Depending upon how you feel about being in the employ of cantankerous octogenerian billionaires you’re extolling praise on one of the coaches named Mike making this morning’s news cycle and lamenting the fate of the other. But it’s entirely possible depending upon your POV which gets which may differ in your case.
On the one hand, it’s easy to celebrate the fact that Mike Vrabel has reunited with his beloved New England Patriots, with the official coronation occuring at a Monday press conference which CBS SPORTS’ Tyler Sullivan covered;
It’s the dawn of a new era at 1 Patriots Place, where the club introduced Mike Vrabel as the 16th head coach in franchise history on Monday. This comes after a quick interview process conducted by the organization, who came to terms with Vrabel to be their next head coach essentially a week after their 2024 regular season came to a close. With Vrabel now acquired, New England will hope to have just as quick of a bounce-back to relevance after consecutive 4-13 campaigns.
“In the interview process, Mike showed us that he had a very deep understanding of our current team, and most importantly, he had a clear and focused strategy of how to get us back to the championship way that is not only so important to all of us but also something that I think our fan base really deserves and expects,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft remarked as he opened up the introductory press conference from inside a pavilion at Gillette Stadium.
The rhetoric sounds nice, and indeed Vrabel has earned the opportunity, having taken the reins with a troubled Tennessee Titans franchise and winning more than 54% of his games over a six-year run that took them as far as the AFC championship game. But it sounds waaaay too familiar in tone and verbiage to not notice that it’s eerily similar to what Kraft expressed about another person with deep understanding of his team a mere five months ago, as PATRIOTS WIRE’s Danny Jaillet reported at the time:
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft broke down why he chose Jerod Mayo to be the head coach of the organization, as the Patriots are set to begin their season on Sunday.
I’m always thinking about what’s right for the long term. Our businesses are private. I don’t need to make reports to Wall Street every 90 days. I do what the right thing is strategically long term. And I think I’ve done that with Jerod. I’m going to do what my gut tells me, and stay with it until I’m convinced it’s not right.”
It looks like when you get up there in age your gut can play tricks on you, which Kraft all but confessed a week earlier as reported by NEWSWEEK’s Sean Treppedi:
Robert Kraft showed no shame in taking full ownership of how New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo’s first and only season at the helm shook out.
Kraft, the New England Patriots CEO and Chairman, addressed the press on Monday to discuss the firing of Mayo along with fielding questions on other topics within the organization. “This whole situation is on me,” Kraft said. “I feel terrible for Jerod, because I put him in an untenable situation. 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.”
So Vrabel is now the golden boy returning to the roost, and it’s anticipated that he will have slightly more rope than Mayo had. But that’s merely an assumption given the way 2024 unfolded, and the fact that Kraft isn’t getting any younger.
Nor is Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who after a week of hemming and hawing–or perhaps a desire to hog the news cycle for himself–finally made the decision to part ways with his Mike, but not before creating a dumpster fire’s worth of distraction, as THE ATHLETIC’s Saad Yousuf noted in his Monday piece:
For one frozen moment, it doesn’t matter whether you thought the Dallas Cowboys should extend Mike McCarthy to continue as their coach, or whether you’re content with their decision to part ways with the guy who has been at the helm the past five years.
Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones has united both sides of the discourse. Whether you thought McCarthy should stay or go, most would agree the way Jones and the Cowboys reached this conclusion was lousy and unnecessary.
Last week, the Chicago Bears requested permission from the Cowboys to interview McCarthy for their vacant head-coaching position. Although McCarthy’s contract with the Cowboys expired last week, they held an exclusive negotiating window with McCarthy until Tuesday. The Cowboys declined Chicago’s request.
That move made it seem like there was real substance to the Cowboys’ interest in bringing back McCarthy. Perhaps all of the over-the-top compliments Jones gave McCarthy the past two months in the media wasn’t just deflective.
For six days after declining McCarthy the opportunity to speak to the Bears, the Cowboys remained silent. Other teams continued conducting coaching interviews. The New England Patriots even made their hire. Dallas did nothing, until it parted ways with McCarthy on Monday. The optics are terrible.
And this morning, as SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’s Randy Gurzi reported, we learned even more about the grandiose master plan of the biggest ego in Texas:
It seems as though Jerry Jones had a master plan for the Dallas Cowboys head coaching position, which was surely flawless in his mind.
NFL insider Jane Slater said Jones, who is on record saying he sees Jason Witten as a future NFL head coach, spoke with Witten about a position on the team “in recent weeks.”She believes that Jones wanted Witten to be groomed to become the future head coach — making him the potential heir to McCarthy.
If that sounds familiar, it should. This seems similar to the situation when Jones hand-picked Jason Garrett as a future coach, forcing him on Wade Phillips. That led to Phillips becoming the first (and only) coach Jones has ever fired in-season.
McCarthy, who had plenty of other reasons to walk away, would be wise to avoid such an arrangement. It was the right move for him and it’s forced Jones to do something he should have been doing long ago — begin searching for a replacement.
It’s crazy to think Jones had a full year to come up with a plan but ended up with none whatsoever.
But whether he borrows a page from Kraft and anoints Witten without prior experience or somehow convinces Deion Sanders to agree to co-star with him in what would be be a de facto revival of the DALLAS TV soap opera that once captivated the nation–will be attached to a clock that, in the immortal words of Mona Lisa De Vito, is TICKIN’ LIKE DIS!! for both of them.
Jones will turn 83 this year; Kraft 84. There’s only so many more autumns of consequence left for either of them.
There’s plenty more left for Mike McCarthy, who will seemingly have a choice of still-open NFL job opportunities. His 61% win percentage eclipses even that of Vrabel’s, and he’s not only made it to a Super Bowl, he’s won one. If nothing else, the timing helped him avoid the temptation that New England might have offered him–and vice-versa.
So send your flowers, be they roses of accolade or sympathy, real or virtual, to both of these Mikes if you choose. Either way, you’d be justified.
Courage…