Vrabel named HC of the NEP

staz

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The cradle of the game.
You could make that exact same statement with Mayo.
Setting the above textbook Straw Man fallacy aside, certainly.

Now putting the point back into context... Mayo does not have 6 years' HC experience, Mayo did not coach his team to the playoffs 3 times, and Mayo did not win Coach of the Year.
 

j-man

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i like the hire i just wish kraft would had took a look at the SF and Rams Off get some new blood i mean 2001-2019 was the best run in sports no q but sometimes to get a ring fast u have to be open to new ideas and viewpoints

i had over 30 teachers in my school career and a few of them i was very sad when i had to move on but i learned new ideas and viewpoints and was better for it this is like if i loved my 7th and 8th grade teach from new hamp and thought only her ideas worked and no one else
 

jercra

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Inherited a 9-7 team. Has never rebuilt a team. Last 2 years he was well below .500. Has never developed a QB (which is really what we should be looking for).
He had the best record in the NFL one year - he is not a bad hire at all. But there is a whole lot he has never done.
Who were the.available candidates that took a terrible NFL team and made them successful, had an above .500 record their last 2 years and also developed a QB? If those were your requirements for HC, then there was no one to hire.
 

jercra

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i like the hire i just wish kraft would had took a look at the SF and Rams Off get some new blood i mean 2001-2019 was the best run in sports no q but sometimes to get a ring fast u have to be open to new ideas and viewpoints

i had over 30 teachers in my school career and a few of them i was very sad when i had to move on but i learned new ideas and viewpoints and was better for it this is like if i loved my 7th and 8th grade teach from new hamp and thought only her ideas worked and no one else
What does this mean practically? Like, they should have hired someone from SF or LA as the head coach? I think Vrabel is an excellent coach and will be even better in his second stint, but even if he was a "safe hire" (he wasn't), this team doesn't need to work on their molecular gastronomy skills right now, they need to learn how to cook a steak properly. The basics are so broken that just getting a competent adult in control was the first priority.

If it was just to talk to people from those orgs, who knows if they have or haven't? Maybe they'll fill out their whole staff with those guys? There's a long way to go before we have the whole picture.
 

luckiestman

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Who were the.available candidates that took a terrible NFL team and made them successful, had an above .500 record their last 2 years and also developed a QB? If those were your requirements for HC, then there was no one to hire.

Too easy: PETE CARROLL
 

jercra

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Well i stand corrected. He was obviously the one to hire. There could have been no complaints.
 

Jimbodandy

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Not sure why folks are pushing back on Vrabel being called a safe hire. He's obviously a safe hire. That doesn't mean that he's a bad hire.

Also the "process wonks" who think that we need a committee to hire a coach confuse me.

Carry on.
 

Eddie Jurak

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Not sure why folks are pushing back on Vrabel being called a safe hire. He's obviously a safe hire. That doesn't mean that he's a bad hire.

Also the "process wonks" who think that we need a committee to hire a coach confuse me.

Carry on.
I think "safe" implies that they were looking for something other than the best possible hire.

To some degree, this almost looks like Mike Vrabel hired the Pats and not the other way around.
 

rodderick

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Not sure why folks are pushing back on Vrabel being called a safe hire. He's obviously a safe hire. That doesn't mean that he's a bad hire.

Also the "process wonks" who think that we need a committee to hire a coach confuse me.

Carry on.
The Patriots have made the two quickest coaching hires in the league since 2019. But maybe the Krafts do have the secret sauce and everyone else is just a collection of morons who waste their time interviewing multiple qualified people to fill one of the most demanding position in sports. Doesn't mean Vrabel is a bad hire, but when you have guys like Brian Flores and Aaron Glenn available and you choose to schedule interviews with Pep Hamilton and Byron Leftwich on the same day in the most blatant "let's get this Rooney Rule bullshit out of the way" move in recent history in order to laser focus on one guy, I'm going to question it.
 

CoffeeNerdness

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But maybe the Krafts do have the secret sauce and everyone else is just a collection of morons who waste their time interviewing multiple qualified people to fill one of the most demanding position in sports.
If they were wasting their time interviewing half the jokers that the Jets are interviewing you'd be talking about a much more questionable process, imo. It feels like this new-ish method of interviewing 10+ candidates correlates to the rise of using these outside consultancy firms to help in the hiring process. Getting Woody to waste his time and money interviewing Ron Rivera - who as a HC twice over (a la McDaniels) probably isn't getting another HC job, sounds like a straight up grift to me. Of course these firms want to line up as many interviews as possible.
 

