Inside Mike Vrabel's private meeting with Patriots players over Dianna Russini affair scandal

The New England Patriots locker room has rallied around embattled head coach Mike Vrabel in the wake of offseason accusations of an extramarital affair with league reporter Dianna Russini.

'It's difficult to explain to people outside the building how he approached it and how players took it,' a Patriots player, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told ESPN. 'Of course players care about [what happened]. Vrabel is a great leader. Sometimes you have to mess up to become an even better leader.'

Allegations of an extramarital affair between the NFL's reigning Coach of the Year and The Athletic's Russini first surfaced in April when she and Vrabel were pictured by The New York Post fraternizing by the pool of an adults-only Arizona retreat. Other years-old photos later surfaced showing the two gambling at a casino, renting a boat together in Tennessee and kissing at a Manhattan bar.

Both initially denied any wrongdoing when the first photos were published, but according to ESPN, Vrabel wanted to issue a stronger statement defending her reporting for The Athletic. 

In the end, Vrabel vaguely admitted to letting down his family without specifying his exact misdeeds. Although Russini resigned, she did stand by her work at the New York Times-owned website, where editors have conceded she failed to meet newsroom standards.

In its piece, ESPN endeavored to tell the inside story of the scandal's impact in the Patriots locker room, which appears to have rallied around its coach. 

According to those in attendance when Vrabel addressed the issue with players last spring, the Patriots head coach acknowledged creating a distraction and discussed the importance of overcoming challenges.   

Vrabel declined to speak with ESPN for the piece and much of the organization followed suit. However, a few players did speak to ESPN on and off the record to give a clearer picture of the fallout in Foxborough.

'He feels like he did wrong by us,' veteran running back Rhamondre Stevenson said.

Vrabel did not discuss specific details of the scandal with the team, five people in the room confirmed to ESPN, and according to Stevenson, nobody cared.

'None of the team was really even worried about specifics,' Stevenson said.

If anything, the article shows an NFL locker room to be a rather forgiving place.

'His leadership was never tied to how he lived his personal life,' one Patriots source told ESPN, explaining things would have been different if Vrabel was known to moralize publicly.

'Ultimately football players care about respect, they care about accountability, and they care if you can make them better,' that source told ESPN. '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.'

Shaun Smith, one of Vrabel's former teammates from his playing days, had a similar, albeit more playful take: 'Some guys are gonna be like, "Hey, he's a dirtbag like me." You might have some guys who want to high-five him.'

But the vast majority of those who spoke to ESPN about Vrabel's redemption in New England seemed to think it would take care of itself.

Players aren't asking coaches to be perfect, free-agent acquisition Kevin Byard told ESPN. Rather, they're looking for coaches who are invested in their long-term success and happiness.

'We all fall short sometimes; that's what makes us human,' said Byard, who previously played for Vrabel in Tennessee. '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.'

What Byard and many others have seen is a coach who knows how to be human.

When Byard's newborn son spent five months in the hospital in 2023, Vrabel called to check in repeatedly, even after the safety was traded to Philadelphia that season. And similarly, when then-Patriots linebacker Jahlani Tavai lost an unborn child as his partner fell into a coma, Vrabel called every day.

'Players know how much he cares about them,' former Tennessee Titans center Ben Jones told ESPN. 'He builds relationships where a lot of coaches don't.'

ESPN's article also addressed the Vrabel-Russini scandal's impact on female reporters in NFL locker rooms.

Several women media figures told ESPN their jobs have already been impacted. In one instance, ESPN reported, a female reporter was told by an NFL assistant coach he did not want to be seen meeting with her and specifically cited the Vrabel-Russini scandal to defend his reasoning.

League personnel reached out to one female reporter this past spring to warn her that women in the media could have a harder time at events like the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis, she told ESPN. Typically, the early-March event offers league reporters the chance to fraternize with coaches and executives at the city's bars.

'It really sucks this [scandal] came from someone [Vrabel] who a lot of us thought approached things differently than his peers,' one NFL reporter 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.'