The NFL currently faces antitrust issues on multiple fronts — legislative, regulatory, and executive.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft saw it coming a year ago.
As noted by Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, Kraft accurately presaged the situation last year, when the league hired Ted Ullyot as its new general counsel.
“We’re at the top of the heap,” Kraft said at the time. “We’re going to be a target in antitrust, and in a lot of other ways, we’re going to need legal representation that knows how to go on the offensive and play defense to protect where we’re going.”
In 2024, the NFL had a multibillion-dollar verdict entered against it in a private antitrust lawsuit arising from the Sunday Ticket package. More recently, the issues have arisen through the political process, as the NFL embarks on an effort to renegotiate existing broadcast deals.
Regardless of the motivation, the possibility of entanglements has hidden in plain sight since the NFL first sold a package of games to cable networks in the late 1980s. More than forty years later, the long-wandering chickens are coming home to roost, from multiple directions. Where it goes from here remains to be seen.
It’s still a problem. One that the league has never before encountered in this specific way. And the potential consequences include forfeiting the ability to sell games in a league-wide bundle to cable, satellite, or streaming platforms — and possibly losing its entire antitrust exemption.
There’s a story behind the publication of compromising photos involving Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and New York Times reporter Dianna Russini.
Some of that story is trickling out.
Ryan Glasspiegel and Michael McCarthy of Front Office Sports report that the photos were shopped before being published by the New York Post on Tuesday.
TMZ was approached by, per the report, an “anonymous tipster” regarding photos of Vrabel with an “unidentified woman.” The tipster, who was not from a known paparazzi or photo agency, requested a sum in the “four figures.”
The Post declined comment to FOS regarding how it obtained the photos, including whether it paid for the images.
Vrabel and Russini denied, in separate statements, that the photos show anything improper. There are inconsistencies between the statements, the photos, and the reporting from the Post.
Russini returned to Twitter early Thursday, posting what seemed to be an innocuous trial balloon. It did not go well, with the usual Twitter toxicity emerging in overwhelming fashion in the responses to the post.
The Patriots have not commented on the situation. Vrabel likely won’t be available to reporters again until the typical press conferences that occur during and/or after the draft.
The biggest story in the NFL continues to be the recent photos of, and the denials issued by, Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and New York Times reporter Dianna Russini.
Everyone is talking about it. Most of the people who cover sports media have written about it. Even NBC News had an item about it.
Reasonable minds differ on what the photos show, and what they don’t show. A significant question lingers as to how the photos came to be. Between accident and design, it feels like someone was looking for something.
As mentioned on Wednesday’s #PFTPM, the situation also invites scrutiny of Russini’s past reporting. (Alex Reimer of Awful Announcing has ventured down that specific rabbit hole.) It will impact the reactions to her future reporting.
It also created a practical question as to the right way to assume a business-as-usual presence on social media.
On Thursday morning, Russini authored her first tweet since the situation came to light. It was innocuous; she posted an item that ran a link to an article about the NFL’s ongoing collective bargaining brouhaha with its officials. It felt like a trial balloon.
If so, it fell flat.
The responses were as toxic, mean, and hateful as anyone would imagine, given the toxic, mean, and hateful nature of the Twitter ecosystem. There were, as of this posting, more than 2,300 responses to the tweet.
So what’s next? Given that the job of the NFL insider relies heavily on winning the thumb races to Twitter, it’s going to be hard to abandon the platform. But she may have to.
Yes, things tend to blow over. Collectively, we have the brains of goldfish. In this specific case, however, the facts are sufficiently unique from the typical merry-go-round — and Russini’s job is sufficiently polarizing in nature — to invite the same kind of response to everything she reports from now on.
Tuesday’s report from Page Six of the New York Post regarding the photos of Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and New York Times reporter Dianna Russini raises plenty of fair questions moving forward.
There’s one important question moving backward. How did the Post get the photos?
Vrabel and Russini have separately said the photos do not show evidence of impropriety.
It’s highly unlikely that someone in Sedona, Arizona — two hours from the site of the recent NFL annual meeting in Phoenix — was bird watching and just happened to see Vrabel and Russini in a setting that could be plausibly characterized as questionable. Common sense suggests that someone was actively looking for evidence. Whether it was a freelancer who then sold the photos to the Post or whether it was someone the Post dispatched isn’t known.
Still, the photos were either harvested accidentally or by design.
There’s an intriguing nugget lurking in the shadows of this one. Did someone give the photographer or the Post a tip? If so, who? If so, why?
Accident or design. Spontaneous or planned.
Whatever the truth, there’s a potentially compelling story there as to how the photos came to be. There could also be a potentially compelling story as to any and all discussions that preceded the publication of the photos.
The Post may have had them for a week or more, and the Post got statements from Vrabel, Russini, and Russini’s employer before posting the story. Who made the call to publish?
And what, if anything, may have been done before they were published to prevent their publication?
Toledo safety Emmanuel McNeil-Warren appears headed to being a late first-round draft pick later this month.
McNeil-Warren has become a popular top-30 visitor.
He is currently visiting the Dolphins in Miami after recent visits with the Patriots, Browns, Cowboys and Falcons, according to Jordan Schultz of The Schultz Report. McNeil-Warren will head to Pittsburgh after finishing in Miami today.
McNeil-Warren earned second-team All-American honors last season when he totaled 77 tackles, three forced fumbles, two interceptions and seven passes defensed.
Dane Brugler of TheAthletic.com ranks McNeil-Warren as his 23rd-best player in the draft, third among safeties.