Jimbodandy

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I think "safe" implies that they were looking for something other than the best possible hire.

To some degree, this almost looks like Mike Vrabel hired the Pats and not the other way around.
I get it. I just think that people are placing their own cognitive biases on that word, whether writing or reading it. Safe means safe. It doesn't mean "shame on Robert for not thinking outside of the box". I'm not even the biggest fan of this choice, but it's not like "experienced NFL head coach with experience in the New England market" is an avant garde choice. It's the opposite of that. It's safe.

The Patriots have made the two quickest coaching hires in the league since 2019. But maybe the Krafts do have the secret sauce and everyone else is just a collection of morons who waste their time interviewing multiple qualified people to fill one of the most demanding position in sports. Doesn't mean Vrabel is a bad hire, but when you have guys like Brian Flores and Aaron Glenn available and you choose to schedule interviews with Pep Hamilton and Byron Leftwich on the same day in the most blatant "let's get this Rooney Rule bullshit out of the way" move in recent history in order to laser focus on one guy, I'm going to question it.
Anyone saying that Robert has secret sauce is nuts, agreed. But why are we taking for generally accepted fact that a giant search committee or paid consulting firm is a "must have" when doing a search. How many bad decisions and horrible hires have resulted from committees and paid consulting firms? It's not a given by any means that such a drawn-out process necessarily results in good decisions.

If they were wasting their time interviewing half the jokers that the Jets are interviewing you'd be talking about a much more questionable process, imo. It feels like this new-ish method of interviewing 10+ candidates correlates to the rise of using these outside consultancy firms to help in the hiring process. Getting Woody to waste his time and money interviewing Ron Rivera - who as a HC twice over (a la McDaniels) probably isn't getting another HC job, sounds like a straight up grift to me. Of course these firms want to line up as many interviews as possible.
Exactly.

If people are biased to think that the Krafts are gumps who are bound to screw this up, there's probably no way to talk them out of it. Moreover, if people are biased to think that long-form search committees is the only way to do business, then I guess we'll agree to disagree. I'll reiterate--saying "we should do it the way that the Jets are doing it" makes it sound like one hasn't watched Woody Johnson run a franchise. We're at our lowest point for Patriots fandom since Will McDonough was still writing hit pieces, and the Jets are still a bigger fucking joke than we are.
 

Myt1

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I think that the issue is less one of search committees and more one of the specific facts at issue here:

1. The Patriots just fired a one year coach after an absolute disaster of a hiring process. Unmitigated disaster. I’m tempted to go look at the thread on that to see how sanguine people were in real time.

2. When questioned about that hiring process, in its immediate aftermath, the owner pointed to his track record of hiring coaches as evidence that he didn’t need a different process.

3. Very early on, it seemed like Vrabel was the owner’s choice, almost a fait accompli. It’s not entirely fair to put all of this on the organization, given Vrabel’s ties to the team and relationship with the owner; people would have speculated no matter what. But that Patriots seemed to do nothing to dispel that notion.

4. The interview season kicked off with two obvious sham interviews.

5. Some reporting before the Johnson interview was that the Patriots were open to being “wowed by him,” which doesn’t give the impression of an open minded process.

6. There has also been a fair amount of reporting of general institutional decay and failure to modernize operations, putting the Patriots well behind other teams in the league in terms of infrastructure and function.

Look, Vrabel seems to have some good qualities that make him a strong candidate, and I really hope that it works out. He was obviously in demand, so maybe the result is good even if the process wasn’t.

But there’s plenty here, directly about the Patriots themselves fucking things up with a bad process just the last time around, with enough smoke of similarities for concern. We don’t really have to look at what Woody Johnson is doing to be concerned independently.
 

rodderick

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I get it. I just think that people are placing their own cognitive biases on that word, whether writing or reading it. Safe means safe. It doesn't mean "shame on Robert for not thinking outside of the box". I'm not even the biggest fan of this choice, but it's not like "experienced NFL head coach with experience in the New England market" is an avant garde choice. It's the opposite of that. It's safe.



