![\"Patriots](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Cabin-photo.jpeg\")
Patriots assistant Mike Smith, right, stands with his wife Emily and children Finley, left, Kennedy and Weston. (Photo courtesy of Mike Smith)\nA father\u2019s footsteps<\/p>\n
How did Mike Smith get here?<\/p>\n
Alone in a wooden cabin atop a remote mountain in Utah, hundreds of miles from home, sitting in the overnight dark. Days of solitude lay ahead of him, questions lingered behind.<\/p>\n
Was it his fall in Green Bay?<\/p>\n
That crash landing weeks before he worked Packers training camp in 2021, when he was one saw cut away from completing the roof on a backyard treehouse for his kids and instead dropped more than 20 feet, snapping ligaments in his right arm, crunching wrist bones to dust and activating old fractures in his back upon impact.<\/p>\n
Was it his father?<\/p>\n
The late Dan Smith, a Vietnam veteran, old-school west Texas cowboy who died in his son\u2019s arms, a moment Mike would relive for months through night terrors and daytime flashbacks.<\/p>\n
Was it the vodka Mike used to drown out that memory?<\/p>\n
All those nights he counted a bottle as company and plunged himself further into the pain he thought he was escaping. Just as his old man did.<\/p>\n
Before Smith flew to Utah in August 2023, he left his job as the Vikings outside linebackers coach. He walked into the head coach\u2019s office right after the preseason opener, depressed and angry about things he could not change, and quit. Smith drove home and told his wife he was done. He needed to isolate, to dry out once and for all.<\/p>\n
Weeks passed before the Vikings announced on Sept. 4 that Smith was on personal leave. Once the news broke, his phone pinged with texts and calls from all around the league. They all went unanswered.<\/p>\n
Smith was unmoored from the only life he knew and loved. His passions had left him. The only thing he clung to was what he held in that cabin for almost 10 days: an old photo of his family.<\/p>\n
In the photo, the Smiths are on an island beach where the waves have paused at their back. His wife, Emily, stands on the left in a bathing suit with their then infant daughter, Finley, on her left hip. On the right, Mike carries their other young children, Weston and Kennedy, one in each arm.<\/p>\n
In the photo, his wife and kids smile.<\/p>\n
In the cabin, he wept.<\/p>\n
Patriots assistant Mike Smith, right, stands with his wife Emily and children Finley, left, Kennedy and Weston. (Photo courtesy of Mike Smith)
\nA father\u2019s footsteps<\/p>\n
Smith is alone again.<\/p>\n
The 44-year-old is sitting on a sideline bench in Denver, where the Patriots just clinched the AFC championship amid a swirling snowstorm on Jan. 25. Tears of joy slip from his face into the powder below, as players dance and yell around midfield. Smith, who coaches the Patriots\u2019 outside linebackers, has retreated so he can reflect.<\/p>\n
Head in his hands, his mind drifts to a time and place that holds so much pain. But instead of hurt, he finds gratitude.<\/p>\n
In the 18 months Smith spent out of football before joining Mike Vrabel\u2019s staff last February, he came to believe his path, like all paths, was preordained. Every step that brought him to this snowy sideline, to his first Super Bowl and returned him to the warm embrace of his family was already written. Which means so was his sobriety, now two years and counting.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople ask themselves if God\u2019s real. I know he\u2019s real,\u201d Smith said. \u201cMy story tells me he\u2019s real.\u201d<\/p>\n
If God was Smith\u2019s guide through the valley of those 18 months, Smith\u2019s father was his trailblazer.<\/p>\n
Before he passed away at 73, Dan Smith was a gritty ranch hand, carpenter and contractor. He had a handlebar mustache that would have made Yosemite Sam jealous.<\/p>\n
When Mike was eight years old, Dan and his mother divorced. The court sent Mike and his twin sister to live with their mother. But after a year, Mike couldn\u2019t bear his father\u2019s loneliness any longer and asked to move in with him.<\/p>\n
In the two-bedroom apartment they now shared, Dan had a couch from Sears and a TV set that rested on a toolbox. He built a wooden frame around his son\u2019s new bed, an air mattress, and gave him a TV tray to place his dinner every night. They were together, always.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really just me and him,\u201d Mike said.<\/p>\n
![\"Dan](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Dan-Smith-e1770401728574.jpeg\")
Dan Smith, the late father of Patriots outside linebackers coach Mike Smith, passed away on Aug. 31, 2022. (Photo courtesy of the Smith family)<\/p>\n
Dan\u2019s words were law in his house. If the old cowboy said wear this, you wore it. If he told you to eat that, you scarfed it down. Disobey, and it was time prepare for a spanking.<\/p>\n
