New England Patriots
“In my life, with big decisions, I’ve always gone with my nose,” Kraft said.
Mike Vrabel and Robert Kraft during the 2025 season. Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe
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NFL head coaches getting fired after one season has become more common in the last 12 years.
According to ESPN, Pete Carroll became the 11th coach in 12 years to join the list in January when the Raiders fired him last month. Jerod Mayo joined the list in 2024, when Robert Kraft fired him after a 4-13 season.
“This whole situation is on me. I feel terrible for Jerod because I put him in an untenable situation,” Kraft said at the time. “I know that he has all the tools as a head coach to be successful in this league.”
“He just needed more time before taking the job. In the end, I’m a fan of this team first, and now, I have to go out and find a coach who can get us back to the playoffs and hopefully championships.”
Ousting a coach so quickly is not exactly a rare move, but it’s not particularly common either.
The Patriots hired Mike Vrabel less than a week after Mayo’s firing. They are set to play against the Seahawks in Super Bowl LX on Sunday at the conclusion of Vrabel’s first season coaching the team.
In an interview with The Athletic, team owner Robert Kraft spoke about why he felt so strongly about making the move in such a short amount of time.
With both the Patriots and his other businesses, Kraft said he has had a knack for doing things that felt right to him but may have seemed “crazy” to others.
“In my life, with big decisions, I’ve always gone with my nose,” Kraft said. “I did things that people thought were crazy. But my nose — they don’t teach you that stuff at Harvard Business School. And I think the best decisions I’ve made were following what my instincts tell me.”
The Patriots’ rebuild came along sooner than anticipated. Kraft called the 2023 and 2024 seasons the worst of his 32 years owning the team.
Keeping Tom Brady and Bill Belichick in Foxborough for two decades showed that there were a pair of positions that the Patriots had to get right.
“To be good long term, you need a coach and a quarterback,” Kraft said. “And when Mike Vrabel was available, I just thought knowing how he was as a player, and in talking to him, how he had evolved as a human being, how he won with us and saw the culture, how he went and had experience at another place, I felt a chemistry with him. I thought he had all the different factors.”
Vrabel’s experience as a player, along his previous experience coaching the Titans set him apart, Kraft said.
The former Patriots linebacker was a member of three Super Bowl championship teams. He carved out a role after beginning his career as a special-teamer with the Steelers. By 2007, he had worked himself into a First-Team All-Pro caliber player. He was a hard-hitting linebacker and a red zone threat at tight end, and his versatility helped him stay in the league for more than a decade.
Then, he returned to his alma mater, Ohio State, as an assistant coach in 2011. After a few years he broke into the NFL coaching ranks as a linebackers coach with the Texans. He later spent six years as head coach of the Titans, taking Tennessee to the AFC championship game in 2019, and winning NFL Coach of the Year in 2021.
Things ultimately went south during the end of Vrabel’s Titans tenure, and Tennessee fired him after back-to-back losing seasons.
But Kraft pounced on the chance to bring Vrabel to the Patriots. He credited Vrabel, not just with handling his coaching job well, but also with helping overhaul the Patriots’ roster during free agency.
“He had product knowledge that we didn’t,” Kraft said of the offseason moves. “We spent more money than anyone in that year, but I believed in the team. And it worked out pretty well.”
Khari A. Thompson
Khari Thompson covers professional sports for Boston.com. Before joining the team in 2022, Khari covered college football for The Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Miss.
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