Dianna Russini’s 2020 report that the Tennessee Titans were not interested in Tom Brady is back under scrutiny after new photos showed her with Mike Vrabel, the coach at the center of the story. The photos, released Thursday, April 23, on the first day of the 2026 NFL Draft, appeared years after the report helped define one of the league’s sharpest offseason pivots.
On March 11, 2020, Russini was spotted with Vrabel at a bar in lower Manhattan. Four days later, she reported that the Titans were not interested in Brady and were working hard to get a deal done with Ryan Tannehill, a message she put directly on X in near-verbatim form: that the team was not pursuing Brady and was focused on Tannehill. Days after that, Tennessee signed Tannehill to a four-year, $118 million contract, and Brady signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Russini’s own career has since moved on. She announced her resignation from The Athletic on April 14, months before the latest photographs surfaced, but the old report has taken on new life because of where and when the new images emerged. The scrutiny is not about whether the Titans ultimately landed on Tannehill — they did — but about whether the reporter who had the story also had a personal relationship with the coach whose team was involved in it.
Russini and Vrabel both insisted the Arizona photos were taken out of context and denied any wrongdoing. But the release of the new pictures, on the opening day of the draft, reopened a question the 2020 sequence had never answered cleanly: how much access, and how much distance, existed between one of football’s most visible reporters and one of its most connected coaches when the league’s biggest quarterback decision was being covered in real time.
Vrabel addressed the media on Wednesday for the first time since the first batch of photographs appeared, saying he had committed to seeking counseling starting that weekend. He also said his relationship with Brady went back to 2001, when the two were longtime Patriots teammates, and said they used to go to practice at Parente’s and then to the bar there after practice. Russini’s 2020 report remains accurate in the record of what the Titans did. The tension now is over the optics around how that reporting unfolded, and whether the story people thought they were reading in 2020 was the whole story at all.