Super Bowl curse? How Vrabel can succeed where other coaches failed originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
Mike Vrabel’s hire makes plenty of sense for the New England Patriots. After back-to-back 4-13 seasons, why not hire a Patriots Hall of Famer and three-time Super Bowl champion in New England to help restore the team to championship glory?
As history proves, however, that’s much easier said than done.
Vrabel is just the seventh person in NFL history to become head coach of the franchise where he won at least one Super Bowl as a player, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, joining Jerod Mayo, Bart Starr, Forrest Gregg, Art Shell, Jeff Saturday and Jason Garrett.
The most recent example, of course, is Vrabel’s predecessor in New England: Mayo won one Super Bowl with the Patriots over eight seasons as a Pro Bowl linebacker but lasted just one season as head coach, going 4-13 in 2024 before he was fired earlier this month.
Here’s a full list of the six head coaches leading teams they won Super Bowls with as players, along with their coaching records for those teams:
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The numbers don’t exactly paint a rosy picture: Only two of these six coaches had winning records as coaches for their former teams, and their combined winning percentage is well below .500.
None of these coaches won a Super Bowl with the same team as both a player and a coach; in fact, the Raiders’ Art Shell was the only one on this list who even made it to a conference championship game. (Forrest Gregg reached the Super Bowl as a head coach, but with the Cincinnati Bengals, not Green Bay Packers.)
Jason Garrett, who won three Super Bowls with the Cowboys as the backup quarterback to Hall of Famer Troy Aikman, is the model of “success” on this list, and to his credit, Garrett guided the Cowboys to three playoff appearances a head coach. His teams never made it past the Divisional Round, though.
The models of failure? While Mayo was a disaster, he has nothing on Saturday, who was thrust into the Colts’ interim head coach role in 2022 to replace Franck Reich and lost seven of eight games before being shown the door.
Unlike Mayo and Saturday, Vrabel comes to New England with plenty of head coach experience: He went 54-45 over six seasons as Titans head coach from 2018-23 and led Tennessee to the AFC Championship Game in 2019.
There’s a distinct pressure that comes with coaching your former team, however — especially for someone like Vrabel, who’s a member of the Patriots Hall of Fame and core member of the early-2000s dynasty. If anyone can handle that pressure, it’s Vrabel, but the odds are stacked against him as he aims to turn around a team with one of the NFL’s worst rosters.