ESPN reports Mike Vrabel was in "constant contact" with Patriots on Saturday, retracts it

The NFL's biggest story of the month — which has crossed over to national news, morning shows, and late-night TV — had a fairly big development on Saturday, when Patriots coach Mike Vrabel skipped the third day of the draft to attend counseling.

On Thursday, Patriots V.P. of player personnel Eliot Wolf explained that the draft room would be missing Vrabel's "leadership" and "presence," along with his skills as a "tremendous recruiter" of undrafted free agents.

During Saturday's draft coverage on ESPN, Peter Schrager said this: "I've been told, from Patriot sources, that they are in constant contact with Vrabel throughout the day."

That was a surprising nugget, to say the least. If Vrabel is skipping the third day of the draft for counseling, being in "constant contact" with the Patriots would undermine the basic purpose of being away from the team.

Later, Schrager retracted the report. Even if he didn't call it a retraction.

"Following up on the Vrabel report, it was my understanding that Coach Vrabel was going to be in contact with the staff via phone/text, but I've learned that in the end, both Vrabel and the team ultimately chose not to interrupt him and his family during Day 3 of the Draft," Schrager tweeted.

It's a huge difference to go from "they are in constant contact" to "they are having no contact whatsoever." So either the report was wrong — or it was right and the Patriots realized that it was the latest example of piss-poor P.R. and scrambled to clean it up.

Either way, here's what Wolf told reporters on Saturday, from the transcript distributed by the team.

Q: "Were you in contact with Mike at all today, and if so, how often were you guys in contact?"

A: "So, last night we kind of talked through things and made the decision that the time away really needs to be time away, so we were not in contact with Mike today other than some just, ‘Hope everything's going OK’ kind of texts early this morning."

Q: "And just to follow up, when you talked to him last night when Day 2 ended, what kind of message did he leave you guys with headed into today?"

EW: "Just words of encouragement. He knows our process, and again, we talked about what kind of players we needed to add. We knew what kind of players that he liked, and obviously we drafted some of the guys that he had an affinity for today."

So it sounds like the claim that the Patriots "are in constant contact" with Vrabel was not accurate. Given the overall size and sensitivity of the story, that's a pretty significant mistake for ESPN to make, to say the least.