Every day, Dan obeyed his own addictions, killing pain with packs of cigarettes and Coors banquet beers. Always the yellow bellies, never liquor. Some nights Dan came home. Others, he didn\u2019t. He never explained why.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomebody like him, and how I was raised, you didn\u2019t talk about emotion,\u201d Mike said. \u201cYou didn\u2019t talk about sadness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dan\u2019s hurt echoed through time when Mike\u2019s surgically repaired wrist flared up in the winter of 2022. The pain reached a level even he, a former NFL linebacker, could barely withstand. Smith couldn\u2019t sleep and began to self-medicate. Tito\u2019s vodka over the yellow bellies.<\/p>\n
A second surgery cleared out the metal in his wrist, where the screws had been inserted too far apart and different pins went in. The pain subsided, but remained. So his self-medicating continued in Minnesota, where he had moved from Green Bay to follow his longtime friend, new Vikings assistant head coach Mike Pettine.<\/p>\n
As his wrist and back still ached from the treehouse fall, Smith\u2019s heart broke next. He received a call about his father\u2019s failing health that August and flew to their native Lubbock, Texas, where Dan\u2019s strokes and years of chronic drinking and smoking were about to exact the ultimate toll.<\/p>\n
The minute before he passed, surrounded by his three children, Dan looked his youngest son in the eye and sobbed. Until then, Mike had only seen his father cry twice: when he lost his mother and a brother. This would be the third and final time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI lost the man I loved the most,\u201d Smith said. \u201cLosing your parents is hard, no matter how you lose them, but I lost him in my arms, saw him take his last breath. I held him, and it really broke me.\u201d<\/p>\n
That memory haunted Smith all the way back to Minnesota, where the NFL season rolled on. Some nights he awoke in the middle of the night screaming in a cold sweat next to his wife. Others, he didn\u2019t. He never explained why.<\/p>\n
Not even football offered an escape.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d be at practice and somebody\u2019s talking to me, but I\u2019m back in the hospital holding my dad like it\u2019s happening again. I\u2019m looking at him,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBut I\u2019m afraid. If I tell someone, is it going to come out that I am losing my mind?\u201d<\/p>\n
Even as visions interrupted Smith at work and booze numbed him at home, the Vikings seemed no wiser to his pain. Smith\u2019s star pass rushers, Danielle Hunter and Z\u2019Darius Smith, both topped 10 sacks. Minnesota glided to a 13-4 record and made the playoffs. Smith was the exact coach they wanted when they hired him, but the man had hollowed himself out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d go down to the basement and just sit there and drink. Then I\u2019d sleep an hour or two, and I\u2019d go to work about 4 a.m., and nobody could tell,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause that\u2019s the thing: my guys were performing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eventually, his marriage crumbled. Smith moved in with Pettine in late February 2023, after he and Emily had separated. It took only a few nights for Pettine to hear the same overnight screams and cries she did.<\/p>\n
About one week into living together, Pettine popped into Smith\u2019s office at the Vikings\u2019 facility and said to follow him down the hall. They stopped in front of an office Smith had never visited before. Pettine swung the door open to reveal a tidy room with a vacant chair and a man in a bow tie who rose to meet them. He extended his hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cMike,\u201d the man said, \u201cI\u2019m Dr. Young.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heartbreak to hope<\/p>\n
Smith is by himself now, but hardly alone.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s standing at the front of the Patriots\u2019 team meeting room one day last spring, presenting his \u201cfour H\u2019s\u201d during a team-building exercise Vrabel instituted so players and coaches share about one another; more specifically, their hometowns, heroes, heartbreaks and hopes. While he speaks, a picture of the late Dan Smith is projected on the screen behind him.<\/p>\n
![\"New](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/AP25314781886654.jpg\")
New England Patriots outside linebackers coach Mike Smith walks the sideline before an NFL game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025, in Tampa, Fla. The Patriots defeated the Buccaneers 28-23. (AP Photo\/Gary McCullough)<\/p>\n
