Sign up for the Today newsletter
Get everything you need to know to start your day, delivered right to your inbox every morning.
Mike Vrabel critiqued NFL replay review and joked about his sideline sprint after first Patriots’ win
"Hopefully, this trend of these linemen false starting and then patting each other on the back after the game can end."
At the outset of Mike Vrabel’s Monday morning interview on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” following the Patriots’ 33-27 win over the Dolphins, the hosts immediately jumped into discussion of the New England head coach running down the sidelines during Antonio Gibson’s dramatic kickoff return touchdown.
How fast does Vrabel think he was running if it had been a 40-yard dash?
“About 5.8 [seconds],” Vrabel admitted. “That headset’s a lot heavier than you think.”
Stefon Diggs’s joking postgame assessment that his coach is “slow as hell” was brought up.
“It’s more for endurance than speed. It’s built for the long haul,” Vrabel said of his 6-foot-4 frame.
Advertisement:
Eventually, discussion turned to the more substantive subject of the back-and-forth nature of Sunday’s AFC East matchup, and that the Patriots achieved the first win of the Vrabel era by responding to adversity.
“That’s how some of these games go,” Vrabel said. “We’d love to be up 30-3, and if [we] are, we’ll plan accordingly and we’ll be OK. But you get into these back-and-forths, you have to just believe that you’re going to make enough plays in the end to win.
“I felt like we did that, and that was good to see,” he added. “I think we needed to see it, and our players needed to see it, and feel it, and be in there and say, ‘Hey, we could have a couple bad plays, somebody’s going to make a play.’ Which we did numerous times. So we answered back.”
Advertisement:
Vrabel moved on to discussion of his quarterback, Drake Maye.
“Drake was very efficient,” the Patriots coach noted. Maye finished his day 19-of-23 passing, with three touchdowns (two passing, one rushing) and no turnovers.
“That was something that we’ve talked about for a long time is just putting the ball where you’re supposed to put it, where it needs to go based on their coverage and our scheme,” Vrabel said of Maye. “He did that. I thought he transferred into the pocket well being on the silent count [against] good edge rushers, guys with good get-off.”
Here are a few other topics Vrabel covered:
“Hopefully, this trend of these linemen false starting and then patting each other on the back after the game can end.”
The weekly question about Will Campbell, the fourth overall pick from the 2025 NFL Draft, elicited an expansive response from Vrabel.
Asked if he thinks Campbell is turning into the leader the Patriots want, the New England head coach tentatively agreed.
“I think that he shows up every single day and I think he does his job and he cares extremely about this football team, and so I think that’s starting to make him a leader,” Vrabel said. “I think he’s prepared. I think he executes for the most part in the game. He knows what to do. So I think that that makes him a leader.”
Advertisement:
Campbell encouraged fellow offensive tackle Morgan Moses after the latter committed a series of false starts on Sunday. It came a week after Moses did the same for Campbell in reversed circumstances.
Vrabel, hearing the story of his linemen helping raise each other’s spirits, couldn’t resist the sarcastic commentary of a coach.
“Hopefully, this trend of these linemen false starting and then patting each other on the back after the game can end,” he joked. “We only have three more linemen to go. We’re 40-percent of the way done here, ‘You know, it happens. don’t worry, it happened.’ Hopefully, three more weeks we’re done with this.”
“I’m OK losing a challenge, but give me the courtesy of taking a look at it in a two-minute window.”
On the subject of officiating, Vrabel seemed less than pleased with the performance of Sunday’s crew in Miami.
Noting that the team will address false starts, he took exception with one call made against Campbell.
“Will didn’t move. Will pointed at the guy that’s rushing and they called false start,” Vrabel claimed.
“I’m not going to go through the crew,” he continued of the officials. “They made some good calls, I’m sure there are ones they’d like to have back.”
He also bristled at the outcome of a third quarter challenge that was made regarding a 23-yard completion to Dolphins wide receiver Jaylen Waddle in the third quarter.
Advertisement:
When WEEI co-host Greg Hill said that he thought the Patriots should have won the challenge, Vrabel’s sense of humor rose to the surface again.
“Tough day, I guess,” he quipped. “We know how this thing goes. It goes to New York, and there’s one guy looking at three games, and there’s one guy looking at another three games. They can tell us what they want, but for it to be expedited was shocking.
“I’m OK losing a challenge, but give me the courtesy of taking a look at it in a two-minute window,” he said.
“Didn’t survive the ground,” Vrabel added of what he thought regarding Waddle’s catch, which was confirmed by officials after a quick review. “We know what the rule is — he’s going to the ground, it wasn’t like he had made a third step and completed it and it came off his body. It came loose. So we’ll keep swinging. We have a good feel for how these things go on replay. Again, judgment.”
Defensive “concerns” in context
While the Patriots got a first win in Miami since 2019, Sunday’s game was not without its tough moments for the visitors. The defense yielded some big plays for the second week in a row.
Vrabel acknowledged that his defense is a work in progress, but also offered to contextualize some of what Miami did within the parameters of his own team’s scheme.
“Our whole intention was to defend inside the numbers,” he explained, “and make sure that that was not where it was hurting us. We did OK there, and then obviously they felt comfortable throwing those outward-breaking routes, and not that I’m accepting of it, but we have to be able to say, ‘This is what the game-plan was.’
Advertisement:
“So I think there are certainly some plays we need to correct. We cant have the ball thrown over our heads on 3rd and 15 and Tyreek Hill just blazing out of there, so those are concerns,” he concluded. “But the other ones, some of them are on us, and how we wanted to play the football game, making sure we were defending them [in the] middle of the field where they’ve had so much success.”
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com