Vrabel, Russini, and the Story That Matters

Last week, photographs showed New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and The Athletic reporter Dianna Russini holding hands, hugging, and spending time in a hot tub together in an adults-only resort in Arizona.

Ethics in journalism is front and center in the sports world right now, and it reminds me of a very important lesson I learned while in college.

During my junior year at Ohio State, I still very much did not know what I wanted to do with my life.  I knew I loved sports, so picking my major was easy enough, but being a Sports Management major was a pretty nebulous concept.

I knew I wanted to work in sports…but in what capacity?

I had no idea.  And, because I had no idea, I took lots of different classes.

One class, in particular, was Media Law and Ethics.  It was exactly what it sounds like: a class about the laws and ethics in the journalism profession.

Did I want to be a journalist?  Honestly, it never even occurred to me.  But, thankfully, it occurred to my professor that I was a decent writer.  And because I was a decent writer, she suggested to me after class one day that I submit something to the school newspaper The Lantern.  Even better – my professor was the paper’s editor, so it’s an understatement to say I had an in.

That, more or less, was the start of my love for writing (or maybe more accurately, my love of creating sports-related content).  That was the first time I ever got real validation – not just from my family.  It was a big deal for me.

Because I was an easily distracted college kid, I only ever wrote two articles for the paper, but it was better than nothing.  And even though I didn’t continue writing, I still enjoyed going to and applying myself in that class (which wasn’t the case with a fair amount of my other classes).

My professor used to work at a major publication as a journalist.  One day in class, we broached a subject that’s making waves right now in the sports media world: the idea of sleeping or trading sexual favors for information.

My professor warned us never to do it.  It would be a disaster for your credibility, and it’s just a bad idea.

My fellow students and I snickered.  It was silly.  Of course we wouldn’t sleep with a source.  That kind of thing only happens in movies and TV anyway.

But, last week, photographs surfaced in the New York Post that showed New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and The Athletic football reporter Diana Russini holding hands, hugging and relaxing next to one another in a hot tub at an adults-only resort in Arizona.

That alone, without any other context, is problematic.  The fact that both Vrabel and Russini are married – and, critically, not to each other – is also very poor optics.

Both Vrabel and Russini downplayed the photographs.  Vrabel called the story “laughable.”

But Russini has basically disappeared from social media.  And The Athletic is opening an investigation into any impropriety.

Vrabel and Russini aren’t laughing right now – and neither are my classmates in Media Law and Ethics.

And that’s because, even without any hard evidence of infidelity or impropriety, the images are more than enough to damage both Vrabel’s and Russini’s credibility.

A reporter’s job, as my professor would agree, is to report the facts.  Information gained for information’s sake.  Adding personal relationships into the picture, though, makes everything dubiously opaque.

Who’s using who, and how is that “who” being used?  When these questions are being asked, something untoward has definitely happened.

There are bread crumbs too.  Russini was a Tennessee Titans beat reporter from 2018 to 2023, which coincided with Vrabel’s tenure.  Her reporting that the Philadelphia Eagles were shopping AJ Brown to the Patriots (now coached by Vrabel) is under a lot of scrutiny.  Could Russini have been working with Vrabel and the Patriots to drive the Eagles’ price down?  The fact that we have to ask that question at all is problematic.

Yes, there is a double-standard here.  Russini is currently not working, and Vrabel will likely face no consequences whatsoever.  But that’s because Russini’s position demands that there can’t even be the appearance of impropriety.

The Athletic, Russini’s employer, has policies in place regarding fraternization with sources.  Clearly, Russini didn’t disclose this relationship, otherwise The Athletic wouldn’t be investigating.

The fact that both felt compelled to make statements following the release of the photographs is telling.  There was a clear calculation on both Vrabel and Russini’s part that silence would actually be more damaging than making a statement would be.  That’s a tough calculus.

This isn’t how public figures typically handle these sorts of situations.  Leonardo DiCaprio is seen in hundreds of tabloid photos every year.  People speculate all the time about his relationships, and it’s become a running joke that Leo dumps any girlfriend once she turns 27.

But you’ve never heard Leo comment.  And he never will, because breathing life into that story doesn’t serve him.

For Vrabel and Russini, though, that wasn’t the case, and that’s just as revealing as those photos were.

Neither wanted to address the conflict of interest question.  That won’t stop people everywhere from addressing and questioning it.

And they shouldn’t.

Whether or not any impropriety happened, we should demand that those in positions of power and influence behave themselves.  Both Vrabel and Russini benefit financially from the mighty sports-media industrial complex – it’s not asking too much for them to be held to a higher standard.

It’s a shame that any of this occurred.  We may never know exactly what happened between Vrabel and Russini at that Arizona resort, but Vrabel and Russini shouldn’t have put themselves in that position in the first place.

This isn’t about moral judgment – this is about doing a job the right way.  In this case, that didn’t happen.