In the aftermath of the April 7 publication by the New York Post of photos featuring Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and NFL reporter Dianna Russini at a resort in Arizona, Vrabel has become the subject of a search for any existing images. And for the discovery of any new ones.
The Post has obtained photographs of Vrabel in the Salt Lake City airport. Per the report, the photos were taken on Saturday. He was alone at the time, shopping in one of the stores in the terminal.
Saturday, of course, was the third day of the draft. Vrabel announced last week that he’d be absent from the draft room for “counseling, starting this weekend.” On Saturday, ESPN reported that he’d be in “constant contact” with the Patriots during the third day of the draft, before retracting it.
As of early 2025, Vrabel owned a home in Park City, Utah.
We’ll defer any speculation or guesswork to others. The facts are the facts, if the facts as reported by the Post are accurate. The biggest takeaway is that Vrabel — who is very hard to miss — will now have eyes (and cameras) on him wherever he goes. Until the current situation dissolves to background noise, if then.
The Patriots released wide receiver John Jiles and tight end Marshall Lang on Monday, the team announced.
Jiles, 25, spent the past two seasons on the New England practice squad, and he signed a futures contract with the Patriots on Feb. 10. He has never played a regular-season game.
Jiles entered the NFL as a rookie free agent in 2024, signing with the Giants.
Lang, 24, had two stints on the New England practice squad last season, and he also spent time on the Seahawks’ practice squad.
Lang entered the NFL as a rookie free agent out of Northwestern in 2025, signing with the Seahawks. Seattle released him out of the preseason.
He appeared in 47 games during his college career and finished with 48 receptions for 491 yards and four touchdowns.
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.
