Introducing Malibu Belichick ... Now With NEW Hat!
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?
The Green Bay Packers spent 21 seasons in the 1970s and 1980s trying to recapture Vince Lombardi’s magic.
Lombardi retired from the Packers after the 1967 season. Longtime lieutenant Phil Bengtson took over a roster still loaded with legends. Bengtson knew the notes but not the music. The Packers finished in third place in the NFC Central for three straight years.
The Packers briefly looked outside the family and hired college coaching rockstar Dan Devine as head coach and GM in 1971. As a coach, he broke his leg on the sideline in his NFL debut. As a GM, he concocted one of the most infamous trades in pro football history. Devine’s Packers slipped into the playoffs once before slipping below .500 in 1973 and 1974.
The Packers replaced Devine with Bart Starr, who was also overmatched in both roles (he lost his GM hat after a few years) but was too beloved to fire. Starr coached for nine seasons; the Packers had winning records (8-7-1 and 5-3-1) in two of them.
Forrest Gregg, another Lombardi Legend, took over for Starr in 1984. Gregg coached the Bengals to the Super Bowl in 1981, so he had more to offer the Packers than back-in-the-glory-days stories. But Gregg was one of those no-nonsense tough guys who lashed out at his players when they made mistakes and worked them down to the nub in the preseason. He resigned after the 1987 strike season. His Packers finished .500 or worse in four straight years.
By the time the Packers finally looked outside the organization for both a coach (Lindy Infante) and top executive (the nondescript Tom Braatz), two decades had passed with just two playoff appearances, one of them in a strike-shortened year. The mid-1980s Packers were like classic rock has-beens on the county fair circuit. And they still needed four more years and another reboot before they became relevant.
I cannot help but think that the Patriots just hired their Forrest Gregg.
Mike Vrabel did some impressive things as head coach of the Tennessee Titans, particularly in 2020 and 2021. He may have been the most qualified candidate on this year’s coaching carousel. He’s also a Keep-It-In-The-Family hiring by a franchise that is in serious danger of living in the past.
Patriots fans: feel free to performatively balk at the “in-the-family” criticism. Vrabel never coached under Bill Belichick, you protest, pretending you love Vrabel for his Titans accomplishments the way I used to read Playboy for the articles, all the while lovingly fondling the old Vrabel jerseys you found in your closets.
Yes, yawn, Vrabel started his coaching career at his Ohio State alma mater, then served as an assistant under Romeo Crennel for Bill O’Brien’s Texans for four years. Totally not a Belichick Family Tree sapling, LOL.
Let’s get real: Vrabel did not become the one-and-only candidate for the Patriots job, in the hearts of Robert Kraft and fans, because he could beat the Jaguars and order Arthur Smith to force-feed the football to Derrick Henry. He’s back in Foxboro to be Malibu Belichick, now with a new hat.
Sure, Vrabel had success outside of Foxboro. But so did O’Brien. Vrabel was and is a better head coach than O’Brien – he did not throw red-faced tantrums at his most indispensable players that we know of – but gosh, their records look similar. Vrabel went 54-45 and made the playoffs three times in a squishy division. O’Brien went 52-48 and made the playoffs four times in the same division. Vrabel went 2-3 in the playoffs, O’Brien 2-4. But the Patriots cannot bring back O’Brien, because they already tried that.
Vrabel gave the Titans personality. He presided over their transition from scuffling prospect Marcus Mariota to successful reclamation project Ryan Tannehill. He built smart, tough Belichickian defenses around rugged dudes like Jeffery Simmons and Harold Landry. Vrabel’s Titans became Henry-and-defense throwbacks with a knack for defeating both soup cans and flashier foes, including the Tom Brady-led Patriots in the 2019 playoffs. Meanwhile, Vrabel slowly wrested personnel control away from general manager Jon Robinson, which is a primary reason why things went pear-shaped in 2022 and 2023: the Titans drafted poorly, overpaid some veterans and traded A.J. Brown for HowieCoin in a draft-day fit of pique.
Read one way, the paragraph above sounds like the rise and fall of a no-nonsense defensive coach trying to turn around a bad franchise. Read another way, it’s a Belichick Buddy saga: reliance on defensive personnel/scheme and a veteran quarterback, weak drafts, eventual offensive indifference/cap mismanagement, a touch of whispered boardroom intrigue. It sounds a little like the saga of late-era Belichick himself and, again, O’Brien with the volume turned down.
