As Mike Vrabel stood in front of his team on Wednesday, he posed a simple question: Raise your hand if you were still playing football at this time last year.<\/p>\n
In a full room, only defensive tackle Milton Williams raised his hand.<\/p>\n
It was an eye-opening moment for quarterback Drake Maye.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s 24 teams at home right now. There\u2019s eight of us practicing and still working,\u201d Maye relayed. \u201cHe mentioned it to us today before practice, \u2018Take a look, raise your hand, who was still practicing at this time last year?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
At this point last year, Maye \u2014 who just ended his rookie season with four wins \u2014 was already on his couch watching Williams record a two-sack performance in a Super Bowl victory with the Eagles.<\/p>\n
Now, Maye is just two wins away from that same opportunity, beginning with a divisional-round matchup against the Houston Texans.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s eight teams left and this is a chance, an opportunity that we have, to play a home football game, a home playoff game, at a time when it matters most,\u201d Maye said. \u201cJust reflect on that and realize the opportunity we have, and at the same time, how much work we\u2019ve done to get here and enjoy it. He just reminded us to take advantage of it and know that we\u2019ve got a chance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout the season, Vrabel has made it a point to ensure his team is enjoying the ride. Despite the stakes growing higher and the games becoming more meaningful, that message has remained consistent.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just feel like you put a lot into it,\u201d Vrabel said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t the easiest profession in the world, and we only get one chance a week. And so, if we only try to focus on having fun during the game, it\u2019s a small window of our week. And so, we want to bring good people in here that we enjoy being around, that are like-minded and want to try to exhibit the qualities of the identity that we wish to play with, enjoy it and obviously work, but then go out to the game and let them have fun and compete. We know that one play is not going to make the difference and that we have to keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Mike Vrabel stood in front of his team on Wednesday, he posed a simple question: Raise your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2050],"tags":[7,1167,249,52113,91604,2326,2094,6,208],"class_list":{"0":"post-677835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-england-patriots","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-new-england","10":"tag-new-england-patriots","11":"tag-new-england-patriots-first-read","12":"tag-new-england-patriots-playoffs","13":"tag-newengland","14":"tag-newenglandpatriots","15":"tag-nfl","16":"tag-patriots"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115896189222277317","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}