Vrabel is hands on for drills
NASHVILLE — Mike Vrabel played 14 seasons in the NFL, so the first-year Tennessee Titans coach is more than willing to pick up a pad for drills to get his point across.
If someone knocks off the 42-year-old former linebacker’s sunglasses during the process, that’s not a problem.
“Yes, that’s fun,” Vrabel said Thursday after the Titans’ first day of training camp. “That’s when you know it was a good punch. I use that as a barometer — when the sunglasses go flying off. But they’re doing it the right way. They’re delivering a blow and trying to transfer power to stop a guy’s charge — in that case, the punt team — and get out and cover.”
The Titans’ season opener and Vrabel’s debut as a head coach in a regular-season game is just 45 days away on Sept. 9 in Miami. His preseason debut is Aug. 9 in Green Bay, and Vrabel was starting to drive his wife and son crazy being at home waiting for the start of training camp.
“You wake up in the middle of the night thinking about, ‘Should I call a timeout in this situation?’ Then I’m like, ‘I’m really losing my mind,’” Vrabel said. “It’s just good to have the players back.”
Vrabel, who was an All-Pro and won three Super Bowl rings with the New England Patriots, has been an assistant at Ohio State and with the Houston Texans. He was able to watch some of football’s best make crucial decisions during games, including Patriots coach Bill Belichick and Ohio State coach Urban Meyer.
Now it will be Vrabel’s turn to decide, and he has been doing his best to prepare for kickoff by doing what he did so much of as a player — watch video. In this case, he’s trying to figure out what he can and
can’t challenge, how to use his timeouts and how to defend an opponent trying to run out the clock at the end of a game.
“We’ve got a library of 10 years,” Vrabel said. “You can go back and pretty much get whatever game we want and pull up a scenario and play it out.”
For now, Vrabel is trying to improve a team coming off consecutive 9-7 seasons and the franchise’s first playoff victory since January 2004 — all of which wasn’t good enough to keep Mike Mularkey on the job as head coach.
Music plays throughout practice to help simulate game-day noise, and Vrabel’s assistants spent parts of Thursday’s session working on fundamentals such as tip drills. The Titans saw their coach throw himself into camp with the same participation and intensity he displayed during offseason organized team activities.
“Oh, man, that feels good all the time when you get to hit the coach a little bit,” defensive lineman Jurrell Casey said. “It just shows you know the stuff that he was doing at OTAs wasn’t a fluke. He’s continued to do it.”