Mitch Brown blames Patrick Dangerfield for Mad Monday being cancelled
The AFL’s first bisexual male player Mitch Brown has blamed Patrick Dangerfield for Geelong’s Mad Monday shenanigans.
The AFL’s first openly bisexual man, Mitch Brown, has blamed Patrick Dangerfield for Geelong cancelling Mad Monday moving forward after intense backlash stemming from their 2025 celebrations.
Following the Cats’ grand final defeat in September, Brown hit out at Bailey Smith and Dangerfield for what he called “homophobic” Mad Monday antics.
Smith was dressed as Brad Pitt’s character from Legends of the Fall, and uploaded a photo with a Brokeback Mountain reference, while holding hands with Dangerfield, who was dressed as a cowboy.
The Cats star wrote: “This is what losing a granny does to ya.”
Brown called out the behaviour on Instagram almost immediately, writing: “In all seriousness though, guys do better.
“Last time I checked, losing a grand final doesn’t make you gay, but being homophobic definitely makes you a loser.”
The former AFL player also spoke of his disappointment with Smith’s sexist and misogynistic inference towards veteran AFL journalist Caroline Wilson, with the Cats star posting with Max Holmes, who came dressed up as her.
Following immense backlash and several controversial incidents in recent years, Geelong declared that Mad Mondays would be a thing of the past at their club, with Brown copping the blame from fans as a result.
But Brown has now doubled down on his comments, telling Olivia Rogers on her Tell Me More podcast that the club’s skipper, Dangerfield, should have been a true leader and stopped the poor behaviour.
“That one with Caroline Wilson is pretty bad,’’ Brown said on the Tell Me More podcast.
“Then I said to Lou, my partner … I don’t know how I feel about this.
“And secondly, it’s like, there’s some leaders around there, there’s Patty Dangerfield, there’s some other leaders there. Maybe if the journalists are calling me, there’s going to be, they’re going to know a reaction’s happened.
“Maybe the leaders, they’re good guys, maybe they will shut things down. And the hours kept going in the afternoon, nothing happened.
“The Caroline Wilson one was taken down, the Brokeback Mountain sort of caption one, that stayed up the full 24 hours on the Instagram story. I was most disappointed at the club.
“It was like that afternoon, I posted around seven o’clock, so it was quite a while from 11 o’clock and I waited for all those mechanisms to surely kick into place.
“Maybe this is a chance for another men’s AFL player from another team to call out this behaviour.
“Maybe this is going to be the moment where we stop caring about the sensitivities of talking about other teams and stuff and going, no, this is not on.
“And let’s stamp out this behaviour, whether it’s so casual or not, never happened.”
Brown said people have hurled hate towards him for cancelling Mad Monday, but says instead of blaming him, they should instead be disappointed in the Geelong captain and the leadership group for not standing up for what he knew was wrong.
“Once you start to rock this precious hyper masculine game, and then you go one deeper, the sacred Mad Monday, the hate came,’’ Brown said.
“Like it came in droves. And that’s when (the club) gave a two-paragraph statement about cancelling effectively the current structure of Mad Monday.
“And it’s like, oh, thanks. It’s going to really throw me under the bus that one. And then after that statement, the next day, the death threats came.
“And that was all because, you know, I guess this burden that we talk about, it’s like standing up to something that, maybe Patty Dangerfield should have stood up.”
Originally published as Mitch Brown blames Patrick Dangerfield for Mad Monday being cancelled
AFL pre-season report: The latest intel from the track
