The NFL just got turned upside down.
A woman came forward with a shocking story to tell.
And this fired NFL reporter exposed a dirty sex scandal that ripped the league to shreds.
The Reporter Who Got Fired for Saying What Everyone Knew
Here is the quick version of how we got here. Earlier this spring, photos published by Page Six showed Russini, then a Senior NFL Insider at The Athletic, and New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel together at an adults-only resort in Sedona, Arizona. Both are married to other people. The images showed them hugging, holding hands, and spending time together poolside. Both denied any romantic involvement.
Russini said, according to reporting at the time, “The photos don’t represent the group of six people who were hanging out during the day.” Vrabel called it “a completely innocent interaction” and said any suggestion otherwise was “laughable.”
The Athletic launched an investigation. Before it wrapped up, Russini resigned.
That is when Froyd stepped into the story. She took to social media to blast Russini’s exit, writing, “We know who you really are and what you’ve been up to for years.” USA Today Sports, where Froyd worked as a freelance reporter, fired her within days. Their official statement said her comments did not “reflect our commitment to professionalism or uphold our principles of ethical conduct.”
Froyd’s response? “I regret zero of what I said and stand beside it.”
Now She Is Naming Names
Froyd recently published a full column in the Daily Mail under a title that leaves nothing to the imagination: “I was fired for exposing the NFL’s dirtiest sex secret. Now, I’m revealing everything… and naming names.”
The piece claims the Russini-Vrabel situation is not an isolated incident. Not even close.
“Around 2020, I was told by a well-known national sports reporter in explicit terms that Vrabel, then coach of the Tennessee Titans, and Russini were carrying on a secret relationship,” Froyd wrote. “It was one of the first rumors that I heard when I began my NFL reporting career. I’d hear many more.”
She says the rumors go back at least five years and that she had heard them practically from the moment she started covering the league.
But the Russini allegations are, according to Froyd, just the beginning. She claims at least half a dozen female reporters personally told her they had slept with NFL staff while covering those teams, including, she alleges, at least one prominent head coach.
“I’ve also been told by at least half a dozen female reporters that they have had sex with NFL staff and, in one case, a prominent NFL head coach, while they were covering the team,” Froyd wrote. “It takes a high degree of trust to make such a confession, so I assume that many other similar stories go untold.”
She also says she was propositioned herself. The way Froyd describes it, the approaches rarely start with anything overtly inappropriate. “A female reporter may be invited by a coach to a baseball game — but at the last moment, he offers to meet up beforehand at his hotel room,” she wrote. “Or a coach will remark on what a journalist wore the last time they meet and request that she wear something similar the next time they’re together.”
That is not a slip. That is a pattern.
The Media’s Silence Is the Real Story
What Froyd finds most galling is not the behavior itself. It is the silence around it.
When Vrabel recently stepped up to the microphones to face reporters for the first time since the scandal broke, Froyd says she held her breath waiting for someone to ask the obvious question. Nobody did. The assembled press corps asked about OTA practices and player morale and moved on.
And Froyd says she understands exactly why. The NFL controls access. Press credentials, sideline passes, locker room entry, pre-game availability — all of it flows through the league and its teams. Ask a question that makes a head coach uncomfortable, and that access can disappear. Ask the wrong question loudly enough, and you can lose your job. Froyd knows that firsthand.
“At the very least, Russini and Vrabel’s relationship creates the perception of a quid pro quo culture that pressures female journalists to trade sexual relationships with powerful male NFL employees in return for access and advancement,” she wrote.
That is a serious allegation. And the fact that the NFL’s own press corps appears unwilling to pursue it says something ugly about how the whole system operates.
“The Vrabel-Russini scandal also casts suspicion over the journalists and NFL teams that do things the right way, of which there are many,” Froyd wrote. “That’s unfair and demoralizing — and that’s why I tweeted about Russini’s resignation from The Athletic, resulting in my termination from USA Today.”
She added: “Even more disheartening, it appears that no one is particularly interested in getting to the bottom of this story.”
What Gets Buried and Who Does the Burying
The mainstream sports press has largely treated this story as gossip rather than journalism. A few outlets covered the photos. Some covered the resignation. Fewer still covered Froyd’s firing with any real scrutiny. And the question of whether a culture of sex-for-access actually exists inside the NFL media ecosystem has gone almost entirely unexamined by the people best positioned to examine it.
That is not an accident. It is how these things work. The reporters who cover the league depend on the league for their livelihoods. The editors who assign those reporters depend on the league for relationships and revenue. And the executives who run those outlets have no particular incentive to burn bridges with a multibillion-dollar sports property over the complaints of a fired freelancer.
But Froyd is not going away. She lost her job for saying what she says everyone in NFL media already knew. And now she is putting it in writing, publicly, with names attached.
Vrabel has reportedly sought counseling since the story broke. Russini is no longer at The Athletic. And the reporters who covered Vrabel’s recent press availability without once raising the obvious question are still collecting their credentials and their paychecks.
Froyd wrote that over the course of her career, the number of stories she has heard about illicit reporter-NFL employee relationships “has numbered in the tens — and they have involved some of the most prominent female sports reporters and NFL coaches in the country.”
If that is true, the story the NFL press corps is not telling may be bigger than anything they are.
Sources: Daily Mail (Crissy Froyd column, May 2026); Heavy.com; Total Pro Sports; Yahoo Sports/The Blast; Daily Caller (April 2026); EssentiallySports; USA Today Sports official statement (April 2026)