The Patriots went 4-13 this season under the stewardship of first-year head coach and former New England linebacker Jerod Mayo. After firing Mayo shortly after the team's final game of the season, the Patriots have landed on a method for improving the team: Replacing Mayo with a different former Patriots linebacker.
Mike Vrabel is your new Patriots head coach. He returns to the organization where he spent eight years as a player and became one of the more annoying avatars of the Patriot Way. That wasn't really his fault—the Patriots fanbase was always going to latch onto a square-jawed white linebacker who occasionally caught touchdown passes from Tom Brady.
More relevant is Vrabel's head coaching experience, which spanned six seasons in Tennessee and resulted in a 54-45 record. How impressive you find his résumé is largely a matter of perspective. Is it a good omen that he put together a 23-10 record over the course of two seasons with Ryan Tannehill at quarterback, or was this man simply a Derrick Henry and A.J. Brown merchant who leveraged a few moments of savvy clock management into a reputation as a high-level tactician? The Titans were pretty squarely stuck in the mud over the course of Vrabel's final two seasons, although this season's 3-14 finish under Brian Callahan added a little retrospective polish to Vrabel's tenure.
If you're wondering why the Pats settled on Vrabel rather than waiting around to potentially pair young quarterback Drake Maye with Ben Johnson or some other offensive guru, the answer's probably not that deep. Bob Kraft is an ancient man who probably sees Vrabel as a bridge back to the glory days; if you can't have Brady and Belichick anymore, you can still settle for one of the other guys.
That's not to say this hiring process doesn't deserve any scrutiny. The Patriots just canned one of the NFL's few black head coaches—a hand-picked successor to Belichick who was in his first year as a head coach and presiding over a team that was supposed to lose a lot of games—and now they've brought in Vrabel without conducting much of a coaching search. Hiring a head coach is a rare opportunity for a franchise to pick the brains of highly regarded coaches and coordinators around the league, but for the second year in a row, the Patriots pretty clearly locked in on one person from the start. (Say, how's Brian Flores's discrimination lawsuit going?)
Whether or not this hire works out for the Patriots might have relatively little to do with Vrabel. This is a player's league, and if the Pats are to begin a new era of success, it will happen because Maye delivers on the promise that made him the third-overall pick in the draft and because New England spends its top-four pick and league-most cap space on a real team around him. If Maye can't get to the next level, or if the front office whiffs in free agency, then it's likely that Vrabel will be joining Mayo on the scrapheap of linebackers-turned-coaches sooner rather than later.
