Dear Robert and Jonathan Kraft: Here’s how you win Patriots fans back

COMMENTARY

Extra-belated congratulations, Robert and Jonathan.

You got your football team back last January from that certain brilliant, misanthropic, hoodied grunting ogre who hoarded championship rings right up until he didn’t.

Bill Belichick — said ogre — got an oversized portion of the dynasty-sustaining credit you seemed to believe belonged on your plate.

So after four adequate-to-disastrous post-Tom Brady seasons, you got him gone, and you got control.

It’s your team. It’s your show. But unless all self-awareness eludes the two of you like any decent running back eludes your linebackers, you know this in your bones: You haven’t got everything back.

Here we are — one year, one overmatched one-and-done Belichick successor, one more 4-13 season later — and you’re right back where you started from last January.

You have your team back. But you’ve got some work to do to get your fans back.

Lucky for you, as someone who would prefer, desperately, to write roughly 3,000 words per week of previews and reviews about an interesting football team next season without redundancy (Drake Maye good, rest bad, film at 11), I’m going to help you get this right.

Forget the thank-yous. Just fix this.

The easiest part is right in front of you, right now. Mike Vrabel is coming back to familiar turf on Thursday to interview to be the successor-to-the-successor to Belichick.

I suspect you know what you need to do here anyway, but just in case, we’ll say it:

Don’t give him a reason to think about any other opening. Don’t lowball him, patronize him, or emphasize that he will be answering to you. Do your due diligence, and interview other candidates — particularly Lions coordinators Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn, two brains of Detroit’s exceptional operation.

But don’t mess it up. Hire the coach you should have hired in the first place. Hire Mike Vrabel.

He is the right fit, just as he was the right fit a year ago when you chose to fulfill a written promise to Jerod Mayo and elevate him to a job for which — no fault of his own — he was nowhere near ready.

Opportunities for do-overs don’t come along often in the NFL. This is a golden one — or maybe a red one, given that that’s the color of the Patriots Hall of Fame jacket Vrabel was wearing in October 2023 when the then-Titans coach came back for his induction on his team’s bye week and had the audacity to praise your organization while he was working for another one.

“I don’t want you to take this organization for granted,” Vrabel said that day. “I’ve been a lot of places, this is a special place with great leadership, great fans, great direction, great coaching. Enjoy it. It’s not like this everywhere. Thank you very much.”

It’s not like this everywhere. Titans ownership reportedly took offense to that comment — understandably — which is one reason, and perhaps the main reason, he was fired at the end of the 2023 season. It’s also extremely high praise, even if the question must be raised now: Is it really like that here at this point?

Vrabel can help get this derailed situation back to how he remembers it, and how you should want it to be. I recommend a piece Kevin Clark wrote for The Ringer in August 2023 if you require further detail on what makes him a superb and respected head coach.

But you should already know why. You know him well from his eight seasons here as a stellar outside linebacker and quintessential Patriot from the dynasty’s first phase.

You know him for his sarcastic, hilarious, and sometimes condescending personality, one of the rare players who could chirp Brady and Belichick in practice, or note, as he did back in 2008, that perhaps some of the money being poured into Patriot Place could have gone to Patriots players. Heck, you could not have loved that he mentioned Bill Parcells in his Patriots Hall of Fame acceptance speech. Bet he knew that, too.

Vrabel can get away with those sorts of tweaks because he’s charismatic, imposing, extremely capable, and very, very smart. How many other coaches could have outwitted Belichick by utilizing a play-clock loophole in a playoff game, a loophole Belichick discovered and was almost comically furious to have used against him. It was Vrabel’s Titans that ended the Brady era that season, knocking the wobbling Patriots out of the playoffs in the 2019 wild-card round.

Right, you probably remember that.

Vrabel — who has all the benefits of playing for and learning from Belichick, but has enough experience elsewhere that he’s a freestanding tree rather than a coaching-tree branch — is in an enviable spot, and he knows how to use it.

He interviewed with the Jets, and it certainly appears like it hastened your decision to dismiss Mayo. His old buddy and practice-field nemesis Brady might be able to sell him on the Raiders, even if the best quarterback in the organization is a minority owner. It’s almost as if Vrabel is not a candidate for coaching jobs, but rather a coveted recruit. He has leverage over you, and you had better know it.

Hire him. Oh, and when you introduce him at the news conference, don’t say he was “ready, willing, and Vrabel.” That bombed at the Hall of Fame ceremony, and it will bomb as a sequel.

One last word of advice, which surely you will respect from a sportswriter, as everyone of great riches and power does. It’s time to be transparent — about everything. No more trying to manipulate fans (and Hall of Fame voters) with self-aggrandizing projects such as “The Dynasty.” No more pretending Jonathan is preoccupied with overseeing the perforation department at the box-making facility. If he’s heavily involved with the football operations of this team — and of course he is — then acknowledge it. And this is a long shot, but maybe even take some responsibility for Brady leaving and how it all went south. You could have stood up to the ogre.

Yeah, you got your team back. Overdue congrats, again.

Now go hire Mike Vrabel, and entrust it again to someone who has a clue on what to do with it.

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