Mike Vrabel’s coaching moment was a scathing indictment of New England’s offense

MIke Vrabel played for Bill Belichick from 2001 through 2008, and he clearly picked up a few things along the way.

It seemed like the height of strategic madness when Titans head coach MIke Vrabel decided to do it. With 5:52 left in the game, and Tennessee up 14-13, the decision was made to punt on fourth-and-5 from the New England 36-yard line. You could hear America screaming at Vrabel as it would scream as somebody entering an abandoned, haunted house in a horror movie, believing that whatever bad things have happened to anybody else, it would not happen to them. After all, it would take just a few yards for the Titans to be within field goal range, and that would have given them a four-point lead with time running out.

But Vrabel had a better idea, and it had everything to do with time running out. There’s a loophole in the NFL rulebook that allows teams to take penalties and run down the clock outside of five minutes left in the game. Vrabel wanted to give the Patriots as little time as possible, so on that fourth-and-5, the Titans were called for a delay of game penalty as the clock ran down from : to 5:29. Then, a false start on linebacker Wesley Woodyard that ran the clock down to 5:14. Punter Brett Kern didn’t actually get to do his job until there was 4:51 left in the game, and with all those penalties, the Titans ran 1:36 off the clock, making things far more pressurized for the Patriots.

You could also say that with the decision to punt in that situation at all, Vrabel was betting on two things: The ability of his own defense to stop Tom Brady and his crew from scoring, and the simple fact that the Patriots have struggled to consistently sustain drives all season. Both bets worked out, as New England went three-and-out on the subsequent drive, and punter Jake Bailey gave the ball back to Tennessee with 3:10 left in the game. Vrabel’s team was then able to milk the clock down to 15 seconds, at which point Brady ended New England’s season — and perhaps his time with the Patriots — and perhaps the Patriots’ dynasty — with this pick-six to Titans (and former Patriots) cornerback Logan Ryan. Ryan had dropped a sure pick-six earlier in the game, which explains the “REDEEMS HIMSELF” thing.

The best part of Vrabel’s particular bit of coaching brilliance is that he learned it from Bill Belichick, who coached Vrabel from 2001 through 2007 back when Vrabel was a linebacker who also caught 10 touchdowns in the regular- and post-season.

Earlier this season, Belichick worked the clock in similar fashion even though his team was beating the daylights out of the Jets in what became a 33-0 thrashing. With 11:33 remaining, the Patriots took a delay of game penalty on a punt set up from the Jets’ 33-yard line. So, a similarly odd situation for a punt. But the clock kept running, and then, running back Branden Bolden went out of his way to get a false start penalty called on himself. Presumably, Belichick knew — as Vrabel knew — that consecutive delay of game penalties would have caused an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, which is a 15-yard loss and a loss of down.

Why would Belichick try such a stunt in a blowout when he clearly didn’t need it? One would imagine that he was greasing the wheels for an opportunity to try it in the postseason, or any key moment where it was important to run down the clock. What Belichick never could have expected is that Vrabel would pull the old “Student Becomes the Teacher” plot point you see in every martial arts movie, and would blow his old coach away with it.