PATRIOT REIGN? How Mike Vrabel and Drake Maye can restart a dynasty of their own
The End of Belichick wasn't pretty, but hope is renewed again in Foxborough with a coach turning games into street fights and a quarterback who's ascending.
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — The showers were a pigsty. A scene straight out of a college frat house. His first spring on the job, Mike Vrabel noticed that players were leaving washcloths all over the shower floors and refused to let this slide.
During a team meeting, the New England Patriots’ new head coach told everyone that the equipment staff is forced pick up all of their dirty washcloths — and that’s unacceptable. The bin of dirty clothes is right there. So, it was pretty simple. Vrabel let players know that he informed the equipment staff not to clean any of those washcloths. Anything left on the ground, that day forward, would only be dried. If they weren’t going to show the equipment staff respect, they didn’t deserve any in return.
There has not been one washcloth left on the ground since.
“If you want to win, you do the small things,” running back Antonio Gibson says. “We’re grown men. Pick up after yourself.”
Everyone knows to watch film on their own time. “Because” adds Pro Bowl special-teamer Brenden Schooler, “everyone’s too good in this league to just rely on talent.” Players cannot show up to a meeting one minute late. The starting time is the starting time for a reason. Players must take care of the cafeteria, the weight room, the training room like it’s their own home. “You’re not letting somebody come in your house,” Schooler adds, “and leave washcloths over the place. These guys aren’t your nannies.”
All of which is a direct extension of the head coach’s very first address to his team captured on video. He tells players to be on time for meetings and — inside those meetings? — he asks players to pull their hoods down and leave their cell phones on silent in their bag. There’s no need for a pretend cough if the phone goes off. Vrabel assures he’s seen every trick in the book over his 25 years in the league. When it’s time to lift weights? He asks players to leave their phone on the counter or their locker. He doesn’t want to see guys slip into the time-suck habit of doing a set, checking the phone, doing a set, checking the phone.
He implores everyone to treat the support staff with the utmost respect. If they have an issue, Vrabel tells players to cuss him out. He doesn’t want to hear them belittling anyone in the kitchen or training room.
And, above all, he vows these Patriots will build something they’d be proud of and protect at all costs.
“We’re building our own identity,” Vrabel says.
So, that was our charge at Go Long. When one of the greatest dynasties in sports crumbles to dirt, how does that organization rebuild again? In a league rigged to promote parity, Bill Belichick’s Patriots somehow went 266-121. They reached nine Super Bowls, won six and had a surreal stretch of 17 division titles over a 19-year stretch. Then, the empire fell. Belichick’s final days were bizarre. The Jerod Mayo Experiment combusted. Before those washcloths, there was trash all over a deteriorating sauna, one coach (Belichick) dating a woman five decades younger, another coach (Mayo) calling his team “soft,” and a litany of issues behind the scenes that had 2024 coaches thinking they had slipped into a time machine.
Many franchises that’ve lorded over their respective sports wander through a wilderness of mediocrity for a decade or two — the post-Lombardi Packers, post-Jordan Bulls, etc. — because it’s impossible to carbon copy a blueprint that worked in one era and apply it to another. These Patriots spent an entire generation humiliating AFC East foes. Now, they’re the ones chasing the Buffalo Bills and MVP quarterback Josh Allen. Once upon a time, the Patriots’ dynasty was launched with one Jets resignation scribbled on a napkin Jan. 4, 2000 and one bone-rattling hit of Drew Bledsoe Sept. 23, 2001. Belichick and Brady changed the sport.
Now, Mike Vrabel and Drake Maye join forces.
Players believe something special is building inside the locker room, thanks to the quarterback with the legitimate star potential and the head coach who wants to turn Sundays into street fights. They see the pelts on Vrabel’s wall.
“New energy. New juice. And the guys that he surrounded himself, all of our coaches, are a testament to him,” says Schooler, a man who’s experienced Belichick, Mayo and Vrabel. “So having him at the helm of our ship — with all the experience he’s had — he is the leader, the spearhead when we’re going into games. We’re following him into these games.”
His relentlessness is infectious. Most teams max out for a quarter, a half. Very few have the mental stamina to throw punches all game. One handpicked renegade from New England’s offseason spending spree — 34-year-old tackle Morgan Moses — promises the Patriots are creating a team that’ll fight for 60 minutes… with a distinctive attitude. “A certain fuck-it,” play to play, he calls it. Society’s softening. Football’s gone finesse. The Patriots, under Vrabel, see an opportunity in 2025 to stand out. That’s why Vrabel repeats exactly what he wants out of his players every damn day. “Until,” Moses adds, “it’s embedded into your system.” The head coach is one of them, hurling himself into training-camp scuffles and chasing kick returners down the sideline on gamedays.
And if these Patriots learned anything from their own collapse, it’s that it doesn’t matter how many times a coach howls Do Your Job. Quarterback is king.
Maye has all the early signs of blossoming into the next elite passer.
The third overall pick in the 2024 draft is universally heralded by players, by coaches, even by discarded members of Mayo’s staff as the entire package.
“I don’t know what his ceiling is,” says backup QB Josh Dobbs. “I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t think he knows.”
This team is far from being a finished product. Nobody’s talking about hoisting the Lombardi Trophy yet. But there’s real hope.
First, let’s sift through the dusty ruins of a fallen empire.
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Ironically enough, Mike Vrabel is the rebel who overthrew the Patriots’ tyrannical rule over the AFC. His Tennessee Titans stunned the Patriots in the 2019 wild card, Belichick bid Tom Brady farewell and — to the shock of many in the organization — the greatest coach in NFL history didn’t have a plan at quarterback.
Instead, the Patriots rolled with Cam Newton and reset the salary cap through the 2020 Covid season. Honestly, it’s a miracle the coaching staff squeezed a 7-9 record out of a three-win roster. The next spring, Mac Jones was appointed quarterback heir and even made the playoffs in Year 1. OC Josh McDaniels departed and, in the words of one team exec, “everything got crazier.”