Blog

Jul 17, 2023

Mike Vrabel Is Becoming a Coaching Legend—Through His Yells and His Hugs

In 2020, Ben Jones, the Tennessee Titans’ longtime center, would wake up at 5:30 in the morning with a text already waiting for him. It’d be a screen grab of Peloton cycling stats and a message

In 2020, Ben Jones, the Tennessee Titans’ longtime center, would wake up at 5:30 in the morning with a text already waiting for him. It’d be a screen grab of Peloton cycling stats and a message saying, “Beat that, fat boy.”

There are hundreds of little reasons players buy into Tennessee head coach Mike Vrabel—that’s why I went to Nashville this summer to do a story on him. Jones, for instance, told me that Vrabel has long trusted him to be a leader in the locker room, challenging and empowering him to be one; that the veteran coach taught him that a nose tackle playing with more width can be a tell that the defense is in zone coverage. And also that Vrabel occasionally sends texts like “Beat that, fat boy.” You can’t tell one part of the story without the other. It’s all connected. “You always have to make sure you are on top of your game, because he’s an asshole,” Rodney Harrison, Vrabel’s former teammate and now an analyst at NBC, said. “He’s a good asshole. I love him. He is one of the best assholes I know.”

Vrabel is a 48-year-old former All-Pro defender who’s entering his sixth season coaching in Tennessee. He has snagged an NFL Coach of the Year award, won nearly 60 percent of his games, and made the playoffs three times in five seasons—once getting all the way to the AFC championship—despite never having what most would consider an elite roster. He has traversed multiple eras of football—from brutal Steelers and Patriots training camps as a player in the late ’90s and early 2000s, to more modern practice setups—and has blended that wide-ranging football education together to create his own style. He is equal parts hardass and empath. He cares deeply about his players, but he also cares deeply about getting his point across.

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Longtime Titans tight end Delanie Walker played against Vrabel in 2010, during the then-linebacker’s last year in the league, and he noticed something strange. Vrabel was coaching Walker—or some version of coaching. “He’d help you out,” Walker said. “He’d say, ‘You better change that stance up, I know it’s a pass. You’re giving away your technique,’ or [talk about] the way I was looking at the line.” So eight years later, Walker immediately bought in when Vrabel became his head coach on the Titans.

What Walker noticed first was that Vrabel would air him out in a way most coaches wouldn’t to an established veteran. Walker dropped a pass in practice early into Vrabel’s tenure and the video was replayed during a meeting. “We don’t pay you that much money to drop passes, do we?” Vrabel said. This type of biting sarcasm propels most Vrabel meetings. Harrison remembers Vrabel deadpanning things like, “Still didn’t know it was Cover 3, Asante? Still messing up that call, Willie?” to bust chops during Patriots defensive meetings, and he has not changed his approach in the two decades since. Walker learned to love this. “If a coach cusses you out, yells at you, that means he likes you. He wants you to be great,” Walker said. “If you can’t take coaching to be great, we don’t need you.”

Vrabel’s lack of filter when it comes to football, and his habit of jumping into drills himself, creates a physical, intense practice where you can find basically the entire gamut of human emotions. “Mike is the guy manning a .50 caliber on top of a Humvee or a Bradley and still barking out competent orders,” Falcons head coach Arthur Smith, a former Titans offensive coordinator, said of those practices. “That’s what I love about him. There is no gray area. If you’re sensitive, it is not for you.”

I’d thought about doing a Vrabel story ever since I saw a clip from a Raw Room podcast in which Walker and former teammate Daren Bates told a story about ex-defensive lineman Kevin Dodd getting kicked out of a team meeting, and eventually off the team altogether, after an exchange with Vrabel. Walker’s summary of Vrabel’s intense approach to coaching his players was, it appears, spot-on: “Vrabes is the type of dude to be like, ‘I’ll fight you, I don’t care if you play football; let’s go. And I’ll coach you right after I fight you.’”

Now let’s be clear, Vrabel is not literally fighting players. It just seems like it at times because, well, things can get heated in practice. Then things calm down. “There are no fucking grudges,” Vrabel told me. “There’s a mistake, an argument, a disagreement, whatever happens. In relationships that I have, I’m moving on. We don’t have time to sit there and dwell on what happened. I gotta do my job.”

Vrabel believes that in order to get through to players, he needs to do two things: teach them correctly, and show them that what he’s holding them accountable for is worth it. “Help them become a better player, which in turn is going to help their family make more money,” Vrabel told me of his philosophy. “This is professional sports. We can all say we want to do it for the love of the game. But we also do it to support our families. It’s a tough road to playing professional sports, especially football, so there’s got to be some of that.”

Vrabel said he’ll get through to some players by reminding them that if they take care of their body, they’ll have a better chance to eventually reach free agency and get a payday. The instructions are simple: This will be hard, but lucrative. “Work on your conditioning, which means you can play more snaps, and then make more plays, which in turn is going to mean someone—whether it’s us or somebody else—is going to compensate you accordingly,” Vrabel said.

