New England Patriots
The New England head coach also discussed A.J. Brown, Drake Maye, and how the team handles late-game situational football.
While a good portion of Mike Vrabel’s weekly radio interview with WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” was interrupted by a fire alarm, the Patriots head coach emulated his team’s performance in Sunday’s 26-19 win over the Jets and kept his cool.
“Fire alarm, got to go,” Vrabel joked when the siren began blaring, though the interview continued unabated for several minutes. The alarm bell ringing echoed Vrabel’s postgame comments after what he saw as a subpar effort, openly saying in the press conference that the Patriots “just didn’t play very well,” and had been “lucky to win.”
Vrabel was unwilling to revisit too much of the discussion on Monday morning.
“Nope, moving on,” Vrabel said when asked if he saw improvement in the team, quickly changing the subject to the upcoming matchup with the Bears. “Looking forward to Thursday night. These guys are good. Quarterback is really, really good. It’s a physical football team, so we better be prepared.”
His frustration with the game still seeped through at various points in the interview, such as when co-host Greg Hill raised the subject of wide receiver DeMario Douglas’s fumble, one of the team’s two turnovers (both fumbles).
“We turn the ball over at a historic rate, and it’s ridiculous,” said Vrabel. “It’s an embarrassment.”
New England has 13 turnovers in six games in 2026 (2.16 turnovers per game). And while that’s clearly a coaching point for Vrabel, it’s still a bit off the pace of the 1978 49ers (who set a modern NFL record with 63 turnovers, 3.94 per game).
Here are a few other subjects Vrabel discussed:
A.J. Brown’s performance in his return
Patriots star wide receiver A.J. Brown arrived via a high-profile offseason trade, and entered the season with corresponding expectations. It was put on hold for a few weeks after he suffered a high ankle sprain in the season-opening loss against the Seahawks, but Brown was back in the lineup against the Jets on Sunday.
New England quarterback Drake Maye seemed intent on trying to involve Brown early and often, targeting him 10 times. Yet Brown was rusty, dropping several passes (notching only three receptions despite the team-high number of targets).
Vrabel noted that despite the drops from Brown on Sunday, the long-term signs are good.
“Concern? No, I don’t think so,” he said of the 29-year-old wide receiver. “I think we just have to make plays that we’re supposed to make, and the ones that we expect ourselves to make.
“I like the separation, unfortunately we just have to finish,” Vrabel added of Brown’s route-running.
His view of Drake Maye’s day
Maye finished 18-of-32 for 235 yards passing with three touchdowns. With the young quarterback’s early-season struggles in the rearview mirror, Vrabel isn’t letting Maye be content.
“I think there were a few throws that he missed, but I felt like he was comfortable,” Vrabel explained. The Patriots’ coach said he expected more pressure from the Jets’ defense.
“We went in thinking we were going to get a little more [blitzing] than what we did,” said Vrabel. “So when that didn’t happen, I think [Maye] was kind of able to progress through what he was looking at. Certainly that play there early to [Romeo Doubs] was huge.”
In-game communication
Following a calamitous end-of-game situation during the Week 5 Giants-Commanders matchup on Oct. 11 — which ended in a 27-27 tie after Washington quarterback Jayden Daniels unintentionally let time expire trying to scramble on the last play of overtime — discussion was sparked about how teams manage those moments (particularly from a coaching standpoint).
Vrabel offered a fairly expansive explanation of how the Patriots coordinate as a staff and with the players.
“So on the belt pack, I have offense, defense, and then the secret ‘bat phone’ to ‘Stretch’ [John Streicher],” he said, referencing the Patriots’ vice president of football operations and strategy. “So I just click back and forth, and it’s like a producer. You’re pressing buttons back and forth like, ‘Hey, what are you thinking here?’
“And then we’ll talk quickly, and I’ll get back over,” Vrabel continued. “A lot of these things, you’re just trying to be a play ahead in understanding how quickly — with the clock moving — a situation can go from, ‘Hey, we’re going to center the ball and clock it,’ or, ‘Hey, we’re down on the play clock, now we’re going to use some different mechanisms if we don’t have a timeout.’ So try to review those situations each and every week, and you never know when one of them is going to come up.”
Vrabel also mentioned that he tries to navigate a balance between regular coaching and gaming out specific scenarios.
“There is a lot, and you don’t want to overdo the players,” he said. “You don’t want to detract from the normal game plan so they’re thinking, ‘Oh my gosh I have to think about this situation.’ Well, not necessarily. We’re going to help you through that situation. We’re going to try to talk you through it, and ultimately the quarterback has to communicate to the other guys in the huddle. You can only talk to the quarterback.”
New England has a meeting every Friday to go over situational football. Vrabel provided one more layer, saying that they go into more niche situations every few weeks.
“I think every four weeks you try to get a little deeper into the situations, maybe the ones you don’t normally do on Friday that we do each and every week,” he said. “And then you do some of the outlier ones on a Friday maybe every three or four weeks just to say this hasn’t really come up yet, but we could always be in this situation. The ones that are probably more often than not, we hit every Friday.”
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