Hours before the AFC Championship Game, Chuck Vrabel’s phone buzzed with three text messages that arrived minutes apart.
The first was from one of his former players at Norton High School, a public school outside of Akron, where he coached basketball in the early 1980s. So was the second. And the third.
All three ex-players wanted to wish his son well, a boy they used to tease and chase around the Norton High gym during practices over Christmas break.
Try to pick on a grizzled Mike Vrabel now, at 6-foot-4 and 50 years old, well, good luck.
But back when he was just a boy who had yet to celebrate his 10th birthday, one of the most imposing head coaches in football was fair game for high school kids. They loved him.
“Mike would get his ball and go shoot at the baskets and run around the gym, and the kids would always pick on him. It was just fun, you know?” said Chuck, 76. “I would let them do it for however long, and then we had to get back to practice.”
Once practice was over, Chuck and Mike climbed back into their car to go home. Between the holidays and these practices, winter breaks allowed father and son more quality time than they usually experienced during the school year. Before Chuck gave up coaching in 1985, he taught and coached in a different school system from where Mike was enrolled as a student, which stole late afternoons and evenings they otherwise could have shared.
But in these winter moments, sports bound them, and set Mike’s career path after his father’s before he even knew it.
“The way athletics support people and help people do things, those were times where you look back now and I don’t know at the time you think those drives are quality times, but they certainly were,” Chuck said. “I’m just so glad that we were able to do that.”
“I was an only child of two educators,” Mike said at his introductory press conference last year, “but my dad was a basketball coach and assistant football coach, and he taught me what it was to be tough, to work hard, and to embrace being part of a team and loving being part of a team and how powerful that can be.”
Connection through sport is a generational throughline for the Vrabel family.
New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel celebrates a win in the AFC Championship Game against the Denver Broncos, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026 in Denver. (AP Photo/Bart Young)
Almost a century ago, Chuck’s father, George, played basketball in high school before he joined the Navy during World War II. As a father, George sat in the bleachers watching Chuck lace up for his own high school basketball team and then the freshman squad at Bowling Green in 1967, when future Celtics coach Bill Fitch led the varsity program. Later, Chuck cheered for Mike, who found his way to the football field and never left from high school to college and the pros.
During Mike’s high school days, his parents never missed a game, even when their calendars as administrators at other Akron-area schools conflicted with their son’s schedule.
“(My dad) was always there for me when I was playing sports, Little League and all those things. And I remember that like it was yesterday,” Chuck said. “The enjoyment that my wife (Elaine) and I got out of watching Mike play and going to all the games, it’s a great thing to be able to do that as a parent. And now at the highest level, going to the Super Bowl, I mean, it’s just unbelievable.”
Chuck, a self-described “tough nut” on the sideline, never coached his son. He wanted what happened in the arena to stay in the arena and away from their home life. That divide continued as recently as last year, when Vrabel worked as a consultant for the Browns after getting fired in Tennessee and regularly drove from team headquarters in Berea to his parents’ home in nearby Medina for dinner.
Together, father, mother and son often sat on the back patio of the house, which overlooks the 18th hole of a local golf course. Mike and Chuck cracked Coors Lights. They rolled pizza dough, then sprinkled sausage, pepperoni, tomatoes and mushrooms, red sauce and white on different pies, and slid them into an outdoor oven on a hot stone for three minutes, sometimes five.
Football talk was rarely on the menu.
“Your job’s your job. You do it, you work hard doing it, and when you’re at home, you talk about other things,” Chuck said. “I try not to talk about football with Mike. He already gets that 24/7. He’s been doing it now for well over 30 years, playing and coaching and all of that. So, he knows what he’s doing, and I can see and I know what he’s doing.
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad, because other people ask me, ‘What did Mike say about the game?’ Well, I saw the game. I don’t need Mike to tell me about the game. It’s a great game, or they got beat, or whatever. And he’s not talking to me about that. I don’t get to call plays.”
Still, on the precipice of Mike’s fifth trip to the Super Bowl and first as a head coach, football is inextricable from day-to-day thoughts and conversation. Chuck and Elaine will travel to the Bay Area soon and visit with Mike when they can before and after the Big Game, just as they did before and after the defining win of the Patriots‘ season: a primetime upset at Buffalo in Week 5.
The night before, they dined at a local Italian restaurant. The next day, they went out to lunch. All the moments that led to the Patriots announcing themselves again as an AFC threat were perfectly regular for the Vrabels until they weren’t.
After waiting for Mike to depart a giddy, victorious locker room, Chuck and Elaine embraced their son steps away from the bus that would take him back to New England and back to work. For a moment, Chuck broke his code.
He noted how the Patriots’ young players had contributed in the 23-20 win, how composed they had been. That night, Drake Maye led the first game-winning drive of his career. His father’s message resonated enough that Mike relayed that part of their conversation in a radio interview the following morning on WEEI.
Chuck was, after all, the first coach Mike ever knew.
He just calls him dad.