Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
This is one of those weeks where I could write three columns about stuff going on in sports, but I’d rather meld them all together into a single offering.
So here we go.
What has happened in the spicy-but-unsavory story of a head coach in the NFL and a member of the media who covers the league he coaches in is where we start.
Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and former ESPN reporter turned The Athletic football insider Diana Russini were caught in photographs in clearly romantic poses at a resort during an official NFL event.
They are both married.
I am sure you can guess my feelings on this, but I am not the relationship police, and I am not in charge of making sure everyone is with whom they are supposed to be.
The results of the pictures coming to light are that Russini lost her job at The Athletic, and Vrabel missed the final day of the draft in Pittsburgh while he “went to counselling” for the very thing he spent a week denying really happened.
I won’t waste any space or energy laying the whole situation out for you.
The questions that linger are these: “Why did she lose her job and why didn’t he lose his?”
Russini crossed the line in starting what we now have come to understand is a relationship with Vrabel that started five years ago. A reporter can’t have a physical relationship with a person she is responsible for reporting on. If it didn’t actually affect her coverage of him and his team, it certainly could have, and it’s not the impropriety of the situation; it’s the appearance of impropriety.
So, she lost her job for it.
The NFL came out with a statement saying that they wanted no part of the situation. League spokesman Brian McCarthy said that the league would not even investigate whether Vrabel violated the NFL’s personal conduct policy.
That policy contains language that states that players, coaches and executives must not engage in “conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in” the NFL.
They concluded this was a personal matter and rinsed their hands of it in the golden bowl.
The heart of the problem is not what these people did, which we know is wrong, but his ability to make decisions.
If I am the owner of a franchise and my coach is so dumb to be caught cheating on his wife at an event while representing my team and me, it would make me wonder what else he was hiding from me.
The Cubs of 2026 are proving that you can never have enough pitching.
The Cubs currently have 10 pitchers on the injured list. That’s almost a whole roster of pitchers.
That list does not include Matthew Boyd, who pitched on Sunday after coming back last week from being injured and Daniel Palencia, who is back with the big club after two weeks on the shelf.
The Cubs were criticized during the winter, and understandably so, for choosing to add more pitchers instead of going after a better solution for right field.
I was among those voices of dissent.
But that was assuming that Justin Steele would come back in May and join the rotation, which would have grown to seven starting pitchers at that point.
Then, Cubs pitchers started dropping like flies.
The duo of Seiya Suzuki and Matt Shaw is doing just fine in right field, and most of the pitchers from AAA Iowa have seen at least some action this season.
And they are still winning.
Kudos to the Cubs front office for holding the boys together to this point.
Sometimes you get on me for the number of columns I write that include hockey in them, but this is the time of year when hockey is at its best.
What makes hockey better this time of year is how far guys prove they are willing to go to pay the price required for their team to win that game, that series, and that conference for the right to hoist that prize in the air.
But what makes it great is what happens after the first 60 minutes of play end.
Overtime hockey games are the best because they could literally end at any second.
Football can be that way, to a point. But in hockey, the changing of possession of the puck happens so frequently that it makes a scoring play more difficult to predict.
Baseball can’t end until the home team gets at least one batter to the plate, and the NBA overtime is like a mini version of a regular-season game—the first four minutes are to set up the drama of the final 60 seconds, which could take 15 minutes to play.
Next week, we will try to recap what the IHSAA decided on the basketball coaches’ proposal to have a shot clock.