Anyone saying that Robert has secret sauce is nuts, agreed. But why are we taking for generally accepted fact that a giant search committee or paid consulting firm is a "must have" when doing a search. How many bad decisions and horrible hires have resulted from committees and paid consulting firms? It's not a given by any means that such a drawn-out process necessarily results in good decisions.



Exactly.

If people are biased to think that the Krafts are gumps who are bound to screw this up, there's probably no way to talk them out of it. Moreover, if people are biased to think that long-form search committees is the only way to do business, then I guess we'll agree to disagree. I'll reiterate--saying "we should do it the way that the Jets are doing it" makes it sound like one hasn't watched Woody Johnson run a franchise. We're at our lowest point for Patriots fandom since Will McDonough was still writing hit pieces, and the Jets are still a bigger fucking joke than we are.
Plenty, because it's a flawed, subjective process to begin with. There's no perfect way to do it, and sometimes the gut instinct works itself out wonderfully. I didn't want them to conduct a 12 person wide search either, but is there any justification for not fulfilling the requirements of the Rooney Rule with two qualified candidates, at the very least? Because they were available. I'm not naive, no job search of this nature begins with every single candidate in the same spot, it's perfecly fine and normal to have preferences and it's impossible to judge the extent to which said pre conceptions potentially affect the outcome of the process, I just think a little more perspective could help, even it doesn't guarantee anything. Not even arguing for way more people to be involved in the decision making, just for hearing more candidates out.
 

Jimbodandy

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Yeah @rodderick and others, I understand the reservations that you have about the Krafts making a good choice. It's fair and completely defensible. They just fired a coach after one year, a non-interim coach, so clearly even they perceive the last HC choice as a whiff. They're on a losing streak here. And yes, a couple more qualified candidates would have given the impression of a more robust process. Probably would have been more ideal. But the vibe that I was getting from this thread was a clutching of pearls over not firing up a search committee, with a side of "like Woody Johnson did". That's what I was pushing back on. There is a happy medium for sure.
 

rodderick

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Yeah @rodderick and others, I understand the reservations that you have about the Krafts making a good choice. It's fair and completely defensible. They just fired a coach after one year, a non-interim coach, so clearly even they perceive the last HC choice as a whiff. They're on a losing streak here. And yes, a couple more qualified candidates would have given the impression of a more robust process. Probably would have been more ideal. But the vibe that I was getting from this thread was a clutching of pearls over not firing up a search committee, with a side of "like Woody Johnson did". That's what I was pushing back on. There is a happy medium for sure.
I'm actually happy with the Vrabel hire, so I don't want to keep repeating myself over and over on this any longer, it's boring and honestly not very productive after the choice has been made. I get your point.
 

NomarsFool

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Even a broken clock is right twice a day. The Krafts seem to generally be almost idiotic in the way they pick head coaches, but once in awhile they've been lucky enough to get it right.
 

Archer1979

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Hiring Vrabel tells me that the Krafts are looking for an organizational overhaul. He's a known commodity; knows how to coach players; knows how to manage a game. Had the Krafts gone with someone devoid of head coaching experience, it tells me that the front office would stay as is for at least one more season if not more as, and we saw this with Mayo, there is a learning curve in being a head coach so you want them to concentrate on that and let the FO do its job. With Vrabel, I think the FO is going to see a major facelift.

One thing to bear in mind is that Belichick and his culture were pervasive in all facets of the business. When he left, there was a vacuum that did not get filled. Sure, they had bodies in the positions, but its been obvious that they weren't really the right bodies.

This team is already better than they were a week ago.
 

Van Everyman

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I think "safe" implies that they were looking for something other than the best possible hire.

To some degree, this almost looks like Mike Vrabel hired the Pats and not the other way around.
You know who wasn’t a safe hire? Jerod Mayo. It may have gone completely wrong but you can’t accuse Kraft of taking the safe route elevating a veritable position coach with no play calling experience to be HC of the NEP.


6. There has also been a fair amount of reporting of general institutional decay and failure to modernize operations, putting the Patriots well behind other teams in the league in terms of infrastructure and function.
Breer has been at the forefront of this, Curran is hammering on some of it as well. I think a lot of it is a bit natural and kind of reminds me of some of the conversations happening around baseball FO. We just moved on from a guy who had a small staff because he preferred a handful of guys he trusted to a bunch of guys he didn’t know as well. He also had some old school ways of doing things and a lot of the work was done in his head. So it shouldn’t be surprising that they “are behind the rest of the league” on having a modern infrastructure – they had little need for one until the last few years.