Safety Amani Hooker said Vrabel will explain in granular detail how one shift in technique can change a career. “Everyone is athletic and can jump,” Hooker said of one of Vrabel’s lessons. “The difference between making a play and missing a play is, ‘Are you going to stab when the ball is coming, or are you going to swat and miss the ball?’”

Offensive lineman Aaron Brewer said he was struggling with the two-hand punch technique and driving down on opponents as a rookie, and that Vrabel practiced it with him, hand in the dirt, in the trenches, “many, many times. He got after my ass,” Brewer said. That’s his way, Brewer explained, of showing love.

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Wide receiver Nick Westbrook-Ikhine said he was surprised the first time Vrabel jumped into a drill—a punt-block drill, to be exact. “He’s still got it,” Westbrook-Ikhine said. Westbrook-Ikhine was rushing off the edge. Vrabel was in protection. “I was not expecting that stout of a figure. I almost slipped,” Westbrook-Ikhine said.

Defensive tackle Teair Tart said that after his first Vrabel practice he felt: “Horrified.” Actually, maybe horrified isn’t the right word. “But it just felt intense. Direct. He knew what he wanted,” Tart said. Eventually Vrabel was in drills with Tart, teaching him how to match his hands with the pad level or pushing from the inside out. Vrabel won him over, Tart said, by “being himself. Period.” That seems to be the whole point.

There is a cliché that great players do not become great coaches, that they lack the ability to teach what was innate to them. Vrabel cuts me off before I can even get the question out. “I don’t think I was a great player,” Vrabel said. “I think I was an above-average player that figured it out. I wasn’t a great, great player.” There is some evidence of this. The stories of future Hall of Fame tackle Orlando Pace dominating Vrabel during their Ohio State practices are legendary. “It was a fucking joke. There’s nobody been ever better than that guy. Fucking joke,” Vrabel said of those matchups. “I mean, just crazy.”

But the truth of the matter is Vrabel was an NFL All-Pro selection in 2007 and an anchor of some of the most successful defenses of all time in New England. His friend, Wisconsin head coach Luke Fickell, said he recently talked to his team about a “buddy who was not a great athlete but he was a great player.” Fickell believes there’s a threshold of talent needed for football intellect and preparation to be able to thrive on the biggest stage, and that Vrabel passed it. Then Vrabel took it from there. “I always say, God is fair, and when he gives you one thing he doesn’t give you the other,” Fickell said. “He made the ultimate balance when he gave Mike enough ability but with these unique attributes that will make you incredibly successful in whatever you do.” Vrabel has said that as a coach he doesn’t want to rely on talent, even if his teams have it—he wants to rely on fundamentals and technique to raise the team’s floor, which feels like an on-the-nose assessment of how his career played out.

Fickell said Vrabel has had the same ethos for at least three decades: “He was 18 years old and you’d say, ‘What did you think of that?’ and he’d say, ‘I think it sucks.’” This, Fickell said, was rare at an age when most people just agreed with their friends. “It wasn’t always popular, that’s why he wasn’t elected captain [at Ohio State]. But if you looked at it, he was the leader. If a guy couldn’t make his runs it wasn’t like, ‘Hey are you OK?’ It’s like, ‘No man, we’re counting on you, your ass is going.’”

Fickell believes we’re in an age when a lot of leaders just sort of steal the style of others. For instance, a lot of people watch The Last Dance and might say of Michael Jordan, “Oh, he was a leader and he was a prick and he would call people out and that’s what I’m gonna be,” Fickell says. “But no. You have to be yourself.” That, of course, is what’s happening in Tennessee.

It started with Jadeveon Clowney. Vrabel started coaching under Fickell at Ohio State in 2011. And there Vrabel figured out quickly that he needed to dramatically improve his teaching skills, doing less telling—look at how Tedy Bruschi or Tamba Hali played this, etc.—and doing more actual coaching. Then, when he started as the linebackers coach for the Texans in 2014, working with then-rookie pass rusher Clowney, he figured out that there are multiple ways to connect with players. “My first [camp] in New England, we did 10 straight two-a-days,” Vrabel said. “You didn’t have to have a week off, you didn’t have to have a day off after the fucking fifth or sixth day. Two guys quit. Two starting guards quit on that Super Bowl team. It was different. That’s not a complaint. I’m trying to always adapt and adjust.”

When he started to coach Clowney, he realized Clowney wanted to be coached from home, and that Vrabel could coach from his office. “You wanted him to respond to a text message, send him a video clip and start explaining and coaching him whether it was good or bad or a little detail that needed to get fixed or he did something we had been working on,” Vrabel said. “You’d get an immediate response and it’s, ‘OK, this is what these guys like, they like to see themselves, they like to watch it on their phone or whatever it may be.’” This, along with having two young sons at the time, got the coach to adjust even more.

