“Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”–Mark Twain
There’s a moment in every crisis when the subject of the story gets to make a choice. Get ahead of it, own what’s true, and let the story burn itself out in a news cycle or two. Or dig in, go to war with the press, and guarantee the story has legs for weeks.
Mike Vrabel chose war. He lost.
Abraham Madkour’s Sunday Forum in SBJ this morning is being quietly passed around every PR inbox in sports right now, and for good reason. His dissection of Vrabel’s handling of the Dianna Russini story is both accurate and instructive, and the lessons here go well beyond one coach’s stumble.
Let me add some color from someone who’s managed real crises.
The One Word That Killed Him
“Laughable.”
That’s the word Vrabel used in his initial statement. One word. And it’s the word that made this story impossible to contain.
Here’s the thing about the word “laughable.” It’s a fighting word. It doesn’t deny. It doesn’t clarify. It attacks. It tells the reporter she’s a fool, tells the audience the story isn’t worth their time, and tells the Kraft family, the people writing his checks, that their coach has it handled.
Except he didn’t. And when the facts caught up to the statement, that one word reframed the entire narrative. Now the story wasn’t just about Vrabel’s alleged conduct. It was about a man who looked the public and his employers in the eye and called truth laughable.
That’s not a PR problem. That’s a character problem. And character problems are infinitely harder to fix.
You Don’t Win a Fight with a Reporter. Ever.
The decision to battle the New York Post is one of the oldest and most recurring mistakes in crisis communications. I’ve watched executives, politicians, coaches, and CEOs make it. None of them won.
The Post has more ink than you have patience. They have more reporters than you have allies. And in the social media era, every exchange between a subject and a journalist becomes content, amplified, screen-grabbed, retweeted, and framed in the worst possible light for the person who tried to punch back.
The playbook here isn’t complicated. You don’t fight the story; you displace it. You give the audience something more interesting to focus on: your values, your record, your transparency, your accountability. You make the story about what you’re doing, not about what you’re denying.
Vrabel chose the fight. The story chose to stay.
What Should Have Happened Before the Statement Was Issued
The first 24 hours of a crisis are almost always won or lost in the room before anything goes public. That’s where the real work happens. Credible reporters and editors give you a chance to come clean. And that’s when a few non-negotiable questions have to be answered honestly:
What is actually true? Not what you want to be true. Not what you can prove. What is true. The communications strategy has to be built on that foundation, and everything else is scaffolding that will collapse.
Who has been misled? In Vrabel’s case, the Kraft family deserved the unvarnished version before anyone else. When principals learn the real story from reporters rather than their own people, the trust damage is often irreparable. That may be the most consequential failure here.
What’s the worst version of this story, and can you survive it? If the answer is yes, you lean into transparency fast and hard. If the answer is no, you have a different kind of problem, but even then, getting ahead of it beats getting buried by it.
Some Crises Are Just Gossip With a Distribution Problem
Here’s where I’ll go a step further than the conventional crisis PR narrative, because it’s too easy to just be safe.
Not every crisis is a crisis. Some are just gossip, old-fashioned, interpersonal, human messiness, that has been fed into the content machine of the modern media era and amplified far beyond its actual weight.
The Vrabel story, at its core, is about personal conduct. It’s not a safety issue. It’s not a financial fraud. It’s not an abuse of power in the institutional sense. It’s a story about a man’s personal life and judgment, the kind of thing that, twenty years ago, would have circulated as rumor in league offices and died quietly. (Note: Remember who I grew up working with from age 14 in the sports halcyon era of the 70s and 80s. Back then, no one cared about an inter-office dalliance or a piece on the side. Sure, it was talked about, but reporters back then had better things to cover. But today, the story isn’t about that. It’s all about how it’s handled.)
That doesn’t make it irrelevant. Judgment is legitimately part of the assessment of leadership. But it does mean the response strategy should have been calibrated accordingly. Don’t make a personal conduct story into a credibility story. Vrabel made it worse by making it both.
The “laughable” statement took a story that might have been a one-week burn and turned it into a multi-week character investigation. Friday’s Today show segment, with anchors wondering “what else is out there?”, is the direct consequence of that decision. Once the press smells that the subject is hiding something, they don’t stop looking.
The Tylenol Principle Still Applies
Forty-some years later, Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol poisoning crisis remains the gold standard for one simple reason. They decided that telling the truth, fast, fully, and without hedging, was more important than protecting the brand in the short term. That was the work of Al Tortorella, then on the Crisis Communications team at Burson-Marstellar. I chose Al as our crisis consultant when leading Sports Marketing and PR at The Upper Deck Company. I hired Al after dismissing the entire B-M team on all other PR matters. His guidance, on my watch, kept us out of trouble. It was the best $3,500 a month I ever spent.
His advice to Tylenol was counterintuitive. It feels like surrender. But it wasn’t. It was the right way to go. The only way to go. He also handled the Union Carbide fiasco in Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez oil spill. While I never had to have him help clean up a mess at Upper Deck, our friendship led to almost two years of wise counsel for me. I never forgot those lessons.
The organizations that survive crises intact are the ones that treat the public like adults, own what’s theirs, and give people a reason to move on. The ones that fight, deflect, and minimize? They become the story. Indefinitely.
Vrabel reportedly had crisis professionals in his corner. If true, either he didn’t listen, or someone gave him very bad advice. Either way, he ended up exactly where you end up when you let ego drive the communications strategy: on Today, with anchors speculating about what else might be out there.
Three months ago, he was at the top of the coaching world. As Madkour notes, it’s hard to believe how fast and far the fall has been.
It didn’t have to go this way.
Andy Abramson is CEO of Comunicano, a Las Vegas-based strategic communications agency with 64 exits and more than $9.5 billion in transaction value. He has been managing crises for clients in sports, technology, and media for over three decades.