You would have thought that getting their ass handed to them in the Super Bowl would be the most embarrassing thing to happen to the New England Patriots this year. My dear reader, it turns out that would be a deeply, deeply faulty assumption. No, the team that gave you Spygate, Deflategate and Bob Kraft Hand Job-gate has once again chosen to show its ass to the whole world. And just before the NFL Draft, no less! How exciting!

The scandal this time centers around Pats head coach Mike Vrabel, who just this past season washed away the stench of Bill Belichick’s final years in Foxboro by winning the AFC title in just his second season on the job. He’s cultivated a “he’s your kind of asshole!” vibe that his players and the media appeared to find appealing. One specific member of the media, Dianna Russini of ESPN and then the Athletic, seems to have found the Vrabel aura more than just appealing. Two weeks ago, Page Six, the New York Post’s celebrity gossip arm, published photos of Russini and Vrabel — both of whom are married to other people, at least as of this writing — spending some quality time alone together at an adults-only resort in Sedona, Arizona. The photos didn’t show the pair kissing, but they certainly seemed to depict two people who were more than enamored of one another.

Without the kissing evidence, Vrabel initially brushed off the Post’s findings as “laughable,” as if it would be utterly ludicrous to think that a high-profile figure in the country’s most testosterone-driven sport could potentially enjoy sleeping with women he’s not married to. Meanwhile, Russini told Page Six that she and Vrabel were at the resort separately, with separate friends, saying in a statement, “The photos don’t represent the group of six people who were hanging out during the day.” The four other people those two were supposedly chilling with are nowhere to be seen in those photos.

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FILE: Diana Russini introduces Minnesota Vikings players as they celebrate after the game against the Detroit Lions at U.S. Bank Stadium on Dec. 25, 2025, in Minneapolis.

Nor, evidently, did they make themselves apparent in the Athletic’s subsequent investigation into the whole affair, which led to Russini being dry-docked by the site before she resigned a few days later. Vrabel, being a man, naturally suffered no consequences of any sort.

Russini’s ouster is a glaring illustration of how gender and power dynamics conspire to overpunish women, even when they’ve engaged in blatantly obvious misconduct. But I have no desire to stunt on Russini any more than she continues to be stunted on by the entire sports world. I’d rather use this space to tear Vrabel a new asshole, because WHOA NELLY, subsequent events have made that guy look like an even bigger lech than when this whole thing started.

In the lead-up to the NFL Draft this week, Vrabel held his first media conference since Page Six published the Arizona photos. His tone shifted dramatically when he was asked again about the Russini situation. Instead of trying to laugh the question off, he went into a canned spiel that included such anodyne phrases as “some difficult conversations,” “that starts with me,” and “you never want to be the cause of a distraction.” He could have been talking about a bad play call on fourth down, so generic was his answer. Vrabel, and likely his divorce attorney, probably hoped that non-denial, non-apology would be the end of the matter.

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That was Tuesday morning. Wednesday night, Vrabel told the media that he’d be taking time off from the team to go to “counseling” ... on Saturday. On the third day of the draft, which is the day where franchise scouts traditionally get to make the picks. Vrabel did not specify what kind of counseling he’d receive or where he’d be, but given ESPN’s report that Vrabel “plans to be with his family this weekend,” it’s not exactly a leap to say “counseling” is a euphemism for “beg forgiveness from my wife and children.” Then, Thursday morning, mere hours before the draft kicks off, MassLive’s Patriots beat reporter, Mark Daniels, implied on X that Vrabel might not be available to the media until the end of May. All of this gave off the whiff of Vrabel and the Pats trying to get ahead of something that had yet to break.

New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel walks on the field prior to the start of the Super Bowl on Feb. 8, 2026, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. 

And guess what? Something did. Just moments ago, Page Six struck again by dropping more photos of Vrabel and Russini. Unlike the Arizona photos, the coach and the reporter are caught getting much cozier this time, with Vrabel going in for a smooch and a Page Six spy telling the paper that the two were “all over each other.” Smokin’ gun ahoy. Also, these newly released photos were taken six years ago.

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Yes, six years ago. Right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, six months before Russini would marry the man she now has two children with, a whopping 21 years after Vrabel married his wife Jen. I can’t believe that the New York Post has been a veritable paragon of journalistic ethics throughout this ordeal.

But then again, consider the oafish jackass they’ve outed as a philanderer. In fact, consider the New England Patriots as a whole. Dianna Russini has already paid the ultimate price for her role in this sordid tale, but she’s Mother Theresa compared with an outfit owned by a man who’s in the Epstein files, once coached by a man who is now dating a woman a literal third of his age, and now coached by a meathead who thought he could carry on with another woman for potentially six years without getting caught, or at least without getting punished. And who knows, maybe Mike Vrabel won’t be punished by the league under its eternally vague personal conduct policy. Football men tend to beat the rap sheet the second the games kick back up again. But take a moment to consider how Dianna Russini’s career is now in shambles while her possible lover is openly trying to get off clean. If Mike Vrabel had an ounce of integrity, he would have been publicly honest about whatever he’s been up to, at least to attract some of the abuse his way instead of letting Russini bear all of it. But he works for a team that flushed its integrity down the sewer many years ago, and it’s my opinion that he himself is doing likewise as we speak. All to cover his own ass. There’s a word for this sort of person, and it’s “loser.”

— Screw TurboTax, you need to hire a real human accountant— I got stranded in Germany for days. It gave me faith in humanity.— I tried Elon Musk's Wikipedia clone and boy is it racist— F—k Kash Patel and his $tupid shoes

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