On Saturday, Patriots coach Mike Vrabel wasn’t with the team for the third day of the draft. On Monday, Vrabel is back with the team.
Via Phil Perry of NBC Sports Boston, Vrabel has returned to work with the Patriots.
It ends the chapter but doesn’t close the book on the controversy that erupted 20 days ago. Based on things Vrabel said during a pair of short media appearances last week, it’s possible that he’ll be absent again for counseling in the coming days and weeks.
And the decision not to be present for rounds four through seven of the selection process continues to be unusual, to say the least. It’s a fairly important day on the offseason calendar. Also, it was a Saturday.
Why not Monday? As in this Monday, after the dust settled on the final day of the draft and the mad scramble for undrafted free agents. As Patriots V.P. of player personnel Eliot Wolf said last week, Vrabel is a “tremendous recruiter.” The Patriots didn’t have those skills available to them when trying to extract commitments from players who weren’t going to be drafted.
Overall, the story itself has died down. The Patriots and Vrabel have stopped creating new developments that demand coverage. Neither the New York Post nor TMZ have published new reports or photos in recent days.
Even if the parties involved provide no further short-term oxygen, there’s always a chance something else will happen. And even if nothing else happens, it’s a situation that won’t quickly be forgotten — and that will hover over the Patriots for the balance of the offseason.
Last year, North Carolina G.M. Mike Lombardi crowed that the Tar Heels were the NFL’s 33rd franchise. The other 32 had no interest in any of their draft-eligible players.
None of the players from the first year of the Bill Belichick tenure at Chapel Hill were among the 257 draft picks from the 2026 selection process.
None. As in not one. And they arrived in time to take advantage of the transfer portal to find one-year players who would then exit for the NFL. Given that it was too late to put together a strong class of incoming freshmen, they were even more likely to seek and find established players.
That was the basic problem with the program in 2025. They didn’t have enough good players. And it was Lombardi’s job to find them.
Between finding them and coaching them up, Belichick and company didn’t do enough to get any of them drafted.
The NFL’s biggest story of the month — which has crossed over to national news, morning shows, and late-night TV — had a fairly big development on Saturday, when Patriots coach Mike Vrabel skipped the third day of the draft to attend counseling.
On Thursday, Patriots V.P. of player personnel Eliot Wolf explained that the draft room would be missing Vrabel’s “leadership” and “presence,” along with his skills as a “tremendous recruiter” of undrafted free agents.
During Saturday’s draft coverage on ESPN, Peter Schrager said this: “I’ve been told, from Patriot sources, that they are in constant contact with Vrabel throughout the day.”
That was a surprising nugget, to say the least. If Vrabel is skipping the third day of the draft for counseling, being in “constant contact” with the Patriots would undermine the basic purpose of being away from the team.
Later, Schrager retracted the report. Even if he didn’t call it a retraction.
“Following up on the Vrabel report, it was my understanding that Coach Vrabel was going to be in contact with the staff via phone/text, but I’ve learned that in the end, both Vrabel and the team ultimately chose not to interrupt him and his family during Day 3 of the Draft,” Schrager tweeted.
It’s a huge difference to go from “they are in constant contact” to “they are having no contact whatsoever.” So either the report was wrong — or it was right and the Patriots realized that it was the latest example of piss-poor P.R. and scrambled to clean it up.
Either way, here’s what Wolf told reporters on Saturday, from the transcript distributed by the team.
Q: “Were you in contact with Mike at all today, and if so, how often were you guys in contact?”
A: “So, last night we kind of talked through things and made the decision that the time away really needs to be time away, so we were not in contact with Mike today other than some just, ‘Hope everything’s going OK’ kind of texts early this morning.”
Q: “And just to follow up, when you talked to him last night when Day 2 ended, what kind of message did he leave you guys with headed into today?”
EW: “Just words of encouragement. He knows our process, and again, we talked about what kind of players we needed to add. We knew what kind of players that he liked, and obviously we drafted some of the guys that he had an affinity for today.”
So it sounds like the claim that the Patriots “are in constant contact” with Vrabel was not accurate. Given the overall size and sensitivity of the story, that’s a pretty significant mistake for ESPN to make, to say the least.
The Patriots had only Tommy DeVito behind starter Drake Maye until Saturday. That’s when they used a seventh-round pick on Texas Tech quarterback Behren Morton, making him the 234th overall pick.
Morton is the ninth quarterback selected in the 2026 draft, although LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier isn’t one of those.
Morton finished last season with 2,780 yards passing with 22 touchdowns and six interceptions in 12 games. He missed two games with a hairline fracture in his right leg.
Morton spent five seasons in Lubbock, starting 3 1/2 of those seasons. He started 36 games, going 26-10 and completing 62.8 percent of his passes for 8,989 yards with 71 touchdowns and 28 interceptions.
As Patriots coach Mike Vrabel misses a fairly important work day due to the controversy that has consumed the NFL for 18 days, there’s a fairly important question to ask about Vrabel’s relationship with owner Robert Kraft.
Was Vrabel honest with Kraft from the start?
Either Vrabel didn’t tell Kraft the truth about what happened, or Vrabel did and the strong public statement regarding the initial photos of Vrabel and reporter Dianna Russini (he called the situation “laughable”) were a calculated (and misguided) P.R. effort from the Patriots organization.
Regardless, it’s clear that Kraft is a strong proponent of telling the truth when it comes to landing in a troubling spot.
Rodney Harrison, a member of the Patriots Hall of Fame, admitted to using a performance-enhancing substance in 2007. He later explained the message he received from Kraft.
“When I was going through the situation and Mr. Kraft pulled me to the side, he said, ‘Look buddy, I love you. All I want you to do is be completely honest with everything. Don’t lie. Be honest,’” Harrison said at the time. “And that was the thing I really tried to do. [Kraft] says, ‘Hey, deal with the consequences, but you always come out better when you tell the truth.’ And that’s what I did. That’s the only advice I give to any of these athletes. We see when you lie what happens.”
We’ve seen what happened since Vrabel first provided this quote to the New York Post: “These photos show a completely innocent interaction and any suggestion otherwise is laughable. This doesn’t deserve any further response.”
When asked by reporters on Thursday to explain the shift from calling the situation “laughable” to missing the third day of the draft to attend counseling, Vrabel said, “That’s a private and personal matter. I don’t think that those comments — I think that that was an attempt to protect your family. And I would never be dismissive.”
But he was dismissive. The plan to “protect your family” (or perhaps to protect yourself from your family) was to insist it was nothing, and that anyone who believes otherwise is misguided.
In hindsight, everyone would have been better off if the truth had been told from the get-go. The denials from Vrabel and Russini operated as a Gary Hart-style dare to prove them wrong.
So, again, what did Vrabel say to Kraft when the photos first emerged? And how does Kraft feel about that?
Don’t expect any late-night statements to be issued on that point, even if it’s the most important long-term ramification flowing from the entire situation.