Both interpretations of Vrabel’s Titans tenure are probably true to a degree, and many organizations would benefit from the leadership of an established disciplinarian/motivator with a girthy pelt collection but C-tier chops as a quarterback developer or long-range planner.
The Patriots, however, would be better off with just the opposite. They’re surrounded by trophies, drowning in motivational hoo-ha, haunted by ghosts. They need a Drake Maye developer. They need a personnel guru. They need a spring cleaning and fumigation.
Vrabel will work with Patriots executives Eliot Wolf and Alonzo Highsmith. Wolf, like Vrabel, has NO AFFILIATION WHATSOEVER with late-career Belichick, except for the fact that he has been knocking around the front office in various scouting capacities since 2020 and has his fingerprints all over recent (disappointing) drafts. Highsmith, a collegiate superstar in the 1980s, joined the Packers’ front office at around the same time as Wolf – whose dad ran that team in the Brett Favre years – and has been bouncing around ever since. Both will likely find themselves slotted beneath Vrabel on the org chart, officially or otherwise.
The Patriots are now a second-generation Belichick knockoff, no matter how disingenuous their apologists may be about it. It’s as if they are aspiring to be the Texans or Titans of the late-2010s.
Look, I get the Vrabel hire. He has the dossier. The culture fit is obvious. But it’s a little too obvious. Sometimes, NFL organizations need a swift kick in their complacency, a challenge to their preconceptions. See the current Steelers. Or the 2020-23 Patriots. Or the post-Lombardi Packers.
Insular thinking can be dangerous. It led the Giants to promote Ben McAdoo, then bring back old Bill Parcells functionary Dave Gettleman to mismanage the budget and personnel, after the decline of Tom Coughlin. It fueled Raiders promotions from within down through the decades from Tom Flores (great!) through Antonio Pierce (pointless!). When you realize that the Patriots have not conducted an honest-to-goodness coach/showrunner search since the end of the 20th century – please spare me any mentions of last week’s desultory window-dressing interviews – it’s hard to not worry about insularity when they rush to hire a familiar face ASAP.
If the Patriots don’t think they need to conduct a real coaching search, it’s because they believe their past makes them special. It does not, and they are not.
The Patriots need to sign, draft and/or develop an entire offensive line, most of a receiving corps and roughly two-thirds of a defense. They need a scheme tailored to Maye’s talents and a quarterback whisperer. They need judicious cap management: $120 million to spend sounds great until you realize why they have it (no veteran on the roster is worth the dough).
In other words, the Patriots still need all the things they needed before hiring Vrabel, things he’s not really personally equipped to provide. That doesn’t make him a bad hire – Lombardi himself could not meet the Patriots’ current needs – but it renders many of his greatest assets superfluous and redundant. He cannot grunt and growl this roster into being any good. Jerod Mayo just tried.
I’m not burying the Patriots for hiring Vrabel. Let’s meet his offensive staff. Let’s see how they approach free agency. Let’s give him a year to keep Maye on the straight and narrow (and upright). Let’s see if the Patriots can become pesky and ornery, fresh and fun while rebuilding.
But I just cannot help remembering all the years when the Packers operated as more of a museum – or mausoleum – than a football team. And I wonder if the Patriots are walking the same path.
My first text following the Vrabel hire was to a friend that the Patriots were making the same "favorite sons" mistake the Packers did with the Starr Gregg hirings.
In 1983, the Packers faced the Bears at the end of Starr's ninth season as head coach. The Packers were 8-7 and a victory guaranteed a winning record and rumors abounded that a victory would save Starr's job. It's the only game of my life I rooted against the Packers and they fell to the Bears 23-21. Starr was let go. The other item I recall is that Starr responded to the firing with the comment that he felt he was finally ready as a head coach (after nine years) and was disappointed with the firing.
I have lived with traitor's guilt for that singular season-ending game for 42 years. When my demise arrives, I'll be denied burial within Green Bay city limits. In my defense, I didn't root for the Bears; I rooted for the Packer franchise that needed to move on. That'll be some solace as I lie rotting in my unmarked grave 'neath a dead oak at the end of a gravel service road in the Machickanee Forest twenty miles north of Titletown.
Belichick was done as a head coach when he started hiring only "guys he knows" for his coaching staff.
Kraft Sr. is showing he's done as an effective owner, by hiring only "guys he knows".
When you get to the point where you can't go outside of your comfort zone, to the scary unknown of new people with new ideas, you're going to be left behind in any competitive industry.