To no surprise, the Patriots have named Mike Vrabel as their next head coach. Ian Rapoport of NFL.com was the first to report that the hire was imminent.
Just yesterday, we learned that New England and Vrabel were engaged in contract discussions, a clear sign that a deal was forthcoming. Now, just over a year after he was dismissed as head coach of the Titans, Vrabel is back in the HC ranks at the helm of the team with which he won three Super Bowls as a player.
Per ESPN’s Adam Schefter, Vrabel is the seventh person to become the head coach of a team that he once helped win a Super Bowl as a player. The sixth person on that list, Jerod Mayo, was fired by New England last week after just one season in the top job.
Mayo was owner Robert Kraft‘s hand-picked successor to Bill Belichick, and for a long time, it appeared that Mayo would be given at least another year in charge. After all, he inherited a team that was clearly in the early stages of a rebuild, and despite a few public missteps, it would have been easy to justify allowing him to return for 2025.
Last week, however, it was reported that those public “gaffes,” in conjunction with a locker room culture that may not have been as strong as some players portrayed it to be and an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Chargers in Week 17, were conspiring to drive Mayo out of Foxborough. He was canned later that same day, shortly after the Pats’ regular season finale.
Speculatively, Vrabel’s availability may well have clinched Kraft’s decision to hand Mayo his walking papers. During his time as the Titans’ head coach, Vrabel established himself as one of the league’s better bench bosses, and he is highly-regarded for his game management and his ability to develop a strong culture predicated on accountability. The Titans posted a winning record in each of Vrabel’s first four seasons in Nashville, which included three playoff appearances and a trip to the AFC title game. He earned Coach of the Year honors following the 2021 campaign, but things took a turn for the worse over the 2022-23 seasons.
A seven-game losing streak to close out the 2022 season left Tennessee with a 7-10 record after a division title seemed to be in the cards, and the team slipped to a 6-11 mark in 2023. During that 2023 campaign, Ran Carthon‘s first as Titans GM following Jon Robinson‘s surprising firing, there was reportedly tension between Vrabel and Carthon (a situation that may have been…