Vrabel starts his sixth, and perhaps his most interesting, season as a head coach in less than two weeks. So all of these adjustments and adaptations will be crucial. The Titans are working to develop new quarterbacks like 2023 second-round pick Will Levis and 2022 third-round pick Malik Willis. The team also has a younger than normal roster, and a new general manager in Ran Carthon. Vrabel will need every trick he’s ever learned.

Fortunately, one thing that comes up when you talk to players about Vrabel is his command of every position. He does not limit himself to one position of expertise or even one side of the ball. “He knows their checks and our checks,” safety Kevin Byard said of practices. Ben Jones said Vrabel has meetings on Fridays where he teaches football at large, maybe even a little history, instead of one scheme or focus. What Vrabel wants is the ability to have a functional conversation with every player on his team about what that player’s being taught. “So I can go into a receiver room and talk about a release or talk about a coverage from a defensive standpoint, or settling down versus a trap corner,” Vrabel said. “It’s about easy connections. I cannot have a 30-minute conversation with 90 guys in camp right now, right? But I can go into every meeting room, be seen and I can talk in front of the team meeting about all the plays that come up and some of the details that our position coaches are teaching.”

Vrabel’s journey to understand as many schemes as he could started by playing many roles and in many complicated defenses. As a rookie in Pittsburgh, “3-4, blitzing fucking everywhere,” Vrabel said. Defensive coordinator Jim Haslett would introduce a blitz and they’d be out practicing it two hours later. His time with Bill Belichick only accelerated that. Hell, Vrabel caught 10 touchdowns as a spare tight end with the Patriots. In New England, he also learned about preparation, and size and speed requirements at different positions. Because of his varied football education, he does not exclusively subscribe to any particular scheme. Smith said this is one of the major things he loved about working for Vrabel—how flexible his mind is.

Vrabel told me he believes there are a few non-negotiables to winning: You have to protect the football, affect the other team’s quarterback, and be efficient throwing the football. And be great in situational football: Almost 60 percent of games are decided by eight points or less, and a similar number are won in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter or in overtime. Beyond that, he’s up for more or less anything.

He also believes, Jones said, in individually motivating players. “I came to work every single day and being on that field, being in that locker room, being in a meeting meant something to me,” Jones explained. “So he knew all he had to say is, ‘Hey, you’re not in it, what’s going on?’ He’s questioning my all-in, where my mind was, [why] you’re not bringing the juice, because he knew how bad I wanted to win that championship.” All Vrabel needed to tell Jones—and he often did—was it was hot and Jones should pack it up as an old man. Jones was locked in from there.

“And once you’re one of his guys, he trusts you and then you can bring other guys along with you,” Jones said. “As a leader you had to earn it every day. We have a unique relationship. We would be in each other’s face because I don’t want to come out for a rep, then I’d hit him with a pie for his birthday.”

Jones told me the story behind a now-viral clip of a tunnel hug between the two last year in which Vrabel can be heard saying, “I’ve never seen anything like it,” while getting emotional. Jones said Vrabel knew how hurt Jones was—in that game alone he was battling a stomach flu, torn MCL, and a high ankle sprain. Jones badly wanted to stay in the game and let Derrick Henry finish things off by running out the clock in a four-minute drill. His reasoning was simple: Jones was in Year 11 and “the next oldest guy was in like Year 4. So I wanted to make sure those guys knew I wasn’t going to leave them out to dry. I’m here for you. So I was just trying to be that guy for him. And Mike knew how bad I was hurting and what I was going through that day. He was just—it’s just one of those moments where everything happened.”

But crying is the exception for Vrabel, not the norm. Normally, he’s talking shit to everyone on the practice field. “Saying, ‘We did this when we won a Super Bowl,’” Jones said to describe Vrabel’s mixture of humble brags and just outright brags. “He’ll say, ‘Oh, I used to take all the defensive reps, then turn around and play scout team safety,’ and I’d say, ‘Did you take 100 snaps a day, old man? There’s no way you took all those reps.’”

Unfortunately for Jones and the other players who like to needle Vrabel back, his stories are mostly true. “He loved practicing on the scout team. He loved it. Loved it!” Harrison said. “He didn’t care if he had to be Ed Reed, the free safety, Ray Lewis, middle linebacker, or one of the great defensive ends, he would play that role. I was a great practice player and I’m like, ‘Look at this dude. He’s out running special teams, starting defense, nickel, goal line, and he’s playing scout team defense. That is phenomenal.’” This simply didn’t happen in the NFL, Harrison said. “He’s running R3 [position] on kickoff running down and it’s 90 degrees, full speed, juking guys, tagging off on the runner inside the 20, and he’s celebrating like he had three sacks. It was just so important to him.”

It is still important to Vrabel, of course. But this season, he’s once again looking for the thing he’s always looking for. One time, he said, an opposing coach told him after a game that his team played their asses off. “It was the greatest feeling in the world,” Vrabel said. “It’ll be the best compliment I ever get. Not that we had a good play or a cool blitz. That we played our asses off. That’s all I need.” That and some Peloton wins, I guess.

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