The thing I think people miss a little about the Krafts is that they run the Pats a little like a family business where decisions are often made with a smaller group of people and culture is really important. I’ve been okay with the idea of them moving a little slowly—elevating internally and seeing what Wolf brought to the table with more say—rather than cleaning house immediately. Part of the evaluation people have been clamoring for should include understanding what they had in house already since building culture is really hard to do and the one thing you could say about the Pats to this point was that they had a strong institutional culture that I think Kraft also was hoping to maintain in some respects.

We kid about the whole Patriot Way shit but less so about Do Your Job (Well), the ignore the noise stuff and what not because they had real buy-in. Was it all Bill? Maybe. But I think they were right to want to find out and I don’t think it’s necessarily ego or sentimentality to do so. And while Mayo apparently wasn’t the right guy to try that out with, the odds of Vrabel being able to succeed with his version it are likely higher.
 

snowmanny

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5. Some reporting before the Johnson interview was that the Patriots were open to being “wowed by him,” which doesn’t give the impression of an open minded process.
I agree with basically everything you said. And I believe this could be a perfectly good hire and I am reasonably sure we will see an upgrade in the quality of the coaching staff from this year to next.

But on point 5, I just want to add ( if the reporting is accurate ), that that thought process by Kraft is a little odd and does illuminate the limits of the search. It means that he was pretty much set on Vrabel, but acknowledged the possibility that there was someone out there who could conceivably “wow” him and blow him out of the water to the degree that he might change his mind. And then he identified one (1) person who might fall into that category*, interviewed him, and decided such a person probably didn’t exist and it was better to just hire Vrabel.

I mean, fine, the search was what the search was and this might be a very fine hire. Kraft seems more comfortable with people he knows. Lots of bosses are like that.

*Maybe two, if you count the other Lions coordinator.
 
Oct 12, 2023
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Vrabel, setting aside his irrelevant connection to the Pats and just focusing on demonstrated coaching track record, isn’t such an obviously better candidate than others (coordinators or retreads) that he needed to be speedrun into job without a thorough search

Great, he got his team to the playoffs and is a coach of the year winner. Ron Rivera is a two time coach of the year and got his team to the Super Bowl. Why was he not interviewed? Why were other former coaches not interviewed? Matt Nagy was a coach of the year. Saleh might have been interesting to at least consider.

Vrabel was 100% a Kraft vibes hire. Is he a decent coach? Yeah I’d say he has proven he can be decent (better than Mayo for sure). Is he the best possible option? I’m waiting to hear a cogent argument at what separates Vrabel from the pack beyond BS “patriots way” stuff.

Take out the nostalgia and what really makes Vrabel so much better than other former coaches who are unemployed and have taken teams to the playoffs?

He might be a great fit and take the Pats to the playoffs. But I don’t think it’s so screamingly obvious that an actual search didn’t need to be conducted and a wide net cast.
 
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Wouldn't they by definition have to be more wowed by a guy with zero HC experience vs. Vrabel?
well they didn’t consider other experienced guys and had no issue installing Mayo and a completely inexperienced staff last year so I’m not sure experience is something Kraft cares about
 

lexrageorge

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well they didn’t consider other experienced guys and had no issue installing Mayo and a completely inexperienced staff last year so I’m not sure experience is something Kraft cares about
But they did pick the guy with experience as head coach this go around.
 

Eric Fernsten's Disco Mustache

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5. Some reporting before the Johnson interview was that the Patriots were open to being “wowed by him,” which doesn’t give the impression of an open minded process.
But on point 5, I just want to add ( if the reporting is accurate ), that that thought process by Kraft is a little odd and does illuminate the limits of the search.

I think we should keep trying to ground this sort of conversation in the facts, and what is known vs. not

We have no evidence that that whole "open to being wowed" actually reflects Kraft's mindset, or that of anyone else in the process. It's a phrase that a journalist wrote up and did not attribute to anyone inside the Patriot's organization

We shouldn't assume that journalists are reporting anything accurate about what's happening in the room, unless they come with much more substantial evidence that anything that's been reported the last couple of weeks
 

jsinger121

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This press conference is night and day different than the crap of a year ago when there was zero plan talked about.