What if Antonio Brown had been drafted by the Bills instead of the Steelers?

For one fleeting moment on April 24, 2010, Antonio Brown was nearly a Buffalo Bill. The Central Michigan standout had slipped all the way to the sixth round of that year’s NFL Draft when his brother’s phone rang from Buffalo’s headquarters. It looked like Brown would be headed to the AFC East as the 192nd pick of the draft — until another call came in from Pittsburgh’s area code.

Here’s what Brown said in his Path to Pittsburgh video, transcribed from Beyond the Steel Curtain:

The Buffalo Bills called my brother[’s] phone [and my brother said], ‘Hey this is Buffalo’ ... I literally grabbed the phone and then once I did like this [moved the phone towards his ear] I looked down [his own phone was in his lap] and it was a 412 number. And then I was like ‘Ah, I’ll take this one’ [the call from the Steelers].

Three picks later, head coach Mike Tomlin scooped him up with the 195th pick. Twenty months afterward, Brown was a Pro Bowler. By 2014, he was leading the league in receiving.

There’s no guarantee the Bills would have drafted Brown if he’d answered their call. Maybe it was just a feeler to lay the groundwork behind signing the All-MAC star as a possible undrafted free agent. There’s a good chance South Dakota State’s Danny Batten, the linebacker Buffalo wound up taking, was the team’s top choice for the 192nd pick either way.

But the way Brown tells it hints that he was nearly a Bill, and that presents an entire alternate universe where Pittsburgh and Buffalo wind up as potential playoff rivals.

Getting Brown would undoubtedly have helped the Bills — it just would take a while for his impact to be felt. The explosive wideout thrived in his second season as a pro in Pittsburgh thanks to Ben Roethlisberger’s veteran presence in the pocket, but caught fewer than two passes per game as a rookie as he made the jump from a Group of 5 conference to the NFL.

Instead of catching passes from a future Hall of Famer, Brown in Buffalo would instead downgrade to Ryan Fitzpatrick, Trent Edwards, Brian Brohm, EJ Manuel, Thad Lewis, and Jeff Tuel as his starting quarterbacks in his first four hypothetical seasons in the league.

That’s grim, and it’s reasonable to think Brown’s output would have decreased significantly, though not fallen off entirely. Would the Bills have thought enough of him to lock him in to a contract extension early on? Or would he have been an underrated gem waiting to be unearthed and polished into All-Pro form by another team?

Buffalo’s recent experiences at wideout suggest the latter — and history says the Patriots would be the most likely team to do it.

There’s a long list of wide receivers who have passed through Buffalo before earning bigger roles elsewhere. In 2017, Robert Woods needed just 12 games to set a career high in receiving yards with the Rams, one season after leaving New York. That same year, Marquise Goodwin more than doubled his receiving output — up to 962 yards and a scorching 17.2 yards per catch — after moving from Buffalo to San Francisco. In 2016, the Patriots swiped Chris Hogan as a restricted free agent and turned him into the league’s most efficient deep threat.

New England head coach Bill Belichick has had a keen eye for underutilized talent across the AFC East. Aside from Hogan, the Patriots have also plucked skill players like Mike Gillislee, Donald Jones, Scott Chandler, and most recently, Jordan Matthews from Buffalo’s roster since 2011, with varying success. Would Brown, struggling to reconcile his budding talent with a crop of disappointing quarterbacks, been part of that list?

The most interesting answer to that question is yes. In this case, New England and not Pittsburgh winds up being Brown’s launchpad when Belichick’s in-division scouting pays off. Brown thrives with Tom Brady after signing with the Pats in 2013 for three years and $10 million, a shade less than Hogan would get in 2016. He wins two Super Bowls with the team before pricing himself out of Foxborough with a four-year, $74 million deal with Washington — a team with a penchant for making big free agency splashes.

The move allows the team to give Kirk Cousins a true WR1 and eliminates the need to take Josh Doctson with that year’s first-round pick. Instead, they pick up a frontline space-eater like Jarran Reed or A’Shawn Robinson at defensive tackle, each a popular mock draft target for the club. That’s enough to push Washington to the playoffs in 2016 and convince the team to build around Kirk Cousins rather than let him walk as a free agent — but that’s a can of worms to open another time.

Pittsburgh never gets the chance to build its three-headed monster of Roethlisberger, Brown, and Le’Veon Bell, though the temptation to pluck Brown away from the Patriots would be high. The Steelers haven’t given out more then $28 million in a contract this decade, so signing him as a free agent would have been difficult.

But that’s not a major problem for the team’s deep receiving corps. While no one player could fill Brown’s shoes at Heinz Field, pass catchers like Mike Wallace, Heath Miller, Emmanuel Sanders, Jerricho Cotchery, Markus Wheaton, Martavis Bryant, Sammie Coates, Bell, and, eventually, JuJu Smith-Schuster would be able to fill the targets he’d left behind.

That’s a lot of useful talent, bolstered by one of the league’s best tailbacks in Bell. Maybe Brown’s absence would have pulled the team’s attention away from its hard set defensive focus over its past six drafts — Pittsburgh hasn’t taken an offensive player in the first round since 2012 — but it’s tough to see this version of the team falling out of postseason contention.

That would have also left the Steelers with an extra $68 million to spend in 2017 — the four-year value of Brown’s most recent contract extension. That’s money the team could use to lock Bell into a long-term deal rather than risk losing him after saddling him with the franchise tag the past two years. Of course, that would put plenty of pressure on Bell to replace Brown’s production, though he probably wouldn’t have live-streamed Mike Tomlin calling the Patriots “assholes” like Brown did.

In this stretch of a hypothetical, yep! The odds this would have all unfolded the way it did in one specific alternate universe are slim, but you can derive the logic behind each of these changes. The 2010-12 Bills were a ferris wheel of unfortunate quarterbacking, so it makes sense Brown’s leap would be delayed from his sophomore NFL season to a later date. The Patriots love stealing underappreciated skill players from divisionional rivals, so it makes sense they’d take a low-risk, high-reward gamble on Brown.

From there, he’d break out while playing with Tom Brady and justifiably price himself out of Bill Belichick’s price range. And who needed a top-flight receiver and spends a ton of money in the offseason? Washington.

Meanwhile, the Steelers just keep chugging along because they’re the Steelers. That’s what they do.

In the end, the Bills’ drafting Antonio Brown doesn’t really change much for either Buffalo or Pittsburgh — but it works out well for New England and Washington. There are a ton of moving parts at play here, but not even three years of catching passes from the likes of Ryan Fitzpatrick and Brian Brohm would have stopped Brown from becoming one of the league’s most devastating weapons.