Mike Vrabel may have been the best coach during the 2025 NFL season, but he wasn’t the best coach on the field during Super Bowl 60. The Patriots’ coach, who was voted the 2025 NFL Coach of the Year just three days before the Super Bowl, got out-coached by Seattle’s Mike Macdonald, who finished third in the COY voting.
In his first year with the Patriots, Vrabel worked wonders in New England: He took a team that finished 4-13 in 2024 and led them to the Super Bowl. Vrabel is one of the smartest coaches in the game and he always seems to be one step ahead of his opponent, but in the Super Bowl, that wasn’t the case.
The Vrabel that we saw all season didn’t show up in the Super Bowl. He made several questionable decisions. Let’s take a look at the three of the biggest ones.
1. Kicking an extra point after New England’s first touchdown
The Patriots scored their first points of the game when Drake Maye connected with Mack Hollins for a 35-yard catch in the fourth quarter with 12:27 left to play. At that point in the game, the Patriots were trailing 19-0, so this seemed like an obvious spot for a two-point conversion. If you convert the two-pointer, you’re down 19-8, a score that would open up a few options for you because you can now kick a field goal if you need one later in the fourth quarter. If you miss the two-pointer, you’re down 19-6 and need two touchdowns to take the lead.
Vrabel ended up kicking the extra point, which made the score 19-7. At that point in the game, it was functionally the same as being down 19-6 because you still need two touchdowns. There was no math where kicking the extra point made sense here.
The Patriots defense actually got a stop on Seattle’s next possession following the New England touchdown. If the Patriots had converted the two-pointer, the Patriots offense could have taken the field knowing they only needed a field goal to get it down to a one-score game. Instead, the score was 19-7, the Patriots needed two touchdowns and that put Maye in a position where he started pressing, which led to an interception.
It’s impossible to know for sure, but if the Patriots had only needed a field goal on that drive, it’s hard to see Maye putting the ball up for grabs like that.
2. The punt on fourth-and-1
This wasn’t as baffling as the extra point, but it was still a head-scratching call considering the circumstances in the game. With 7:46 left to play in the third quarter, the Patriots faced a fourth-and-1 at their own 41-yard line. At the time, they were trailing 12-0 and they needed an offensive spark in the worst way possible.
During the regular season, the Patriots had 25 fourth down attempts and they converted in 72% of the time, which was the second-highest mark in the NFL. This would have been the perfect time to run Maye up the middle for a QB sneak or even just give the ball to Rhamondre Stevenson, who got zero carries in the second half, but nope.
In the lead-up to the Super Bowl, Vrabel was actually asked what his fourth down philosophy would be in the big game.
“You have to decide what type of game this is,” Vrabel said, “What the offense is doing, what you think about the play call, where it is on the field, what you feel like the game is going to require. Is it going to require some field goals? Is it going to be a low-scoring game? Or is this going to be a game that we’re going to have to score touchdowns in? Sometimes it kind of differs game to game. I think we’ve tried to be aggressive when we should. Probably just doing the best to marry the numbers up with how I feel like the game’s going.”
Vrabel combines his gut feeling with analytics to make his decisions and, for the most part, that almost always works for him — but it didn’t here.
With his team trailing 12-0 halfway thought he third quarter, it was pretty clear that the Patriots were going to need to start scoring touchdowns at some point. It’s fine to play the field-position game, but that doesn’t work when the other team has one of the NFL’s best punters and Seattle had that in Michael Dickson, who pinned the Patriots inside their own 6-yard line three different times.
The Patriots only totaled 12 yards of offense in the second quarter, so this third quarter drive was a chance for them to get something going. Instead, Vrabel punted. In a way, it felt like this was the spot where he punted the game away.
3. Giving up on the run
This one falls more on Josh McDaniels, but it was shocking that the Patriots gave up on the run so quickly. On their first drive of the game, the Patriots had four runs for 23 yards, including Maye’s 11-yard scramble. After that first possession, they only ran for 56 more yards in the entire game.
One of the Patriots’ most successful drives of the game was their first one. Stevenson carried the ball three times for 12 yards on the drive, but then he only got four carries the rest of the game. Also, Stevenson got zero carries in the second half.
With Maye facing so much pressure — he was sacked six times — trying to get Stevenson going would have made some sense because that would have helped to take some pressure off of Maye. Stevenson and TreVeyon Henderson had nine combined carries at halftime, but then had just four in the second half. The Patriots totaled just 27 yards in the third quarter and 19 of them came from Henderson on just four carries. The Patriots’ rushing attack wasn’t steamrolling the Seahawks, but it was moving the ball forward, which is more than can be said for the passing game.
If the Patriots had been down 24-0 at halftime, it would have made sense to dump the run and go exclusively to the pass, but they were down 9-0 at the half and just 12-0 going into the fourth quarter. It was still a very winnable game.
Of course, the biggest problem for the Patriots offense is the fact that Josh McDaniels had no answers for anything Seattle’s defense did. This was McDaniels’ 10th Super Bowl, and you’d think he had seen it all by now, but Macdonald definitely got the best of him.
This was such a beatdown that you could argue that none of this matters. If the Patriots get the two-pointer or if they go for it on fourth-and-1 or if they keep running the ball, it’s certainly possible they still would have lost. It was just surprising to see one of the best coaching staffs in the NFL get completely out-coached.
During Tuesday’s season-ending news conference, Vrabel was asked if there was anything that he would have done differently in the Super Bowl.
“I wish we would have blocked this guy, I wish they wouldn’t have moved, I wish we would have called a different coverage for what they did,” Vrabel said. “I wish, I wish, I wish, but it doesn’t go that way. None of us did enough to put ourselves in a position to win the game early on, I think, however that went. And we had chances. We put a drive together and stalled, we hit a 20-yard play and then stalled, we gain 8 yards on first down and find a way to not convert a first down. There’s a lot of things where we had chances on the quarterback, and if we make those sacks, maybe the ball comes out. Maybe we intercept the ball instead of them catching it. Maybe Marcus (Jones) makes that interception, as close as that is. That’s how this game goes.”
As Vrabel pointed out, there’s a laundry list of things that the Patriots could have done better. In the end, a culmination of factors led to their blowout loss.
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