\u201cHe taught me everything,\u201d Mike said. \u201cMy toughness, my work ethic, earning my paycheck.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike revealed some, but not all, of what happened after Dan\u2019s passing. Like, how he began talk therapy with the man in the bow tie, Vikings\u2019 team psychiatrist, Dr. Larry Young; how it took 10 sessions for him to open up; how Dr. Young normalized his experiences as a textbook case of post-traumatic stress disorder; how, despite months of progress in therapy, separate stressors inside the team facility drove him out of football months later.<\/p>\n
But those who heard what Smith shared in that meeting, who knew about his battles with alcohol, loss and a body racked with constant pain, could see he was winning the war. After several players and coaches took their turns and said winning the Super Bowl was their defining hope, Smith revealed his dream was simply to show up for his family. To be there.<\/p>\n
In the audience, one of Smith\u2019s players, sixth-year linebacker K\u2019Lavon Chaisson, recognized his own pain in the coach\u2019s story. Chaisson lost his father, Kelvin, when he was in high school. Kelvin was shot and killed during a domestic dispute. He was 33 years old.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe share similar trauma and similar adversity that we fought to get where we are. He knows a lot of things might not be explainable and understandable going forward, but you have to find a way to make it make sense for you, and to continue to functionally go forward,\u201d Chaisson said. \u201cAnd I think he\u2019s doing a great job with that. I appreciate him sharing his story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sharing, Smith told his players, unlocked everything about his recovery. In the meeting, he compelled everyone to defy the stubborn, American male reflex to bury your pain. No, he said. Bring it to the light.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got to be vulnerable. You\u2019ve got to ask for help,\u201d Smith said. \u201cAny coach or player I worked with would tell you I\u2019m a tough son of a b\u2014. But I broke. I never thought that would, or could, ever happen to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Linebacker](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/patriotsms014.jpg\")
Linebacker K’Lavon Chaisson of the New England Patriots with assistant coach Mike Smith during practice at Gillette Stadium. (Photo By Matt Stone\/Boston Herald)<\/p>\n
His words resonated. Soon enough, Smith became a light unto himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously we\u2019re in two different rooms, but he\u2019s a great dude, a good coach. He always makes me laugh,\u201d said Patriots safety Jaylinn Hawkins. \u201cHe keeps us loose.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back in the fall of 2023, after returning from Utah and completing his withdrawal from alcohol, Smith started meeting with Dr. Young once a week outside the Vikings\u2019 facility. By then, he had moved back into his house, but still slept apart from his wife. Smith filled his days coaching his son\u2019s basketball and baseball teams, watching his daughters cheerlead, housework and hard introspection.<\/p>\n
His marriage grew stronger when they moved closer to Emily\u2019s family in southern Connecticut the following spring. The Smiths settled in a shore town, Madison, where they reside to this day. As he unpacked, Smith expected to take a job a close friend had offered him in another industry with a competitive salary.<\/p>\n
But inexplicably, his friend went silent. The job fell through. Dozens of texts and calls went unanswered until the friend crawled out to confess he didn\u2019t believe Smith would actually leave football like he had. That doubt left Mike and Emily, new homeowners with three mouths to feed, both painfully unemployed.<\/p>\n
Unbowed, the old coach took interview classes and wrote his first resume. He created a LinkedIn profile and considered opening an athletic training facility. Emily found a job. Happy days returned.<\/p>\n
But weeks later, they caught wind of a rumor spreading in league circles that Mike left football because of symptoms related to CTE. Circling back to the contacts he\u2019d left hanging before his Utah trip, Smith sent more than 30 texts to set the record straight. He waited for feedback.<\/p>\n
![\"New](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/PATSsc001_073361.jpg\")
New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel enters the field as the Patriots hold OTA practice at Gillette on May 20. (Staff Photo By Stuart Cahill\/Boston Herald)<\/p>\n
Smith estimates only five to 10 of them responded. Vrabel, whom he\u2019d met years ago through ex-Patriots and mutual coaching friends Wes Welker and Larry Izzo, was one of them. No one else sent a text like Vrabel\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just so detailed,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThat it\u2019s all about the family, and family is all that matters before you can ever think about coaching again. And I just thought, wow. Like, we were friends, but he\u2019s really gonna send me something that long, sincere and that caring? I knew what kind of man he is.\u201d<\/p>\n
