This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Follow Peak here.
There were some days when Ben Jones hated Mike Vrabel.
Jones was the veteran center for the Tennessee Titans, the type of hardscrabble player who never wanted to come out. Vrabel was the Titans’ pugnacious head coach, a former NFL linebacker who knew how to goad him.
“You’re limping!” Vrabel once barked during an offseason practice. “Get out!”
Vrabel would scream that Jones looked tired, that he looked old and washed, that he must have been out all night.
“I hated him because I knew he was just going to push the button constantly on me,” Jones says.
Vrabel was also Jones’ favorite coach of all time, and to illustrate why, he tells me a story. Midway through the 2022 season, Jones came down with a stomach virus. He was up all night before a game, vomiting. He lost 18 pounds in 24 hours. He needed an IV to stop cramping after the Titans’ first drive. And before the game was over, he would suffer a torn knee ligament and high-ankle sprain.
Jones never came out, and when the Titans finished off the victory, Vrabel found him in the tunnel and wrapped him in a bear hug, squeezing him tight around the shoulders.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Vrabel told him. “I love you like my own.”
The stories represent the subtle duality of Vrabel — the hot-blooded coach who goads and pushes and inspires moments of hatred, the leader who earns adoration for simple acts of gratitude. The alchemy has led to immediate success in New England, where Vrabel has led the Patriots to an 11-2 record entering Sunday’s game against the Buffalo Bills.
The dichotomy, however, offers a broader lesson about coaching: If you want to push people beyond their limits, it requires a level of sincere care.
It’s an idea Paul Zak has spent the last few decades thinking about. Zak is a neuroscientist and professor at Claremont Graduate University in California. His research focuses on the science of trust.
In the early 2010s, he gained prominence for his work on oxytocin, the naturally occurring hormone that plays a central role in social bonding, empathy and emotional connections. One of the most effective ways to gain and build trust, he found, is to give another person recognition after a goal has been met. Another way was to assign a team “a difficult but achievable job.”
That may seem simple enough, but it colored one of Zak’s most strident beliefs about leadership: Coaches often have to be “a kind of bully.”
It’s a provocative idea, perhaps imprecise. But it formed as he managed a staff, spent time around the military and worked in a lab funded by the Department of Defense. He wanted to be a cheerleader for his employees, but he came to wonder: If his employees didn’t hate him sometimes, was he pushing hard enough?
It led to a simple theory: People do not know what they are capable of, so they often need a coach willing to make them uncomfortable.
“Our brains are so energy hungry,” Zak said. “They’re just such an enormous energy (drain) in the body that we have evolved to kind of cruise most of the time. It’s like, ‘I really don’t want to expend the metabolic energy of doing something cognitively or physically difficult unless I’m really pushed to do that.’ So we need to be pushed. And I’m going to celebrate it when you reach these goals.’”
When it comes to Vrabel, it’s hard to miss the intensity. Kevin Byard III, a former Titans safety, said Vrabel lives by his own “golden rule:” He treats each player the same way that player treats the team. Former Patriots Rodney Harrison and Julian Edelman have each used one word to describe their former teammate: a–hole. As former Titans tight end Delanie Walker put it on his podcast: “Vrabes was the type of dude to be like, ‘I’ll fight you, I don’t care if you play football; let’s go. And I’ll coach you right after I fight you.’”
What’s less apparent is the secret sauce that allows the style to work, the focus on gratitude and appreciation, the intentional emphasis on celebration.
When Vrabel coached in Tennessee, he used to survey players on their celebrations after touchdowns. When you plan for touchdowns, he told them, you work a little harder. This year, on cue, he pushed Patriots quarterback Drake Maye to celebrate more.
In most ways, his mentality has not changed. To mold a young roster, he outlined an identity with four principles:
- Effort and finish
- Ball security & ball disruption
- Details, techniques and fundamentals
- Make great decisions.
One day in August, during a training camp scrimmage against the Washington Commanders, Vrabel set out to model No. 1. When a scuffle broke out, he jumped into the fray, emerging with a bloodied face.
“I just want them to know I’ve got their back,” he told The Athletic’s Dianna Russini afterward.
But the simplest act shows up in the moments after each game, in a show of appreciation on the way back to the locker room. Vrabel stands alone in the tunnel and delivers a thank you to each player, win or lose.
“He always said you should be mentally and physically drained by Sunday at 3 o’clock,” Jones said. “Because you’ve given it your all. And then, after the game, you’re dumping everything that you have left in your body, and a lot of times it goes unrewarded. And he’s the first one there to say: ‘Thank you.’”
The tradition started in Tennessee, where Vrabel led the Titans to AFC South titles in 2020 and 2021. It’s continued in New England. There it was in October, when the Patriots crushed the Titans. Then again in November, following a victory over the Jets. And once more in early December, after another win over the Giants.
“This is their day. I’m happy for them,” Vrabel said in October, after a victory over the Bills. “We challenge them all week. We push them. We coach them. Whether they think I’m an a–hole during the week or not, I don’t know. But I’m going to try to coach the heck out of them all week and try to get them ready.”
For Vrabel, the mentality has never changed. He coaches hard. He demands a lot. Some days, his players may hate him. But for a moment on Sunday, he wants to let his players know how he feels.
“It’s their day to go and put all their hard work out there,” he said, “and I want to thank them for that.”
