Over the last few seasons - including an aggregate 8-26 the last two years - the aura of intimidation that had surrounded the Patriots had vanished. No longer did opponents fear them, and Gillette Stadium was no longer viewed as a challenging road venue. Mike Vrabel has yet to coach a regular-season game in Foxborough, but his presence is yielding a breath of fresh air.
That's a good start for an organization hungry to regain respectability. Fans are certainly clamoring for a championship team again - after all, this is Boston - but going from 4-13 to the Super Bowl is a challenging task.
The Patriots did upgrade their roster this offseason and set second-year quarterback Drake Maye up to have a strong second season, with their win total viewed at 8.5, which would be respectable.
Mike Vrabel is already accomplishing regaining the Patriots' respectability
The Athletic's Steve Buckley noted that Vrabel's priority in New England was bringing the organization back to respectability. Vrabel is already off to a good start by holding his players accountable in practice and not letting the inmates run the asylum, which was often the case under Jerod Mayo's watch in 2024.
I'm not here to relitigate Mayo's one season as head coach, other than to point out that Mike Vrabel, the new guy, so far has approached things with a plain-spoken directness that's easy to digest," Buckley wrote.
Mayo is a good guy who did a lot of wonderful things as a player, but as a head coach, he was in way over his head, and many of his coaches were equally inexperienced. Vrabel has a strong track record as a head coach, and we all know what Josh McDaniels has done as an offensive coordinator, so the Patriots' coaching staff is already miles better than it was a year ago.
The off-field drama surrounding the organization, most notably the spats between Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick, has simply become too much to bear, and it's time for both parties to move on. Kraft threw another log on the fire when he said on Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski's podcast that hiring Belichick in 2000 was a big risk.
The Hoodie subsequently fired back by saying he took a big risk himself becoming the Patriots' head coach, and the 2001 season and Super Bowl championship may have saved Belichick's job after a dismal 5-11 2000 season.
That's all in the past, though, and hiring Vrabel was a big way for the organization to move forward and regain the respectability it had earned over the first 20 years of the 21st century. The focus needs to be on getting the Patriots back to the playoffs.