The summer and fall flew by. Smith coached his son\u2019s new teams and maintained a tradition his father inspired decades ago: Blizzard Fridays. At the end of every school week, Smith picked up his kids and zipped them straight to a Dairy Queen the next town over. It didn\u2019t matter the flavor, the week or the weather. Fridays, in the Smith household, are for ice cream.<\/p>\n
On weekends, he avoided football for a second straight season, college and pro. That is, right up until the AFC Championship Game two Januarys ago. Kansas City, where he coached from 2016-18, had welcomed the Bills again with a trip to the Super Bowl at stake. Smith loved working for Chiefs coach Andy Reid, and was still friendly with several assistants on his staff.<\/p>\n
Something stirred in Smith that afternoon. A warmth, he called it. He put the game on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember my wife coming down,\u201d Smith said, \u201cand she was shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reinvigorated, he drove an hour and 15 minutes north and handed his resume to UConn coach Jim Mora just days later. He applied at the suggestion of a former graduate assistant, Matt Brock, the team\u2019s defensive coordinator. Mora said they would be in touch.<\/p>\n
Days after that, Smith went for one of his many long walks. This one crossed a bordering town, Killingworth, and again, something stirred.<\/p>\n
Smith felt drawn to a tall white facade he could see through the woods just off the road. He walked down a short, paved driveway that led to the towering white building, a non-denominational church called Living Rock. He climbed the front steps, remembering all the Sundays in Texas he had done this as a child and all the Sundays he hadn\u2019t since.<\/p>\n
The church pastor approached him at the entrance. They chatted. Smith shared who he was and what was on his mind, listened and left.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know it sounds crazy, but the pastor said, \u2018Everything happens for a reason. God will give you the desires of your heart,’\u201d Smith said. \u201cAnd so I keep walking, thinking about my purpose. Sure enough, later that day my phone rang.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the new head coach of the Patriots.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere are you?\u201d Vrabel asked, figuring his proud Texan friend had moved back or maybe stayed in Minnesota.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout an hour and a half from you,\u201d Smith said. \u201cConnecticut.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?!\u201d<\/p>\n
Smiling again<\/p>\n
Smith is alone no more.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s his first day of work in New England, early February, and he\u2019s hugging Patriots defensive coordinator Terrell Williams inside the team facility. Smith interviewed the day before in Foxboro, less than 24 hours after Vrabel called. Smith knows Williams made the final call to hire him, but feels most indebted to his new boss.<\/p>\n
\u201cI owe a lot of things to Mike Vrabel,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
On his drives to and from Foxboro that week, he thought of his wife and Dr. Young. He thought of Pettine and Bob Sutton, another former coach turned confidant, and his last boss, Vikings coach Kevin O\u2019Connell, who had endorsed him to Vrabel. He thought of Welker, his best friend and former teammate at Texas Tech, and all the phone calls Welker answered over the years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWes got me through some s\u2014,\u201d Smith said. \u201cI look back and feel bad. He\u2019s coaching for the Dolphins, and we\u2019re talking like twice a week. I was just breaking down crying on the phone.\u201d<\/p>\n
He thought of the impossible odds that he, a football lifer, would find himself living in Connecticut of all places, and then find a job within driving distance of his new home. Smith was the last position coach Vrabel added to his staff, and the only one on defense with whom he had zero prior working experience. Months after hiring him, Vrabel explained why Smith was an outlier during a press conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cMike\u2019s a good teacher,\u201d Vrabel said last June. \u201cHe\u2019s a very good pass rush teacher. He\u2019s an excellent teacher who breaks film down, can explain moves, can show guys these (pass rush) moves. He\u2019s coached a lot of good pass rushers.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of that teaching was ahead, just as his pain was now behind him.<\/p>\n
After he embraced Williams that first day, Smith settled into his new office. He began to unpack his things and found the old beach photo. He taped it to a wall next to his desk. He stared for a moment.<\/p>\n
In the photo, Emily and the kids smile.<\/p>\n
This time, he smiled back.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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