Back in January, there were very few critics of the Mike Vrabel hire by the Patriots (6-2).
Jerod Mayo, a franchise semi-legend in his own right at linebacker, had flamed out in his one season as the direct successor to Bill Belichick. He may have matched Belichick’s final season win total (4), but the air of dysfunction was palpable in a way New England football fans and media had not witnessed since the Kraft family bought the team in January of 1994.
It was time to bring a new sheriff to town, and Vrabel fit the mold of the man for the job, having built a culture of winning from scratch over his first four years as head coach of the Titans from 2018 to 2021. In his second season, he had Tennessee playing in the 2019 AFC Championship Game, and did so while beating Tom Brady and the Patriots on the way there in what was the GOAT’s final game wearing the Flying Elvis on his helmet. In his fourth season, Vrabel put together one of the most impressive coaching jobs in recent memory, fielding a record 91 players throughout the season on his gameday roster due to injuries and COVID, winning 12 games and earning the No. 1 seed in the conference. Weathering that storm won him the 2021 NFL Coach of the Year Award.
His final two seasons in Tennessee were middling at best, and the Titans moved on from the man that had helped make them relevant within a competitive AFC. After spending the 2024 season as a consultant for his hometown Browns, Vrabel was ready and available to come back to his second home and revamp a franchise that had dominated the first 19 years of the 21st century - 6 Super Bowl wins in 9 appearances, 17 division titles, and a winning percentage of 76.3%.
Vrabel, of course, was a massive part of the first eight seasons of this run, almost immediately becoming one of the leaders in the locker room after signing as a free agent with the Patriots ahead of the 2001 season. He helped the Patriots reach four Super Bowls, winning three rings in the process.
…and this is where those minimal critics come into play from January.
‘The Patriots are obsessed with the past!’
‘They need to let go! The dynasty is over!’
‘Another former player from the dynasty era? How original!’
‘Oh, ‘Do Your Job?’ How about you actually do your job and hire someone outside the family?’
‘If you wanted to recapture the magic of the dynasty years, why fire Belichick in the first place?’
I know I’m listing these off like the hire was panned. It wasn’t. These were merely the takes of the vocal minority that populate the WEEI phone lines on a regular basis - the heartland “Massholes” who will always skew negative no matter the situation, good or bad. It’s those callers that help make Boston the best sports radio city in the country. We love them for it.
Whether or not Vrabel heard this loud vocal minority or not, he has certainly operated like someone who has been extremely cognizant about distancing himself from the past era of New England football.
Whenever he’s asked questions where he’s being framed as a coaching disciple of Belichick, he’s quick to make it clear that he never coached under the future Pro Football Hall of Fame head coach. You don’t hear ‘Do Your Job’ or ‘The Patriot Way’ or ‘No Days Off’ parroted during any of his rhetoric at the podium, and you don’t see it plastered on the walls around Gillette Stadium, either. He’s not constantly bringing former Super Bowl-winning teammates around, and he rarely acknowledges the fact that he’s the owner of a red jacket as a member of the team’s Hall of Fame.
On top of it all, Vrabel has cut, traded, or opted not to re-sign almost everyone on the roster who had a connection to the Belichick regime. All of the captains of yesteryear are gone, and guys like Kyle Dugger and Keion White were being traded as recently as Tuesday night.
The roster stuff could very well just be a talent assessment thing - aging players that just weren’t a fit in the system Vrabel was implementing at 1 Patriot Place. But when you combine it with all the new messaging stuff, it all feels a part of this new era approach Vrabel has made a concerted effort to carry out.
On Friday, Vrabel was asked about all of this by The Boston Globe’s Chris Gasper, in what I thought was maybe the most interesting back-and-forth exchange Vrabel has had all season with a reporter during one of his many media sessions.
Vrabel is someone who clearly prides himself at being one step ahead of the game at the podium. He’s not like Belichick, grunting nothings into a mic under the false faced of ‘the media is the enemy,’ and he’s not like Mayo who was constantly stepping in it while simultaneously walking back comments from days prior. He’s always giving you a little taste of something interesting while also protecting whatever he feels is necessary to keep his football team headed in the right direction. Personally, I think it’s a great way of doing business for the 50-year-old. And candidly, it makes our jobs in the media a lot more fun on a day-to-day basis.
So seeing Vrabel get a bit rattled by this line of questioning from Gasper was fascinating, to say the least. It’s clear this stuff is front-of-mind, but he doesn’t want us to know that. Which makes sense - that would be, in a way, a version of focusing on the past.
Here’s the full exchange from Friday:
Chris Gasper: “It seems like you've made a concerted effort to give this program, this team, its own identity and separate it from some of the success of the past. The individual player introductions, you don't do the ‘Aw yeah’ after a win. I don't think I've heard ‘Do Your Job’ very much this year. Why is that important for this program to have its own identity?”
Mike Vrabel: “Well, let's first just say it's been a lot of years since that has happened. So, I don't know how many people really around here know other than Stacey [James], Nancy [Meier], Jim Whalen, you know what I mean? So, we're just trying to do what we feel like is best and what the players, the communication, me, the staff, Eliot [Wolf] and everybody else involved. That's all we're trying to do is just try to win games, get good guys, enjoy coming to work, coach the s*** out of them, watch them have success and be excited for them.
“None of that goes in and, ‘Well, they did it this way; we're going to do it the opposite.’ There's a lot of things that are good that you take from people, and there's some things that you come up with on your own that's good, and then there's some ones that are clunkers. When they're clunkers, you own it, change it and fix it. So, we'll make some modifications to the player announcements, and we'll get the names in order this time, and we'll go from there. Again, I'm excited. I love coaching these guys. It's fun. They make coming to work a lot of fun, and we'll go from there.”
CG: “I'm just wondering, in your mind, is there a burden that comes with that that you're trying to erase? So, the burden of the past for some of these guys and trying to live up to the past and what this organization has done.”
MV: “I don't know what the burden is. They won eight games in two years. So, none of that matters. Whether it was a Super Bowl or a not very good year. It doesn't matter. So, in this league, if you take a nap, you're going to get beat, and that's just how it is. So, we're not trying to take a nap. We want to try to just play good football, be competitive, take advantage of our opportunities, take care of the football, play complimentary, play sound, create some more plays in the kicking game, all these things that we're talking about doing. I don't have enough time to focus on what happened yesterday, let alone what happened seven years ago.”
It might not be a burden, but Vrabel’s desire for changing the culture here in New England is not covert in any way. For a player who has the not-too-distant-history he does with this franchise not to cling to it in year one on the job after years of mediocrity post-Brady is noticeable.
But so far, the results speak for themselves.
The first-place Patriots will host the Falcons (3-4) on Sunday as 4.5-point favorites as of publishing.
Tune in each and every Monday throughout the football season to Patriots Monday on WEEI. Head coach Mike Vrabel joins The Greg Hill Show at 6:30 a.m. ET, and quarterback Drake Maye joins WEEI Afternoons.