The Coach Making Pro Football Fun

The New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel leads from his ventricles—not from shallow-chested sentiment but from the pump action of his brawny heart, out of which blood occasionally makes its way to spurt from a split lip after a head bump from one of his players. During the team’s playoff run, the defensive tackle Milton Williams gave Vrabel a celebratory helmet to the mouth. “I forgot Vrabes ain’t got no helmet on,” Williams said, to which Vrabel, a former linebacking great, replied, “I’ve been hit harder than that.”

Anyone interested in leadership will want to take a close look at what Vrabel has done in one year of coaching the Patriots, and how he has done it. Last January, he took over a franchise that had been 4–13 in each of the past two seasons and, with a combination of hard know-how in football technique and light-handed locker-room authority, judo-flipped the team to 17–3 and a spot in the Super Bowl. A man who often seems ready to rush the field to make a tackle himself, he brings to his coaching a been-there-ness, and a drollery that treats football as the played game it is, not as the grimmest endeavor in the world.

Much of what Vrabel has done is counterintuitive. At the Patriots’ opening offseason workout in New England, he startled the players when one of the the first things he asked them to do was the “victory formation,” the kneel-down play to run out the clock when a game is won. It’s a routine action that doesn’t require much except snapping the ball, and it’s usually among the last things a team practices. Vrabel’s message: We intend to run this play a lot. He did not temper expectations. Most coaches who take over a 4–13 operation would buy themselves some time. Instead, Vrabel talked about winning the division and said, “I want to galvanize our football team.