Head Coach Mike Vrabel on Weei 9/21: "A lot of good stuff and a lot of things we need to clean up"

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Good morning, Coach.

Mike Vrabel (0:00)

Good morning.

Greg Hill (0:02)

All right, all right, shots here. Victory shots, victory formation. Very good.

Celebrating a win that is a tradition for this show. That is the Wake Me Up shot from Pure Green. And so nice to finally be able to do that for you, your first win as a head coach against that Steelers team.

Mike Vrabel (0:26)

Yeah, yep.

Greg Hill (0:28)

Feeling feeling good about it?

Mike Vrabel (0:30)

I always feel good when we win.

Greg Hill (0:32)

Yeah.

Mike Vrabel (0:32)

Yeah, no matter who it's against. So a lot of good stuff, a lot of stuff that we can clean up, some things we have to eliminate, same thing as always. But it was fun.

Greg Hill (0:43)

Yeah. When you look at defense, certainly looked excellent yesterday.

We questions about the offense, we talked about that as we go through this.

Mike Vrabel (0:55)

I mean, there's things, I mean, there's going to be things everywhere. You know, I mean, I don't think this was, you know, I mean, one of the best offenses we'll face all year. So try to keep things in perspective and go from there.

SPEAKER_4 (1:06)

One of the things, Mike, that I looked at coming into this season, my expectations, obviously, for the offense, and Drake May were extremely high off of what happened last year. And, you know, just the growth of him. Do you feel like at times watching the film that he might be putting maybe too much pressure on himself to kind of make every play? I mean, that's what's leading to some of these mistakes?

Mike Vrabel (1:27)

Well, certainly to the decisions. I mean, I think that, you know, we all put, I think, pressure on ourselves to be great. I think that that's what really good players want to try to do. And, you know, I just think you have to, again, find the fine balance of reading things out, being able to kind of somewhat predict and have the timing to make decisions, to throw the ball down field. And, you know, I thought, for the most part, that was pretty good yesterday. I think there were some things that, you know, Drake could obviously do better. There's the things, you know, that a lot of guys could do better offensively.

Greg Hill (2:05)

I always say to my uneducated eye, my uneducated fan eye, it looks like he is not as confident, perhaps, as he was last season. Is that, you see?

Mike Vrabel (2:17)

I don't know. I thought he threw a confident ball to Eli. I thought he threw a confident ball 55 yards down the field to Romeo. He extended on third down, kept his eyes down the field and converted. You know, so again, everybody is going to nitpick, and I'm just telling you, there's good things in there, and there's things that we have to fix.

SPEAKER_1 (2:36)

When it comes to Ramondre Stevenson, the turnover yesterday, the fumble, for him, that seems like it always starts the beginning of the season with him turning the ball over, then he's able to work through it and then be great for you guys. Is that just something that Ramondre deals with on and off? How do you get a running back to be able to work through that every single season?

Mike Vrabel (2:55)

It's just something that ball security is at a premium. Once you put it out there on tape, you can see that that's what everybody's going to do, that's how they're going to tackle. If we can take care of the ball, I think we have chances to run through some of those hammer tackles where they're not wrapping up and they're just coming in. I think you saw that in the second half. Couple of guys tried to do that and we had some X-Play runs with Ramondre in there.

But once you do that, you're going to say everybody's going to do that and continue to try to hammer at the football. I think it just comes from a high alert, but I also think it's also everybody else being able to protect the guy with the ball. So he only has to worry about guys he can see, not guys that he can't see.

Greg Hill (3:38)

We saw you go right over there, talk to him after that fumble. What do you say to him in that situation?

Mike Vrabel (3:44)

Just try to be a coach.

SPEAKER_5 (3:46)

Mike, you know that there's no way you can get back to where you were last year if Drake doesn't play better.

And the confidence, obviously, you said he made confident throws, he definitely did. How do you manage that? Understanding the outsized importance of that position, knowing how talented he is, and seeing him perform beneath what your expectations are?