Maxx Crosby is the unquestioned leader of the Raiders’ locker room, but as a rookie in 2019, Crosby was a relative unknown with a front-row seat to one of the wackiest training camps in team history.
Jon Gruden was entering his second season as head coach of the Raiders in 2019, and the headlines of the offseason that year almost all involved Antonio Brown.
Crosby sat down with former NFL quarterback Johnny Manziel last week and talked about what it was like to enter his first NFL training camp alongside Brown and a few other notable names on the roster.
“Antonio Brown… I’ve never seen anything like it,” Crosby told Manziel on the Glory Daze podcast. “He had his whole family. We’re in training camp, like in team period and he’d just have his shoulder pads off on the sidelines just playing catch with his kids on the other field. I’m like, ‘What the f—?'”
“In my head, I’m like ‘Is this normal?’ But I’m like ‘Oh, I guess he’s a superstar, so he just do what the f— you want,'” Crosby continued. “And then you see the guys pulling out, everyone’s got Rolls-Royces and all this s— and I’m like, ‘What the f— is this? Why am I here?’ I just felt like I was like placed in a movie and I just happened to like fall into the wrong movie at that time. It was just crazy on a daily basis.”
Coming into the NFL, Crosby was an undersized edge rusher, and he said one of the most intimidating assignments in his rookie year was lining up against Gruden’s newly signed 6’8, 360-pound offensive tackle.
“Trent Brown, he had just been paid, the highest paid lineman of all time. I’ve gone against a lot of bad motherf—-rs, even in the MAC I played some real competition,” Crosby said.
“And I see Trent Brown, this is the biggest human I’ve ever seen in my life. And he moves like a f—ing cat. I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I can play here. I don’t know if this is going to work out.’ Every time I stunt inside, I got Richie [Incognito] waiting for me trying to f—ing decapitate me.”
A year ago, Crosby shared a different story about the battles he would have with Brown.
Crosby might have been intimidated, but he said he never backed down from Brown.
“When I came in the league all the vets were like ‘I’m not going against him,’” Crosby said on The Rush podcast in March of last year.
“Trent Brown was just paid. He was the highest-paid tackle at the time. The biggest human I have ever seen and I’m like ‘I’ll f—ing go every time.’ I beat him on one rush. It took literally two weeks to beat him. I long-armed the f— out of him and I was like ‘If I die tomorrow… I’ll be happy for the rest of my life. I got past that f—ing mountain.’”
x: @raidersbeat