate diva in all of the professional sports.

That’s significant. The Raiders are better off today than they were at any point when AB was effectively stealing a salary from Oakland. Sure, the upside is what it is. But what kind of trade-off would it have ultimately been had his way of doing business instigated a slow burn of the Raiders locker room?

This one will hurt, but only for a while. Oakland has a chance to pull together a game plan that doesn’t include the remarkably dysfunctional Antonio Brown. It’s also highly likely that Gruden and his lieutenants have been working on this contingency for some time.

It’s disappointing, but not season-ending. Hopes remain high in the East Bay even without AB. But know this: the Raiders got better today by shedding the organization of a player who would have ultimately wrecked it from within. Consider yourself lucky. The pain later will be significantly less than the pain now. Like I said, timing can be everything.