Mike Vrabel Calls Timeout on Own Defense, Then Rips It as ‘Dogsh-t’ After Preseason Loss
Mike Vrabel is not doing subtle in his first year with the New England Patriots. If you needed more evidence, you got it Saturday night.
With 1:53 left in the first quarter of the Patriots’ preseason home game against the Philadelphia Eagles, Vrabel took the extraordinary step of calling a timeout while his own defense was on the field. The Eagles had ripped off a 59-yard drive down to the Patriots’ 27-yard line, and Vrabel had seen enough. He just stopped the game.
After the game, a reporter asked him why. Vrabel did not hide behind coach-speak.
“I saw dogsh-t defense and I wanted to talk to them,” Vrabel said.
You can watch some coaches in press conferences and never actually learn anything. That is not going to be the New England experience. Vrabel is going to tell you exactly what he thinks, exactly when he thinks it, and he does not care that it was a meaningless preseason game.
The Eagles did go on to score a touchdown on that drive, so on the surface the chat did not solve the problem. But Philadelphia only put up 14 more points the rest of the way, so somewhere in that chewing out there was a message that stuck.
This is the version of Vrabel the Tennessee Titans fell in love with, then eventually fired because ownership got squeamish about how blunt he was. New England hired him precisely because they wanted the blunt version back.
Bill Belichick left a leadership vacuum in Foxborough that Jerod Mayo could never fill. Vrabel is not filling a vacuum, he is bulldozing through it. He has already publicly needled star wide receiver AJ Brown, whom he coached in Tennessee, and now he is calling in-game timeouts to yell at second-string defensive backs.
The message throughout training camp has been consistent. Effort is not optional. Standards apply to everyone. And if you do not meet them, Vrabel will tell you about it in front of a stadium of 65,000 people.
Some players hate that style. Some players love it. The ones who love it usually stay a long time and win a lot of football games. That is essentially the Tennessee Titans playbook that got Vrabel to a division title and a No. 1 seed before things unraveled.
Whether it works in New England depends less on Vrabel and more on the roster. This is not the star-heavy Titans team he inherited in 2018. This is a Patriots team in the middle of a rebuild, with a young quarterback in Drake Maye and a defense that has real questions at every level.
The Patriots open the regular season against a real opponent soon. If the effort issues Vrabel spotted Saturday show up on a Sunday, do not be surprised if the timeout returns. He has already told the world he is not afraid to use it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
