Antonio Brown's divorce from Raiders proves there are no shortcuts in modern NFL

Leave it to the soon-to-be Las Vegas Raiders to engage in the league's most inevitable divorce two days before their season kickoff.

Sure, the Raiders are in Oakland for one more year, but this Antonio Brown saga has Sin City written all over it: A shotgun wedding that was more a marriage of convenience than an organic partnership. Frozen feet. A stubborn squabble over equipment that ended just about where it started. Unfrozen feet. An Oscar-worthy short film that could’ve starred Pitt and Clooney.

Money, power, intrigue. Everything.

The fiasco unfolded one final time on Saturday morning: Three days after Brown unleashed a threatening tirade at general manager Mike Mayock, earning a possible suspension, and less than a day after he released his two-minute video featuring a recorded phone call with his head coach, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the team fined Brown nearly a quarter-million dollars for “conduct detrimental to the team” and, in the process, voided more than $29 million in guarantees.

After Brown posted a scathing rebuke to the news on Instagram early Saturday morning, ending his rant with a plea to be released, the Raiders did just that, cutting ties with the all-world, all-headache wideout.

So now it's over in Oakland for Brown, who signed later Saturday with the Patriots.

The series finale happened before Brown's season even began, his tantalizing talent and super-glue hands not enough to make the Raiders continue this foolish dance. On college football's second Saturday, all the attention was siphoned away by a reality show drama that was more captivating than the "Bachelor" on "Love Island" with "Big Brother" watching.

“It’s been well-documented that it’s been a rocky road from the beginning,” Brown’s agent Drew Rosenhaus — no stranger to diva wideouts, as Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco can attest — told the NFL Network. “Unfortunately, not all relationships between players & teams work out. … Everybody had the best intentions going in but it didn’t pan out."

Intentions are all well and good, but above all, Brown's once-and-for-all divorce from the Raiders proves one thing: There are no shortcuts in the modern NFL — not for players entering the league, nor those hoping to last in it.

Nor, especially, for the coaches who are trying to add a Super Bowl to their resume, nor in Jon Gruden's case, a second.

What exactly did he think was going to happen when he added not one but three pollutants to the mix? Team chemistry isn't just something you mess around with. These aren't Bunsen burners, and this isn’t the seventh grade, even if all the parties involved are acting that way.

A year after trading away stalwart defensive star Khalil Mack — who, in addition to his abundant talent, was a pillar in the Raiders' locker room — Gruden added Brown, mercurial linebacker Vontaze Burfict and ticking time bomb Richie Incognito to the roster. Forget winning football games — the Raiders are lucky practice didn't turn into "Mad Max: Fury Road." The fact that the noted head-hunter Burfict had to separate Brown from Mayock on Wednesday only makes sense in this cacophony.

Now, in releasing Brown, certainly Gruden and Mayock are hoping it is a case of addition by subtraction.

The math is simple: $29.125 million back in the Raiders' coffers. That’s the easy part.

The hard part will be moving forward with a stunned squad that now must find a way to settle the waters just two days before Monday night’s matchup with the Broncos.

No team in recent history has entered the season on the coming off such a tumultuous training camp. Not the Steelers, who survived their chaos last season with Le’Veon Bell to come out relatively unscathed. Not the Dallas Cowboys, who overpaid Ezekiel Elliott but nonetheless kept the ship steered in the right direction. Not even the Houston Texans, who jettisoned one key piece of their defensive line but added another huge piece on the offensive line to make up for it.

Now it’s on Derek Carr to carry the team forward, even if his supporting cast now ranks among the worst in the game. And it’s on Gruden, who returned from the broadcasting ranks to the sidelines last year, only to find football had changed so much on him.

They’ve got one more year in Oakland to turn things around, and then they head to Sin City, where things are so much quieter.