SAIL ON, SAILOR: WHEN DIGGS DISPENSES PINK CRYSTALS, VRABEL SHOULD CUT HIM
No disciplinarian can tolerate a veteran receiver on a yacht who produces a packet with three bikinied women, which should be enough for Vrabel to lay down his laws and eat part of Diggs’ contract
Stefon Diggs is on a yacht when he’s surrounded by three women, all of whom would be nude with a few twists and tugs. He is not wearing a shirt but does produce a packet of pink crystals. A brunette grabs the substance, looks at it and nods to a blonde.
“We gonna make it happen,” Diggs says. “On a boat, on a boat.”
He can cruise the wicked world for the rest of his life, because Mike Vrabel should not retain Diggs in his first season as a badass coach with the New England Patriots. He has vowed to cleanse the dismal end of the Bill Belichick era and a single-year disaster with coach Jerod Mayo, which has left owner Robert Kraft in tatters. “I want to galvanize our football team. I want to galvanize this building. I want to galvanize our fans,” Vrabel said.
How is any galvanizing possible if he keeps Diggs, who signed a $63.5 million contract that included $25 million guaranteed and a $12 million bonus? Squash him. Let him keep asking the girls, “What’s my name?” and let them keep squealing, “Daddy,” while Ja Rule plays on a speaker. He cannot be part of a Vrabel team and catching passes from young quarterback Drake Maye.
Sail on, sailor.
“It's something we're aware of and obviously we want to make great decisions on and off the field,” Vrabel said Wednesday. “Any conversations I've had with Stefon will remain between him and I and the club. The message will be the same for all our players.”
The acquisition of Diggs never made much sense. He was trouble for Josh Allen in Buffalo and was traded to Houston. He is rehabbing from a torn ACL. At 31, why was he partying with women who were twerking on a second clip? Didn’t he attend the Met Gala and a Knicks-Celtics game with rapper Cardi B, who reportedly was seen on the yacht?
An NFL veteran carrying drugs is serious business, especially within a franchise that saw Aaron Hernandez die of suicide after his murder arrest and conviction. Belichick maintained control for most of 24 seasons, but last year, Mayo played cards with players on a flight after a loss in Arizona. That’s why Vrabel arrived, as a three-time Super Bowl champion who knows why the Patriots have lost their way.
“We're going to be moving. We're going to demand effort and finish,” Vrabel said. “People ask what non-negotiables are. Our effort and our finish is going to be the contract that we make with our teammates. That will be my job to make sure.”
Start with Diggs. Purging him means more than using him to strengthen the league’s 28th-ranked receiving corps, which includes Kendrick Bourne and Mack Hollins. “I don't like losing. I don't like losing the way we lost,” Kraft said. “Things were not developing the way we would have liked. It was time to move on.”
How long would Diggs have lasted as the No. 1 wideout under Tom Brady? He would have been released long before training camp. Vrabel cannot accept pink crystals or the man passing them out like breath mints.
Daddy wasn’t worthy of the $63.5 million assignment. Cut him.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.