Brandon Aiyuk Completes His Degree
I don’t know what is going on with 49ers hostage Brandon Aiyuk. I’m not sure anyone fully knows.
Aiyuk positioned himself to be the next big #1 wideout for the Kyle Shanahan experience. He held out, almost got traded, but eventually got paid. All pretty ordinary. He turned up to 2024 camp out of shape. He then tore his knee to shreds early in the season. That’s when things got…weird.
He vanishes from the team. He’s off doing god knows what to the point where the 49ers are able to simply void most of his contract because he won’t show up. He films himself speeding past the stadium. He vagueposts on Instagram. He seems like he’s either being given very bad advice from his life friends, he’s mentally ill, he’s just plain stupid, or he has some grievance with the 49ers staff. Most likely a combination of all 4. Whatever Aiyuk says, he feels like an unreliable narrator. It’s not hard to feel the synergy with disgraced star Antonio Brown.
Unlike Brown though, he doesn’t have the “brain injury” excuse. I don’t like that excuse and think people assign far too much blame for what happened with Brown to that Burfict hit. I think it’s probably a combination of mental illness and surrounding himself with the wrong people, giving him bad advice. Aiyuk seems desperate to join the Commanders, acting as if he has the leverage to force the 49ers to send him there. I’m not sure the Commanders even want him. Who would want someone who has caused this much drama after getting what he supposedly wanted once? The 49ers caved to his demands and paid for it. They are lucky as hell he’s a dumbass who then put himself into position to have his contact voided.
The 49ers at this stage seem to be content holding him hostage. They won’t trade him. They won’t release him. They already got out of having to pay him. They probably should trade him for whatever peanut they can scrounge up, but they are waiting for him to make it work. It costs them nothing to hold him for now, and will even start fining him should he skip camp in July. Aiyuk seems unable to realize the lack of leverage he has in this situation. He’s made himself undesirable to everyone, and he won’t take the easy steps to get reinstated so he can be released.
My guess is that eventually, he does get cut and ends up a Commander early season. How long that takes is up to him, and I have no idea what to suspect at this stage. This is all just very weird.
Bet he ends up at a drama-magnet team: Cleveland, Miami…
Don’t mention Miami too loudly, plenty of the weirdo Tyreek Hill defenders abound.
Maybe if his QB had an O-line that wasn’t made of feta…
I assume TO misspelled his name on purpose?
Never mind; it’s fixed.
Doubt the 49ers are able to trade BA given that everyone knows they will release him as soon as he shows up. Plus trading him means trading his contract, which no longer has guarantees but will still overpay him if he does play.
Maybe if he continues to “hold out”, and another team is confident that they can get him to renegotiate his contract if he’s traded. It doesn’t make sense for Aiyuk, given he could just show up, get cut, and then negotiate in his own as a free agent, but he hasn’t been making sense lately so it’s possible
All Ayuk has to do to get what he wants is to show up to 49ers training camp (and maybe say something like “I am a willing participant”), in which case he will be active instead of no show and the 49ers would need to cut him to prevent him from counting towards the cap.
But all signs indicate that he doesn’t actually know this and/or thinks he’s already a free agent? He doesn’t have an agent, he doesn’t have legal representation, and I don’t even know if he has buddies giving him bad info because every Instagram crashout he posts is himself alone in his car or his closet or whatever. Just a top tier mess of his own making, and that’s before getting into if his knee actually works since nobody knows that either.
Ahem…
Antonio Clown
ENOUGH FROM THE CLOWN!
Here’s hoping he doesn’t do the Aaron Hernandez, you know the ending for that. That said people were trying to excuse the guy as well because CTE and shit.
If he doesn’t show up to training camp, he gets fined. If does show up, he risks getting arrested by the Santa Clara County police department for his speeding shenanigans.
The thing to remember about CTE is that its not just about the extreme outlier hits, its about… well, every time there’s an impact against the head.
And Wide Receivers are on the wrong end of a lot of them through high school and college and the pros. How many dozens of times has his head bounced off the turf, do you think?
Its not the only factor, of course. And nothing in human biology is simple or definite. But given just how many high-profile Wide Receivers have gone off the deep end, I can’t help but think that there’s something systemic here, and it fucking sucks.
49ers should have traded him when he held value. 1 good season, then an injury (can’t blame him but he was quiet all that year), then a hold out is ridiculous.
At least Brown was a top echelon receiver when he went to the Raiders. Aiyuk was never even the top receiver in SF.
Everything I have read has said that people who were close to him have been shut out for trying to steer him away from this course.