Head coach Mike Vrabel, in his first year as head coach of the New England Patriots, has led them on a 10-game winning streak after a 1-2 start.
The Patriots can win their first AFC East title since 2019 with a victory over the Buffalo Bills on Dec. 14.
Patriots players credit Vrabel’s experience as a former player and his consistent messaging for the team’s rapid turnaround.
Vrabel’s coaching style, which includes listening to player feedback, has been well-received in the locker room.
FOXBOROUGH, MA – No naps.
Not literally, of course. If a member of the New England Patriots required one, and it didn’t hurt anybody else, head coach Mike Vrabel would likely allow some short-term shuteye.
The metaphorical nap is what the three-time Super Bowl winner as a player here, and now first-year head coach of the Patriots, hopes to avoid.
“In this league, if you take a nap, you’re going to get beat, and that’s just how it is,” Vrabel said earlier this season. “So, we’re not trying to take a nap.”
Applying that logic, the Patriots haven’t slept since Sept. 21, when New England gave the ball away five times a 21-14 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers. The defeat dropped them to 1-2. They haven’t lost since and carry a 10-game win streak into a pivotal matchup against the Buffalo Bills; with a win, the Pats can claim their first AFC East title since 2019 and snap the Bills’ five-year streak atop the division.
For an organization that won eight games over the last two seasons – one Bill Belichick’s final season in New England, the other Jerod Mayo’s disastrous standalone year at the helm – that is quite the turnaround. One person stands at the center of it, and it’s not even second-year quarterback Drake Maye, who is a bona fide MVP candidate.
That would be the guy keeping his team awake – and already knocking on the door of the postseason.
Turnaround timetable? Vrabel has Pats rolling in Year 1
Turnarounds in the first year of a regime change aren’t uncommon in the NFL. The last-place schedule helps. The amount of cap room – the Patriots entered free agency in 2025 – helps bring in well-paid veterans and, if managed properly, can lead to improved locker-room leadership.
Players point to April 7 – the day offseason workouts started for New England – as the day the team’s mentality and expectations started moving in the right direction.
“He’s been in our shoes before. He’s done it before at a high level, won some Super Bowls, caught some touchdown passes,” running back Rhamondre Stevenson said after the Patriots’ Dec. 1 victory over the New York Giants. “He’s done it all. So it’s easy to listen to him and follow behind his lead.”
A linebacker, Vrabel made his bones sacking the opposing quarterbacks for Belichick’s defenses. But his 12 career touchdown catches cemented him in the lore of two-way part-timers.
In his book, “The Art of Winning,” Belichick – who led the Patriots to six Super Bowl victories over 24 years – wrote of Vrabel:
‘Everything he did was done with purpose and an edginess. Even joking. … Mike’s knife was always sharp, but it was never malicious – if anything, it made people feel like they were important to the organization if he targeted them. It also helped that he could take it as good as he gave it.’
Vrabel became head coach of the Tennessee Titans in 2018 after one season as the Houston Texans’ defensive coordinator. He went 54-45 in six seasons, with three playoff appearances for Tennessee, which decided to move on after the 2023 season. His replacement, Brian Callahan, was fired six games into this season.
Vrabel spent the 2024 season around the Cleveland Browns as a special assistant. But like he prepared himself to be a coach during his playing career, he was readying for his next job. Cleveland special teams coordinator Bubba Ventrone, a teammate of Vrabel’s during their Patriots days, placed blue-collar-type shirts in each player’s locker both as a gift and to send a message. For Vrabel, who loves Christmas and enjoys giving gifts, doing the same in New England was a no-brainer.
“I got one in brown last year. I thought it looked better in blue, so we got the guys some of those shirts,” Vrabel said. “I thought it would be fun. I liked it. They liked it in Cleveland, so that’s kind of what it was.”
Center Garret Bradbury said Vrabel can hone his coaching style through a unique lens.
“He’s like ‘What would I want as a player?’ or ‘I’ve been a head coach before’ and what worked and didn’t work,” Bradbury said. “This whole player-friendly thing gets thrown around quite a bit. I’ve played for a few head coaches. I like what Coach Vrabel does a lot.”
The little things that mean a lot to Vrabel, using another example he referenced the week of the second Bills game, could be something like receiver Mack Hollins reacting to a tackle on the opening kickoff of the game. Vrabel has been clear with what the expectations are – the primary goal for the 2025 season, preached from that first day of OTAs, was to win the division. The players have appreciated that consistency behind the message.
During training camp, Vrabel wanted to eliminate a mental tools meeting in an effort to give players more rest and allow them to come in later. But the veteran player leadership group said that it was an important 25 minutes of the week – Vrabel had to find another way to make his players happy while accomplishing a coaching goal.
“I love coaching these guys,” Vrabel said. “It’s fun. They make coming to work a lot of fun.”
Handshakes and hugs
Vrabel isn’t the only coach in the NFL who greets each player with a hug and a meaningful handshake as they enter the locker room after a win. But that doesn’t make it any less special to his players.
“It means a lot … he’s someone that connects to his players really well,” rookie running back TreVeyon Henderson told USA TODAY Sports.
Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell does the same, cornerback Carlton Davis said.
“Great coaches do that,” Davis told USA TODAY Sports. “Great minds think alike. It’s just a part of who they are and what they do.”
Vrabel’s reasoning for it is that if he says something to a player leading up to the game and it turns out how he predicted, then he sees it as a chance to remind them of that conversation “and thank them for understanding what it is we’re trying to get done.”
“There’s a lot of things that are good that you take from people, and there’s some things that you come up with on your own that’s good, and then there’s some ones that are clunkers,” Vrabel said. “When they’re clunkers, you own it, change it and fix it.”
“Clunkers” is not a bad way to describe (most of) the post-Tom Brady seasons of the New England Patriots.
Owned? Changed? Fixed?
An AFC East title in the first year of Vrabel’s tenure would go a long way in that regard. Just don’t hit snooze on that alarm.