The podcaster who has broken the most news on the affair between Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini says her employer may be culpable in encouraging the canoodling.
Tony Farmer is raising the possibility that the New York Times/The Athletic may have suggested to its female NFL reporter that she get close to Vrabel to help her get insider football information from him.
“The Dianna Russini-Mike Vrabel scandal has dominated the NFL offseason in a way few stories have managed in recent memory,” says Yahoo Sports. “Yet four months after Page Six first published photos of the two together, major questions still surround the situation and what happened behind the scenes.
“At the center of those questions sits The Athletic’s internal investigation into Russini’s conduct,” writes Yahoo reporter Pritish Ganguly, quoting a report from Pro Football Network.
“But the public still has no clear idea what the publication found, and Tony Farmer has now floated an unusual theory for the silence.”
While speaking with fellow podcaster Nikki Gist, Farmer wondered whether managers at The Athletic knew about Russini’s alleged relationship with Vrabel and may have played a role in how close they became.
“What if managers at The Athletic were aware of how close she was with Mike Vrabel?” he said. “What if managers at The Athletic encouraged her to get closer, encouraged her to cross that line?”
“That is the type of thing I’m totally speculating here,” Farmer added. “I’m not saying this happened, but that is the type of thing that I think would make them be like, ‘Oh, we can’t release this. We’re complicit. Our own managers told her to do it. We can’t.’ Like, it might be something like that. And that’s where my mind is going to go, if we just get silence, silence, silence leading into the NFL season.”
Gist then offered a similar concern about what the investigation could have uncovered inside The Athletic.
“I had said that too. I think part of what they’re finding is that their people weren’t on the up and up, right?” Gist said. “Because if she did tell them and they knew and they just swept it under the rug, that’s a problem. But if they found out through other means, that’s also a problem.”
The whole incident came to light when the New York Post’s Page Six published photos on April 7 showing Russini and Vrabel holding hands and embracing at the adults-only Ambiente resort in Sedona, Arizona.
The images immediately intensified scrutiny around the two and set the events that followed into motion.
Then, on April 14, Russini resigned from The Athletic, only days after the outlet announced its internal investigation.
Vrabel, meanwhile, missed the third day of the 2026 NFL Draft to begin “counseling” before returning to work days later.
Amid these controversies, The Athletic’s executive editor Steven Ginsberg addressed the investigation two months ago and said it “is going to take a few more weeks.”
However, those weeks have passed without a public update.
But for now, Russini’s NFL reporting career appears to be on hold, and the investigation could shape what comes next.
However, the biggest question remains whether The Athletic will provide those answers before the NFL season begins.
For now, the continued silence keeps the speculation alive.
