It just gets sillier and sillier in the world of NFL reporting. This time, it's courtesy of nbcsports.com in their "ratings" of 2025's NFL head coaches. They rate Andy Reid, Sean McVay, and John Harbaugh at the top of the hill. No problem there. Two of the "new" coaches who don't appear in the ratings make the ratings questionable.
One is a bona fide excellent head coach and Super Bowl winner, Peter Carroll. Carroll should appear on any list of top NFL coaches, whether he's a new hire or not. He's listed with the new-hire also-rans. And the second experienced coach who didn't even make the top 25 list is 2021's NFL Coach of the Year, the Patriots' Mike Vrabel.
Vrabel also didn't make the list of 25 because he's a new hire. Past coaching history doesn't carry any weight. Let's examine Vrabel's non-rating, analyze and dissect it, and see if there's validity in what NBC had to say.
Mike Vrabel, just a Bill Belichick clone?
NBC begins by linking Mike Vrabel, the coach, to Bill Belichick since he toiled for the former Pats' legendary coach as a player. Vrabel has made it clear that his coaching history is his own and is separate from his days of playing under Belichick. Here's what they said,
"For a team that supposedly wanted to move on from Bill Belichick, the Patriots have a funny way of showing it. After an ill-fated one-and-done 2024 campaign with one of BB’s former proteges, Jerod Mayo, they have turned to a more experienced option in Mike Vrabel. Although Vrabel never coached for Belichick, he played for him for eight seasons, and knew how to drive him crazy as a head-coaching rival..."
While they acknowledge that Vrabel never coached under Belichick, they still erroneously link him as a coach to the former Patriots' great. Instead, Vrabel's coaching career took him to several different stops, including six years as a highly successful Head Coach in Tennessee.
He won the Coach of the Year award mentioned earlier in 2021. Prior to that NFL Head Coaching tenure, he spent years as an assistant at Ohio State and with the Houston Texans. Last year, he assisted in Cleveland. There was no Bill Belichick anywhere near those teams.
Mike Vrabel totally scrapped Bill Belichick's defensive coaching model
While Vrabel brought back long-time Belichick Offensive Coordinator Josh McDaniels as his Offensive Coordinator, he totally rejected his former Patriots coaches' methodology on the side of the ball Belichick is most identified with and Vrabel played in for eight years: the defense.
Playing for any coach leaves impressions. Some may be incorporated into your style, and others not so much. It's all part of an individual's personal experience that helps form his own style. Yet, in the most important link to Belichick any former player or coach could have, his defensive scheme, the argument that he is of the Belichick coaching tree completely falls apart.
Vrabel is dismantling the remnants of Belichick's defense and replacing it with his own. He unloaded several stalwarts who played a big part in Belichick's defense. Players like Davon Godchaux, Ja'Whaun Bentley, and Deatrich Wise Jr, all starters under Bill, have been either traded, released, or allowed to sign elsewhere.
Expect others to follow them on both sides of the ball before the 2025 season begins. New players who play a different brand of ball are replacing them. Vrabel's defense is a one-gap, penetrating, upfield attacking style, almost totally antithetical to the two-gap, read-and-react style Belichick has employed in his coaching career. Vrabel has rejected that style entirely. Nothing says he's his own man more than that.
If previous coaching success in the NFL doesn't earn any credibility for a newly hired coach, what does? If adopting his style, utterly divergent from his former coach's, doesn't demonstrate he's his own man and not a coaching appendage of that former coach, then nothing will.
NBC ultimately calls Vrabel a "strong, sensible hire". They got that part right. But not ranking new hire Vrabel (and Pete Carroll) among the top NFL coaches is a gaffe. It will be more so if Vrabel's Patriots win the AFC East and he wins Coach of the Year this season. He may very well win both.