In the days leading up to Mike Vrabel’s post-practice press conference on Friday, his old head coach kept finding his way back into the Boston sports news cycle.
Two days after Bill Belichick’s embarrassing first game as new head football coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels, you had Patriots chairman and CEO Robert Kraft telling WBZ’s Dan Roche that he plans to commission a Belichick statue to stand next to Tom Brady’s statue once the six-time Super Bowl champion retires from coaching.
Yet one day after these rosy words from Kraft, you had reports from both The Athletic and The Boston Herald that Belichick has banned Patriots scouts from attending his UNC practices to scout Tar Heels players. The Athletic’s report notes that while other NFL teams have been limited in their practice viewings, the Patriots were the only team to receive an outright ban from attending.
Even with Belichick’s pettiness towards the Patriots reaching an all-time high this summer with pointed, obviously-anti-Kraft comments to both ESPN and The Boston Globe on separate occasions, on top of not making a single mention of his former boss in his book released earlier this year, this latest chapter of the Cold War between Belichick and the organization he called home for 24 years has gone to a whole other level.
So when Vrabel stepped to the podium on Friday, it was only natural that the former Belichick disciple was asked about this situation in Chapel Hill.
Instead of taking the low hanging fruit, Vrabel opted for the high road.
“That's an individual choice,” said Vrabel. “And we'll cross that bridge when we start looking at players.
“Wanna focus on our football team, and that's their prerogative to make the decisions that they feel like are best for them. And then we’ll have to find other ways to get the information for any players that we want to look at in North Carolina.”
An added oddity to this story - WEEI’s Jon Lyons posted on X.com on Thursday night that Belichick’s blanket ban of the Patriots is actually directly barring members of the New England scouting staff that Belichick himself hired while still with the organization.
With Belichick’s long time friend and current UNC football general manager Michael Lombardi telling The Athletic earlier this year that “everything [at Chapel Hill] is predicated on building a pro team” and that they consider themselves the “33rd [NFL] team because everybody involved with our program,” it appears they’ve taken that mindset far too seriously.
College football is not the NFL. You want pro teams in your building. This shows players and recruits that they’ll have the proper eyeballs on them to get to the next level. Being an open book to pro teams is only going to benefit your program in the long run.
But for Belichick, pettiness seemingly supersedes success at the collegiate level.
Stay locked in to WEEI and WEEI.com as this story continues to unfold.