Aaron Rodgers took aim at ESPN — while appearing on ESPN — blasting the network for how it has handled the Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini scandal.
“What is the network doing?” Rodgers, 42, asked on the Monday, August 3 episode of The Pat McAfee Show. “You have literally an individual that maybe used to work at ESPN that covers our league at the highest level and there’s a major scandal and nobody can f***ing talk about it? What are we doing here?”
Russini, 43, worked for ESPN from 2015 to 2023, before leaving to become The Athletic’s senior NFL insider. In April 2026, Page Six published photos of her with the New England Patriots head coach at a resort in Arizona. As The Athletic began an internal investigation, additional images emerged, including one appearing to show the pair kissing at a New York City bar in 2020.
She resigned just one week after the first pictures were released, while Vrabel, 50, announced he would seek counseling related to the scandal.
The Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback added that Russini’s role as a media member could lead to obvious conflicts of interest.
“If it’s affecting certain things, if there’s leaks going on, if there’s tampering going on, if that person is also an MVP voter and Coach of the Year voter…remember when I won MVP in 2021 and that bum in Chicago?” Rodgers continued. “That’s real life.”
“I told these boys I was bringing it today,” he added.
By “that bum in Chicago,” Rodgers is referring to Chicago sports writer Hub Arkush, who famously refused to vote for Rodgers for 2021 NFL MVP, calling him the “biggest jerk in the league.”
“There’s no guidelines,” Arkush, 73, said at the time. “We are told to pick the guy who we think is most valuable to his team. And I don’t think it says anywhere, ‘strictly on the field,’ although I do think he hurt his team on the field by the way he acted off the field.”
Rodgers’ comments on McAfee didn’t stop at football. He also took aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci for his recent controversial appearance at a senate hearing, where he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment while discussing the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Absolute coward,” Rodgers said of Fauci, 85. “Yeah. Are you kidding me? You got a pardon, and you pleaded over 100 times at the White House?”
He continued, “What are you scared of, Tony? I thought you were the science. I thought you were, ‘I am science,’ and you get up there and you can’t answer a question?”
