Roughly 11 months after Patriots owner Robert Kraft introduced Mike Vrabel as head coach in Foxboro, a rout of the Jets proved how fully his team has executed a vision and promise he shared that day.
An injury report as long as Santa’s reindeer team, (‘You know Boutte and Hollins and Landry and Wilson…’) was no excuse for Vrabel’s crew to show a hit of malaise against one of the league’s worst teams. Quarterback Drake Maye picked New York apart, over 3 quarters, for 256 yards and five touchdowns, and led New England to a 42-10 victory.
While the win seemed like a foregone conclusion at the start of the holiday week, it was far from such a reality when Vrabel took the reins last January. The Patriots had lost two out of their last three matchups against the Jets, all during the 2024 calendar year. One of those losses was Bill Belichick’s final game as head coach of the Patriots: it was a lackluster affair marked by freezing rain and three sorry points at Gillette Stadium.
When Vrabel stood before a room full of media - and a few players – last winter, he set a simple expectation.
“We just want to be good enough to take advantage of bad football,” he said. “That's where we're going to start. That's what I've tried to tell all the players is right now I don't know if we're good enough to take advantage of bad football. I'm unsure. Like, we're undefeated right now, but if we can just work towards taking advantage of bad football and being good enough to, when somebody makes a mistake, capitalizing on it and not being the ones that make the mistakes, and focusing on the little things and the details and helping them do their job better, that's a great place to start.”
The sentiment wasn’t an unfamiliar one. For the better part of two decades, the Patriots touted themselves as a program that fielded teams who were sharp, detail-oriented, and prepared.
In hindsight, however, it sounds like a clear roadmap of how Vrabel saw this year: full of opportunity against teams who would be as down bad as the Jets in December.
Vrabel has, time and time again, shunted the “soft schedule” conversation. Every team is made of professional athletes who are the top .01% of football players in the world. But respectively, the schedule is historically easy, (ESPN’s Bill Barnwell had a fascinating breakdown last week here).
The Patriots can only play who they play. The big takeaway from this season has to be how they’ve largely thrashed these teams. They entered Week 17 with the third-biggest scoring differential, (+110) in the NFL, behind just the Seahawks and Rams.
When they have played top-league talent, they’ve shown themselves capable of capitalizing on oopsies and brain farts. Their signature victory this season was arguably the 23-20 Sunday Night stunner in Buffalo, in which they forced two fumbles and picked off the reigning MVP. They won in Baltimore last week thanks not just to Maye’s transcendent play, but Baltimore coach John Harbaugh’s bizarre benching of running back/freight train Derrick Henry.
An “echo chamber” is usually a derogatory term. It suggests a room where detractors won’t voice their opinions. That’s hardly the case in Foxboro, but this team has to be remembered during the regular season as a group whose sum has been greater than its parts, and in large part, that’s been due to listening and following in Vrabel’s commands – to the extent that his players often do echo his exact thoughts and phrases after games, and during the week.
“Our goals will be to win the AFC East, to host home playoff games, and to compete for championships,” Vrabel said, back in January. “That's what it's going to take. And what the timeline is, just like we say with injuries, like we're not going to put a timeline on an injury, and we're certainly not going to put a timeline on what those will be. But that's going to be the expectations, and we're going to work like crazy, we're going to compete like crazy, we're going to give the players a plan.”
It can be easy to forget how unrealistic those goals sounded for Vrabel’s first season, last winter. However far this team goes in the playoffs, he made good on his promises just about as quickly as he could.