{"id":723552,"date":"2026-02-02T11:08:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T11:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/723552\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T11:08:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T11:08:26","slug":"mike-vrabels-father-proud-of-patriots-super-bowl-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/723552\/","title":{"rendered":"Mike Vrabel’s father proud of Patriots’ Super Bowl run"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hours before the AFC Championship Game<\/a>, Chuck Vrabel\u2019s phone buzzed with three text messages that arrived minutes apart.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Try to pick on a grizzled Mike Vrabel<\/a> now, at 6-foot-4 and 50 years old, well, good luck.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMike 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?\u201d said Chuck, 76. \u201cI would let them do it for however long, and then we had to get back to practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But in these winter moments, sports bound them, and set Mike\u2019s career path after his father\u2019s before he even knew it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way athletics support people and help people do things, those were times where you look back now and I don\u2019t know at the time you think those drives are quality times, but they certainly were,\u201d Chuck said. \u201cI\u2019m just so glad that we were able to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was an only child of two educators,\u201d Mike said at his introductory press conference last year, \u201cbut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Connection through sport is a generational throughline for the Vrabel family.<\/p>\n

\"NewNew 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)<\/p>\n

Almost a century ago, Chuck\u2019s father, George<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

During Mike\u2019s high school days, his parents never missed a game, even when their calendars as administrators at other Akron-area schools conflicted with their son\u2019s schedule.<\/p>\n

\u201c(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,\u201d Chuck said. \u201cThe enjoyment that my wife (Elaine) and I got out of watching Mike play and going to all the games, it\u2019s 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\u2019s just unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chuck, a self-described \u201ctough nut\u201d<\/a> 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\u2019 home in nearby Medina for dinner.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Football talk was rarely on the menu.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour job\u2019s your job. You do it, you work hard doing it, and when you\u2019re at home, you talk about other things,\u201d Chuck said. \u201cI try not to talk about football with Mike. He already gets that 24\/7. He\u2019s been doing it now for well over 30 years, playing and coaching and all of that. So, he knows what he\u2019s doing, and I can see and I know what he\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s good or bad, because other people ask me, \u2018What did Mike say about the game?\u2019 Well, I saw the game. I don\u2019t need Mike to tell me about the game. It\u2019s a great game, or they got beat, or whatever. And he\u2019s not talking to me about that. I don\u2019t get to call plays.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, on the precipice of Mike\u2019s 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<\/a>\u2018 season: a primetime upset at Buffalo in Week 5.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He noted how the Patriots\u2019 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\u2019s message resonated enough that Mike relayed that part of their conversation in a radio interview the following morning on WEEI.<\/a><\/p>\n

Chuck was, after all, the first coach Mike ever knew.<\/p>\n

He just calls him dad.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hours before the AFC Championship Game, Chuck Vrabel\u2019s phone buzzed with three text messages that arrived minutes apart.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2050],"tags":[95040,833,7,6441,838,1167,249,2326,2094,6,835,832,208,836,834,831,837,41484,23840,16165,103731],"class_list":["post-723552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-england-patriots","tag-2026-super-bowl","tag-drake-maye","tag-football","tag-josh-mcdaniels","tag-mike-vrabel","tag-new-england","tag-new-england-patriots","tag-newengland","tag-newenglandpatriots","tag-nfl","tag-nfl-news","tag-nfl-rumors","tag-patriots","tag-patriots-2025","tag-patriots-news","tag-patriots-rumors","tag-robert-kraft","tag-super-bowl-2026","tag-super-bowl-60","tag-super-bowl-lx","tag-super-bowl-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116000726790893785","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723552","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=723552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}