New England Patriots players say they have already moved past the offseason photographs that put coach Mike Vrabel and former Athletic reporter Dianna Russini at the center of a tabloid storm. Women covering the NFL say they have not.
As the Patriots prepare to open the 2026 season Wednesday night in Seattle, a Super Bowl rematch against the Seahawks, the locker room’s message is blunt: the pictures were a distraction, the coach owned it, and football is what matters now. The aftershock outside the building is different. Several female reporters and league staffers describe a new wariness around off-hours meetings, coffee sit-downs, late-night combine conversations and even routine texting with coaches.
The split is the story that remains after the scandal itself faded from daily headlines.
Running back Rhamondre Stevenson, one of two Patriots made available to ESPN for a story published Monday, said the team “just tried to move on as fast as we can from that.” He added that Vrabel “feels like he did wrong by us” and that “none of the team was really even worried about specifics.”
Safety Kevin Byard, who also played for Vrabel in Tennessee, said he called the coach to offer support. “I don’t care what’s going on in the media,” Byard said. “We all fall short sometimes; that’s what makes us human. I’m not going to question a guy’s choices … as long as they don’t affect things on the field, and I haven’t seen that.”
An anonymous Patriots source put the locker-room calculus in even plainer terms: Vrabel’s leadership “was never tied to how he lived his personal life.” Football players, the source said, “care about respect, they care about accountability, and they care if you can make them better. And if you can do those things, you can be the weirdest person or you can be a stone-cold killer and they won’t care.”
That is the culture Vrabel has sold since taking over a 4-13 team in 2025 and driving it to the Super Bowl in his first season in Foxborough. Players describe a coach who sprints to greet them after games, checks on them after personal losses and presents himself as a father figure. Those deposits, several people around the team said, bought him a short hearing and a fast return to business.
Vrabel addressed the roster about two weeks after the photos surfaced. According to people in the room, he used the same serious tone he uses after a loss, said he was responsible for creating a distraction and bringing negative attention to the organization, and offered no details about Russini. Players asked no questions. The meeting moved on to the day’s schedule.
The NFL said it did not investigate Vrabel under the personal conduct policy. Owner Robert Kraft later called the franchise “privileged” to have him and added, “No one is infallible.”
The New York Post’s Page Six published the first images April 7. They were taken March 28 at Ambiente, an adults-only resort in Sedona, Arizona, days before the NFL’s annual meetings in Phoenix. The photos showed Vrabel and Russini hugging, interlocking fingers on a rooftop reached through private bungalows, and spending time at the pool and in a hot tub. Both are married to other people.
Vrabel’s first public line was categorical. The photos, he told Page Six, “show a completely innocent interaction and any suggestion otherwise is laughable.” Russini said the pictures did not represent a larger group that had been socializing that day. Additional images later surfaced, including photographs from a New York bar in 2020 that Page Six said showed the two sitting close and appearing to kiss, plus other older pictures from public events.
Russini resigned from The Athletic on April 14, less than a week after the first Post story and amid an internal review. She has declined to discuss the matter for subsequent reporting.
Vrabel, after days of silence, told reporters he had held “difficult conversations with people I care about” — family, the organization, coaches and players — and that those talks had been “positive and productive.” He later said his “previous actions don’t meet the standard that I hold myself to,” announced he would seek counseling and missed the third day of the NFL draft. He has repeatedly declined to discuss the relationship itself, pivoting instead to offensive line questions and team preparation. By late May he was telling reporters, “I love Jen,” a reference to his wife.
The same episode has changed the temperature of source work for some women who cover the league.
ESPN reported that an assistant coach told a woman reporter he would not want to be seen meeting her for coffee, citing the optics of the Vrabel-Russini situation. Other reporters said they now flag meetings with editors in advance, think twice before asking a coach for a phone number and treat late-night combine conversations, long a staple of NFL sourcing, as newly risky. Multiple league personnel warned at least one reporter that women would have a harder time at the scouting combine, where reporters and team officials often mingle at bars after hours.
“It really sucks this came from someone who a lot of us thought approached things differently than his peers,” one NFL reporter who has covered Vrabel told ESPN. “It’s just unfortunate because it felt like he understood there are challenges that women in the business face and was doing one small bit to try and push back on it.”
An assistant coach from another team described the trickle-down in locker-room language: “All the coaches are under surveillance right now, all the [stuff] with Vrabel.” Another said the damage is the insinuation. After 14- or 16-hour days, he said, coaches now imagine a spouse seeing a photo or a rumor and asking what coaches do on the road. “That is the trickle-down effect.”
