Brandon Spikes: ‘4 Years A Slave’ Playing For New England Patriots
Brandon Spikes, the 26-year-old linebacker out of the University of Florida who played four years with the New England Patriots, apparently didn’t enjoy his time with New England very much. After the Patriots did not bring him back after last season, when his contract was up, Spikes signed with the Buffalo Bills and he’s been taking shots at his previous team ever since.
On Wednesday, Brandon Spikes fired up his Twitter account and compared his four years in New England to slavery, invoking the title of the Academy Award winning film, 12 Years A Slave.
First, Spikes blasted out a pair of tweets in which he described the prospect of defeating his original team twice in one season — the Bills and Patriots are division rivals who face each other in a home-and-home series every year — as “like Christmas.”
Great games on the schedule for 2014, but it’s going to be like Christmas to hand the #Patriots #PatriotsNation a L…twice! #BILLSMAFIA
— BrandonSpikes51 (@BrandonSpikes51) April 9, 2014
Great games on the schedule for 2014, but it’s going to be like Christmas to hand the #Patriots #PatriotsNation a L…twice! #BILLSMAFIA — BrandonSpikes51 (@BrandonSpikes51) April 9, 2014
And then, in a tweet that followed shortly after, Brandon Spikes compared his New England career to the Oscar-winning historical epic depicting the horrors of slavery in the 19th-century United States.
4 years a slave
— BrandonSpikes51 (@BrandonSpikes51) April 9, 2014
While it is clear that Spikes felt somehow unfairly treated by the Patriots, the fact that he made a base salary of $650,000 in 2013 would appear to contradict his claim of “slavery.” While $650,000 is not high on the scale of professional athlete salaries in the four major North American sports leagues, that figure still put Brandon Spikes in the 95.5th percentile of all income earners in the United States.
In other words, in 2013, Brandon Spikes made more money than all but the highest-paid 0.5 percent of Americans.
The Patriots and Brandon Spikes had a tumultuous relationship that ended badly. The team put Spikes on the injured reserve list before the playoffs began last season. The team said that Spikes had a knee injury. But Brandon Spikes later denied that he was hurt.
At the time, reports surfaced that Spikes was late to a team meeting earlier in the week leading up to the Patriots first playoff game, and that the tardiness was the reason that he was placed on the IR list, ruling him out for a postseason roster spot — and effectively ending Spikes Patriots career.
It didn’t take Brandon Spikes long to get into trouble with the Patriots. New England drafted Spikes in the second round out of Florida in 2010, and just about a month after signing his contract, a sex tape surfaced on the internet starring Spikes and an unidentified woman engaging in sexual activities in a hotel room.
In December of that same year, Brandon Spikes was suspended for four games by the NFL, for a violation of the league’s substance abuse policy. Spikes said that the substance was part of a prescribed medication, not steroids or an illegal recreational drug.
In a recent radio interview, Brandon Spikes said that he would not describe his time in New England as “happy.”
