Sophia Culpo Had a Spy on the Jets Who Ratted Out Braxton Berrios to Her
It is with a heavy heart that I report this. I was saddened, not gladdened earlier this year when it was announced that Braxton Berrios and Sophia Culpo had split, on so many levels.
For starters, I've been a Honey Nut Berrios guy since the Patriots first drafted him in the 6th round in 2018 out of Miami. At 5-9, 190lbs, he struck me as the kind of high-ceiling late-round flyer type whom the Pats always managed to develop into a productive NFL. Someone they could bring along slowly into their system to become a future Julian Edelman/Danny Amendola type, running option routes from the slot and returning kicks. But it didn't pan out here and he ended up with the Jets and eventually the Dolphins.
But I still found myself rooting for him when he faced anyone else but New England. And part of my continued loyalty was the fact he was joining other former Patriots by dating an internationally recognized model. In fact, the sister of Danny Playoffs' ex, Olivia Culpo. I can respect a man who gets overlooked by the NFL scouts but who nevertheless manages to attract the far more valuable attention of a supermodel. That's the Patriots Way. And even though he maybe, sort of rebounded with another model who he's denied seeing before he and Sophia parted ways:
... that's still a bad beat for any 210th pick in the draft attempting to overachieve on the field and off.
But the real reason I'm crying the buckets for Berrios now isn't about dating relationships or possible cheating or any of it. It's that, according to his ex, he was done dirty by something much more damaging and insidious. It seems he's a victim of a flagrant violation of The Bro Code:
Source - Sophia Culpo had eyes and ears on Braxton Berrios when she received confirmation that he cheated on her at the end of their two-year relationship.
The model … explained that someone close to the Jets informed her of a conversation between Berrios and a teammate (Berrios signed with Miami in March) indicating his alleged infidelity.
“Someone we know was doing some digging for me around the team and that was how I got confirmation that this wasn’t the first girl also,” Culpo said during an appearance on her sister Aurora’s “Barely Filtered” podcast with Kristen Gaffney.
“(Berrios) was like, ‘Ladies don’t have to know about tonight,’ and this teammate was like, ‘I’m single, so, it’s fine.’ (Berrios) goes, ‘Oh, well I’m having fun tonight.'”
Said Gaffney: “Like if she doesn’t know, she doesn’t have to know.”
Culpo did not name who her spy was.
You might think the thing to focus on here is that Berrios was apparently tomcatting around. But while I agree that one shouldn't butter one's toast on both sides when one is in a committed relationship, I will respectfully disagree about what the real issue is in all this. Yes, Berrios may have betrayed his girlfriend. But he was betrayed by a team source. Possibly a Jets teammate. And that is much, much more egregious than any simple act of going out to find some strange.
Hearts get broken all the time. It's part of life. Hearts also recover, heal, move on, and learn to love again. It's the most resilient organ in the human body. A sports team is not like a heart. An NFL team is a multi-billion operation that doesn't recover from acts of disloyalty the way a single person can. It operates on trust. On a belief that the locker room is a sanctuary. Where what happens in the building, or on the road, or at a nightclub after practice, or at a hotel room filled with attractive, sexually available football groupies, is kept in a lockbox. It's tacit agreement among all who wear the uniform. And once that trust is broken, it will never mend. Just ask anyone who was around the Red Sox in the late 80s when Wade Boggs' sidepiece aired all the team's dirty laundry in the pages of Penthouse. The franchise went into a tailspin that lasted years once they realized there were traitors in their midst that couldn't keep secrets.
I don't just bring this up because it's Jets Week in New England. I'm not trying to sow seeds of doubt or cause division in the ranks. But it is something for that organization to consider. That there's someone in their own ranks, possibly still in the locker room, who is willing to spy on players and spill all their dirt, just to get points with one of their girlfriends. Good luck tomorrow with that in mind.