Mike Vrabel's bridge season in Cleveland confirmed how much he wanted back in as an NFL head coach.
Mike Vrabel's bridge season in Cleveland confirmed how much he wanted back in as an NFL head coach.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Mike Vrabel has talked often of how much he learned during his bridge season in Cleveland, with the overriding lesson being less about X’s and O’s and more about heart and desire.
Above all, Vrabel’s post-Tennessee year confirmed how much he wanted back in as an NFL head coach.
“I was sure that there was nothing else that I wanted to do than to have another opportunity if I could get it,” he said.
Timing and opportunity intersected in New England. He was hired in January, and has done everything since to prove how much he deserved another shot. As his first-place Patriots look to extend their winning streak to four games Sunday, the juiciest angle is found in Vrabel’s return to Tennessee — the story of a fired coach out for revenge against the team that gave up on him.
But that is only a one-week effort. For Vrabel, this stint in New England is bigger — the story instead of a coach out to make the most of his second chance.
It’s one of the NFL’s most enduring tales. Nowhere in sports does the coaching recycle bin get used as frequently as in the NFL, where the complexity of the job can push prior experience to the top of the résumé requirements.
Yes, young, first-time coaches have been the recent rage, but unless they completely flame out — Jerod Mayo, Joe Judge, Matt Patricia — you can bet you will see them again. Why else would Adam Gase, Rich Kotite, Eric Mangini, Pat Shurmur, Norv Turner, or even the great offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels have gotten second chances?
Owners are banking on the belief that head coaches get better with experience, learning from mistakes and gaining the wisdom that comes with age. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does, and to great success.
Some of the best coaching encores have led to titles. Start here in New England with Bill Belichick, who turned in the best second act in NFL history. An ugly foray in Cleveland set the stage for two decades of dominance (and six Super Bowl trophies) with the Patriots. His only two Super Bowl losses came at the hands of another second-act king — Tom Coughlin, a success with the Giants after building the expansion Jaguars.
Of course, there’s Bill Parcells, who coached both of those men, and is the only one to lead four NFL franchises (Giants, Patriots, Jets, Cowboys) to the playoffs, and three of them to conference championship games. He only won titles with the Giants, but he rebuilt franchises in every other stop. In Dallas, he worked with Sean Payton, currently on his second act in Denver after winning a championship in New Orleans. Pete Carroll didn’t last long in Foxborough, and his third act isn’t off to a great start in Las Vegas, but he won a Super Bowl in between in Seattle.
Andy Reid is the championship standard of the present, with his three titles in Kansas City eclipsing the Super Bowl loss he suffered in Philadelphia. He is the only coach to win more than 100 games with two franchises, and the only one to take the two teams to four consecutive conference finals.
There’s Todd Bowles, down in Tampa Bay leading the first-place Buccaneers and making the Jets wonder, yet again, how they continue to stay on a never-ending coaching carousel while a castoff succeeds elsewhere. Raheem Morris, a onetime Buccaneers coach (he went 17-31 from 2009-11) is busy making the most of his second chance in Atlanta.
Well, it’s really his third. Morris was the interim coach of the Falcons in 2020, but was not hired when the season ended. He told NFL.com in 2021, “The first time you’re a head coach, you think you know what the job entails, and you really don’t. You kind of have to grow into it when it comes to roster management, how you spend your money, where you spend your money, deciding what are the key positions you need veteran leadership at, and what is most important to you as far as a culture standpoint — and how you want to manage that.”
For Vrabel, emphasis on culture has been vital to the Patriots’ early success, and that means pushing the spotlight away from himself and onto the players. This past week, that wasn’t so easy, even as he did his best to deflect the personal motivation to win. He insisted the angle might be “interesting,” but isn’t that “important.” He laughed that the NFL won’t “cancel the season” now that his team is in first place, and quipped his players “are not trying to win one for the Gipper here.”
But make no mistake: He wants this win. After a 54-45 record in six seasons in Tennessee, after three playoff appearances, an AFC Championship game berth in 2019, a No. 1 AFC seed and Coach of the Year award in 2021, and the wild-card win that ended Tom Brady’s Patriots career on a loss, he is supremely motivated. If the Titans already admitted their mistake by firing Vrabel’s successor, Brian Callahan, this past week, Vrabel would love nothing more than to pile on.
“This one is personal for Mike Vrabel,” Taylor Lewan, who played nine seasons in Tennessee, said this week on ESPN’s “Get Up.” “He’ll tell you it’s not, it’s all about the players, but at the end of the day he wants to walk into Nissan Stadium and put up three scores on these guys and then eventually go for 2 at the end of the game and give ’em the old, ‘It’s because I couldn’t go for 3.’ ”
Thus proving the second time’s the charm.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.