Pros and cons of Seahawks potentially making Mike Vrabel their next head coach
By Lee Vowell
The Seattle Seahawks are looking for a new coach after the team terminated Pete Carroll from his head coaching position last week. Seattle will likely be very hush-hush about who they are interviewing to replace Carroll. That means every name is a possibility.
Seattle's general manager John Schneider will make the decision about head coach. He likely will be very deliberate about the process, as he should. One coach he might want to talk to is former Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel.
What follows are some pros and cons about Vrabel potentially being the next coach in Seattle. Vrabel would definitely be a different type of coach than Carroll. Maybe that's good or maybe that's bad, though.
Con: Mike Vrabel could be trending toward former Seahawks DC Dan Quinn's coaching career
Mike Vrabel has already broken one trend. That is he became a successful head coach after either playing for or coaching under former Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. A lot of people will argue that Belichick is the best coach in the history of football, but even more, people will point out that hardly any of Belichick's proteges went on to be good coaches elsewhere. Josh McDaniel and Matt Patricia are just two coaches who struggled after leaving New England.
But while Vrabel did have winning seasons immediately after becoming the HC with the Tennessee Titans, his teams started to digress two years ago. When Quinn left the Seahawks to become the head coach for the Atlanta Falcons in 2015, his first three years were fairly successful. He got his teams to the playoffs in years two and three, and he led his team to the Super Bowl in his second season.
Vrabel led his team to the AFC Championship game in his second season and while the Titans made the playoffs in the following two years, they were bounced in the first games they played. In Quinn's first three seasons with the Falcons, he had two playoff appearances and a winning percentage of .604. In Vrabel's first four years, he took his teams to the postseason three times and he had a winning percentage of .631.
My point is that once the records began to get worse for each coach, they could not fix the issue. A good head coach needs to succeed, of course, but needs to get his teams turned around quickly when they begin to fade. Vrabel has not proven he can do this.