Can Antonio Brown and Vontaze Burfict REALLY put their bad blood aside as Raiders teammates?

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The history of both players suggests their newfound friendship as Raiders teammates could easily fall apart.

Vontaze Burfict is now a linebacker for the Oakland Raiders— a team he was pretty much born to play for.

Burfict, 28, has a long, loooong history of reckless play on the football field and now he gets to suit up in a silver-and-black uniform that has long been synonymous with brutal defense. There’s a potentially awkward part of his signing in Oakland, though. One of Burfict’s new teammates is Antonio Brown, who was traded by the Steelers earlier in March.

There’s a bit of history between the pair. For now, things are all good:

For now.

What’s the history between Brown and Burfict?

The closest the Bengals came to winning a playoff game in the last 28 years was on Jan. 9, 2016 when they led 16-15 in the final minute of a wild card game. But then a vicious helmet-to-helmet hit by Burfict on Brown— followed by an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Adam Jones— gifted the Steelers 30 yards in penalties and a game-winning field goal. The Bengals went home empty-handed.

It wasn’t the best moment for the Steelers either. Brown was diagnosed with a concussion and forced to sit out Pittsburgh’s 23-16 loss to the Broncos in the Divisional Round.

Burfict was suspended three games for the hit on Brown, and two years later said that the receiver faked his injury.

“He’s an idiot,” Brown told the Dan Patrick Show a month after the hit. “In that situation Burflict and Pacman Jones cost them the game, from the hit to the personal foul, allowed us to make the field goal and advance to the next round.”

When JuJu Smith-Schuster leveled and concussed Burfict in 2017 with a blindside hit that earned the Steelers receiver a one-game suspension, Brown repeatedly yelled “karma!” in the locker room.

In October 2018, Burfict was fined $112,000 for two hits against the Steelers— including an elbow to the helmet of Brown.

So yeah, there’s more than enough reason for bad blood between the new Raiders teammates.

Will Brown and Burfict get along now?

“I mean we’re on the same team. It’s one goal,” Burfict told reporters Tuesday, via Silver and Black Pride. “It’s all positive, man, I mean he’s a great player, I’m sure he’s going to be in the Hall of Fame one day. And honestly I’m going to approach him just like I do all my other teammates. Introduce myself. All that good stuff. There’s nothing negative over here, man.”

Surely Burfict wouldn’t stir up problems with a player who’s a teammate and no longer an AFC North rival, right?

Well, except that one time he fought Arizona State wide receiver Kevin Ozier in the locker room during his time in college. And the time he “slipped” into the knees of teammate Giovani Bernard during training camp in 2017, less than a year after the running back suffered a torn ACL. And the time Burfict — a USC commit at the time — dove at the knees of fellow USC commit Matt Barkley in a high school game.

Brown hasn’t always dodged conflict with teammates either. He just had a messy, dramatic divorce with the Steelers that reportedly included an outburst directed at Roethlisberger.

Roethlisberger downplayed the incident, but Brown publicly criticized the quarterback’s leadership both on Twitter and on HBO.

What does it all mean? Maybe that a beautiful, oddball friendship is just getting started. But we should probably wait until the Raiders’ training camp is over before we believe that Brown and Burfict are really BFFs.