It's the end of June, so, as usual, there isn't a whole lot going on with the Minnesota Vikings at this time of the year. But that changed on Monday evening when The Center Square's Adam Herbets shared a bodycam video from when Dianna Russini, formerly of The Athletic, was pulled over for texting and driving earlier this year.
During the exchange with the police officer, Russini quickly reveals that she is an NFL reporter, and it eventually gets to the point where she asks him what his favorite team is. If you're wondering why we're writing about this on this specific site, now is the part when you get to find out.
Dianna Russini: "What is your team?"
Police Officer: " I'm a Vikings fan, unfortunately."
Russini then grabs her phone and gestures to the officer to wait just a second so she can find something on it.
Police Officer: "Let's see it."
Russini: "You're going to laugh. Look who I just was texting with."
Russini points her phone screen at the officer.
Russini: "Can you see the name?"
Police Officer: "Oh my god. KOC?"
Russini: "Look what I said to him, though, just now. Go to the bottom."
Police Officer: "Oh my god. Wow, pretty cool."
Russini: "Dude, I love the Vikings. KOC's awesome."
Police Officer: "Yeah, he seems like a good dude."
Russini: "Your quarterback sucks, though."
Police Officer: "Yeah, so he's gotta fix it."
Was Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell one of Dianna Russini's sources?
If it wasn't made clear, Russini shared with the officer that she had just been texting on her phone with Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell. Whether she's telling the truth or not is an entirely different discussion, but in this case, it seems safe to assume that she likely was texting with O'Connell.
Now, it's important to note when this happened. After Russini was pulled over, she told the officer that she was posting on her phone about how the Buffalo Bills just fired Sean McDermott as their head coach.
McDermott was fired by the Bills this past January 19th, which means that the 2025 season for the Vikings had been over for quite a while.
Why is this important? Well, less than two weeks after Russini was pulled over, Minnesota fired Kwesi Adofo-Mensah as the team's general manager.
Shortly after Adofo-Mensah's firing, Russini and her former colleague at The Athletic, Alec Lewis, published an article about the "stunning dismissal" of the former Vikings general manager.
Within that article was a section about how Adofo-Mensah took paternity leave following the birth of his first child and worked from home for two weeks during one of Minnesota's recent training camps.
This is some extremely personal information that only someone very close to Adofo-Mensah would have likely known. Someone like O'Connell.
This could be false, but let's say that the text exchange between O'Connell and Russini on January 19th wasn't the first time the two had talked.
Let's also say that in another conversation, the Vikings head coach possibly shared with the former NFL insider for The Athletic that Adofo-Mensah was away from the team for two weeks due to paternity leave, something that is not a common practice for coaches or executives around the league.
It probably wasn't a coincidence then that after the initial deep-dive into Adofo-Mensah's firing, Russini felt the need to post on her X account that the "Minnesota Vikings supported him through the entire process and did not hold [his paternity leave] against him in any way."
It's almost as if a certain Minnesota head coach didn't like the negative reaction that some people had when they read that Adofo-Mensah's paternity leave was framed in a way to make it seem like the team had a problem with it, and they asked Russini to clarify the Vikings' feelings about it with a post on her X account.
That wasn't the only exclusive Vikings-related content Russini shared during her time at The Athletic.
Minnesota fans will probably remember the report from March 2025 that she helped put together for The Athletic that included details about how the Vikings were "strongly weighing" the possibility of signing veteran quarterback Aaron Rodgers in free agency.
Rodgers, obviously, did not end up signing with Minnesota that offseason. But looking back on that report, did Russini get her information about the Vikings' reported interest from a conversation with O'Connell?
If anyone remembers, she was really the only one in the national NFL media who was pounding the table for multiple weeks about how Rodgers was going to end up signing with Minnesota. Why was she so confident about something that no one else was really talking about?
What about this possible scenario? What if O'Connell wanted the Vikings to sign Rodgers because he didn't feel McCarthy was ready enough to be a starter (which he would've been right about), but Adofo-Mensah shot down the idea of signing the former Green Bay Packers quarterback?
So, after getting shut down, O'Connell retaliates by sharing with Russini that Minnesota is interested in signing Rodgers to generate a bunch of unnecessary commotion that Adofo-Mensah will eventually have to deal with whenever he meets with reporters during the offseason.
And yes, McCarthy was bad last season, like historically bad. But the way in which Russini felt the need to tell the officer how much the young quarterback sucked didn't seem like something she would say so confidently if someone like O'Connell hadn't already expressed something similar to her in a previous conversation.
So, was O'Connell a source of Russini's during her time at The Athletic? That's something we'll probably never get a definitive answer fr, but the bodycam video from Monday certainly didn't do anyone any favors if the Vikings head coach wasn't one of her sources.
Add us as a preferred source on Google