Around 10:30 on Sunday morning, arguably the worst kept secret in Patriots history was finally revealed from NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero and Ian Rapoport.
The Patriots are hiring team Hall of Famer Mike Vrabel as the franchise’s 16th head coach.
One week after firing Jerod Mayo less than an hour after the regular season finale, another former linebacker is now tasked with bringing the team back to relevance.
There’s several ways to look at this, but the most important one is that the team now has someone with legitimate experience (and a somewhat successful track record) running the day-to-day operation. Those that also believe the Patriots need to get away from players and coaches with ties to the organization are looking at this particular situation incorrectly. Vrabel played elsewhere before coming here, learned and won under Bill Belichick as a player, then went and coached outside of the organization in multiple spots. Mike Vrabel is not a Bill Belichick disciple. Vrabel is his own guy with his own ideas on how a team should be run, but he also knows what winning here looks like.
While the Krafts deserve credit for swiftly taking care of the debacle that was the Mayo decision, they also deserve plenty of criticism. First, they deserve criticism for the search. Whether they knew Vrabel was the guy or not, the sham Rooney Rule interviews and then talking to ONE bright offensive mind in Ben Johnson simply isn’t good enough. If you want an example of what the Patriots’ search should have looked like, take a look at the list the Jets have. That franchise will probably screw it up, but at least they’re talking to and taking ideas from all sorts of football minds.
Having said that, this also should have been the move last January when the choice to move on from Belichick was made. Sure, Mayo had it written in his contract that he was the successor, but we all saw and heard what Vrabel did and had to say during his The Hall speech last season. He’s been the guy for two years now, but the Krafts kept their word to Mayo and by doing so, extended this miserable stretch for fans by another year at least.
We’ll soon know whether or not Vrabel is keeping Eliot Wolf or bringing in another GM. It’ll be his second-most important decision (we all know how much work this roster needs) behind his offensive coordinator choice. Heading into Year 2, Drake Maye will be starting over with another new offense. Alex Van Pelt deserves credit for developing Maye (and Joe Milton), but his lack of creativity in play calling was impossible to ignore. Vrabel needs someone who can not only continue to help Maye grow, but someone who can get this offense back to being a worthwhile product to watch. His defensive coordinator choice is equally as important, but not as much as those first two selections.
Josh McDaniels is the favorite, but does Vrabel look elsewhere? Does he try to get Bill O’Brien to make the quick move over from BC? O’Brien has recently said he’s happy with the Eagles, but also acknowledged he’d be foolish not to at least listen to phone calls from interested NFL teams. Tommy Rees – a name we threw out there a week ago – is also a strong possibility. Could he just stun everyone and bring some new, up-and-coming OC from the college ranks? McDaniels probably ends up with the role, but we’ll see. Again, this is where Vrabel not being strictly tied to former Patriots connections makes this a great hire. He actually has a network around the league, something Mayo certainly did not have.
We’ll learn more of how Vrabel plans to push forward trying to make this team respectable again in the coming days and weeks, but for the time being, it took a while and it was quite a strange route, but the Krafts appear to have gotten this one right.
During his HOF speech last year, Vrabel told fans to appreciate the Patriots experience because “it’s not like this everywhere else.”
Well, now, that experience and the future of what happens at 1 Patriot Place is completely in his hands.