I'm So Tired of Brandon Aiyuk and Diva Wide Receivers

I don’t like a particular kind of wide receiver. I’m talking about wide receiver divas. There are so many of them. There are more wide-receiver divas per square foot in an NFL locker room than any other position.

As I write this I’m thinking of Brandon Aiyuk and Randy Moss – I’ll get to Moss in a bit. I’m also thinking of Terrell Owens who never stopped trashing quarterback Jeff Garcia, but I won’t discuss Owens in this essay. I had enough of Owens years ago. FYI, not all wide receivers are divas. Dwight Clark wasn’t and neither was Freddie Solomon.

Okay, back to Aiyuk. I’ve never met him, and don’t care to meet him, but he’s made a mess of his contract negotiations and, until the 49ers trade him, he’s the main topic of conversation at the 49ers Santa Clara facility when the only topic should be getting ready for the season. The topic should be football football football, not how much dough does Brandon want, what will the Niners get for Brandon in a trade, is Brandon happy, is Brandon misunderstood, do his 49er teammates like Brandon, is Brandon in the building, is Brandon near the field, did Brandon say hello to John Lynch, is Brandon drinking water, how good is Brandon really?

I am so freaking tired of Brandon.

Let me explain what makes wide receivers like him so obnoxious.

They are individual practitioners on the field as opposed to offensive lineman, who work as a group – a choregraphed group. But wideouts are on their own, generally at the far ends of the line. They run down the field. They are fast and their moves are beautiful. They know all this. They are stars as opposed to the grunts on the O-Line. An offensive lineman is the friendly neighbor next door. A diva wide receiver is the neighbor who never says hello.

Diva wideouts want adulation and they want the ball – whine and complain when the quarterback throws to some other diva – and they want money. Plenty of it. They want so much money they could choke on it.

I know what you’re thinking. In a free-market economy poor Brandon should get everything he asks for. This is business after all.

To which I say baloney.

From what I understand the Niners offered him something like 25 big ones, as in millions per season. That’s not good enough for Brandon who must think he’s the second coming of Jerry Rice. Play the laugh track here. Brandon, I think, wants 30 million per season. If my numbers are a little off, I apologize but you get the idea.

Any reasonable person should be able to live on 25 million per season. Even with California’s burdensome taxes. Christian McCaffrey is just managing to survive on 19 million per season and he’s a better player than Brandon and more important to the Niners. But Brandon is not holding out – or holding in, what a concept – because he’s needy and has to cash in his pennies at the bank for food money. He wants top-gun money because he’s competitive with other wideouts who earn more than what the 49ers are offering. Brandon’s issue is ego, and it is definitely not need or poverty.

Pardon me but I think Brandon is being a pig.

If this makes me a sellout to ownership, I don’t care.

Trent Williams is holding out, but you never hear a word from him. He’s an adult who does his business silently. Brandon can’t shut up. He’s always telling some media person how great he is and what he wants. He’s made a spectacle of himself. And he’s so so boring. Listening to him I want to fall on the floor and start howling. Please go away, Brandon.

If Brandon ends up at the Steelers – the alleged trade partner changes daily – he’ll make more money than he’ll make in Santa Clara, although not a lot more, and he’ll play for a relentlessly mediocre team and a good coach who never seems to accomplish much, at least lately. And he’ll enter a place with an ongoing quarterback controversy which will only get worse. Good luck in Pittsburgh, Brandon. You are such a typical diva wide receiver.

Now on to Randy Moss at Diva Central. My experience with Moss was limited to the short time he played with the Raiders. I found him to be the Platonic ideal of wide-receiver diva, but he may be a prince in other contexts or at other times.

It was a Monday night game in Seattle in 2006 and the Raiders got shut out. Monday night games are a bitch. They start late and writers sweat to make deadline. The writers rushed to the postgame locker rooms. I waited at the locker of Raiders quarterback Andrew Walter. He said he needed to take a quick shower and would be back fast. His tone was apologetic. He needed to apologize – he’d had a terrible game.

As we nervously waited for Walter – please hurry up – Moss emerged from the shower. Moss was a famous player and a great wide receiver. He wore a towel around his wet waist. His locker was not near Walter’s and he had no reason to approach us. But he did. He looked at us with disgust and said, “The media, I ain’t talking to the media.”

I didn’t need any bullshit from Moss, not then. “That’s okay,” I said to him, “because we don’t want to talk to you. We’re waiting for the quarterback.”

Moss stared at me outraged.

“Why do you have to get personal?” he asked.

“I’m not getting personal,” I said. “I’m merely telling you we want to talk to the quarterback, not you.”

“Who are you?” Moss demanded.

Something snapped in me at that moment. Fully knowing where this would lead, I said, “I’m Lowell Cohn.” I waited a beat and then I said, “And who are you?”

Moss’ brains almost shot out his ears. “I’m Moss 18!” he shouted. He pointed to his bare chest. “Moss 18! Moss 18!”

The 18 being the number on his uniform which he wasn’t wearing. The 18 being his identity – the uniform number figures in the identity of so many ballplayers; they include it in their autographs, often in their phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Moss needed to establish his identity for me.

I was about to say, “So you’re Randy Moss, are you? You could have fooled me. The way you played tonight I thought you weren’t here.” But a Raiders operative asked me to give it up. So, I did.

Moss didn’t. He ran from locker to locker telling his teammates that bald-headed motherfucker, meaning me, had mortally offended him. His teammates, who now had a miserable 2-6 record, didn’t seem to care about Moss’ bruised ego.

Maybe the players didn’t care about Moss’ complaint because he was the guy who, earlier in the season, had run a very strange pass route. (Randy, I got this story from a very good Raiders source. If you have another version, please enlighten me.) The play called for him to go over the middle on what they call a square-in pattern. In this case, the middle happened to be the infield for the Oakland A’s. Remember, the A’s and Raiders shared the Oakland Coliseum and, until the baseball season ended, the dirt infield was right there.

When the center snapped the ball, the quarterback faked a handoff to the running back. A linebacker bit on the fake and ran toward the running back. But the running back didn’t get the ball. The quarterback started to throw to Moss 17 yards over the middle, the middle a vacant cavern left open by the poor misinformed linebacker. Just one problem. Moss was nowhere near where he should have been. He had not run across the middle.

The quarterback, staring in shock, pulled down the ball. He searched the field for Moss, who was running down the right sideline on a long go-route, definitely not the play. Moss even waved his hand like a happy partygoer to say, “I’m open.” The quarterback threw the ball deep but there was no chance. Too late. When Moss returned to the sideline, coaches asked why he ran the wrong pattern.

“I don’t run on dirt,” he informed the coaches.

A typical diva wide receiver. I can’t stand them.

Part of this essay is excerpted from my sports memoir Gloves Off: 40 Years of Unfiltered Sports Writing.