New England’s voluntary program began on Monday.
The New England Patriots were back inside Gillette Stadium on Monday for the first day of their voluntary offseason program. For the majority of the roster, it marked the first team activity under new head coach Mike Vrabel.
But besides the location in New England, Day 1 under Vrabel was nothing new to Harold Landry, who spent the first six seasons of his career with the coach in Tennessee.
“Just upbeat. He wants everybody to be excited when we come to work. He’s big on that. He’s big on the energy. That’s just who he is,” Landry described a Vrabel offseason workout. “Everybody looks at him as this head coach, but he’s really just one of the boys, a locker room guy. And I really mean that. He wants to get to know you, know about your family and everything that goes along with being in a relationship with you. He’s the same guy everyday too.”
Through just one-and-a-half days of work, the energy Vrabel has brought to the building has been felt.
“He brings that excitement and then also he’s one of those guys to where whenever we are doing something he likes to be hands-on,” cornerback Marcus Jones said Tuesday. “So just having that in the building and the excitement — having the music playing and everything like that in the hallways — is great to be around.”
The on-field football work will soon come, as phase one of the voluntary offseason program is limited to meetings, strength and conditioning, and physical rehabilitation work only. Tuesday’s work included the first day of defensive install for both Landry and Jones.
But, the energy Vrabel and his staff is bringing in the early days of work is the first stage of establishing the coach’s new culture inside Gillette Stadium. It’s one that led to his old Titans teams winning more games as underdogs than almost any other team in football.
“I think it was mainly just because we were such a close-knit group and like we really valued each other and we played hard for each other,” Landry said of his former Titans teams. “We didn’t want to let each other down and I think that showed on the film and on the tape
“But also I feel like one of the main jobs as a for a head coach is to make sure your team’s prepared situationally and all I I know is as long as I’ve played for Vrabes, there was never a situation I wasn’t prepared for. Like I don’t care what the score was in the fourth quarter we just always had a feeling that we was going to pull this out it… It’s crazy, we just found a way to win and that was just kind of the mentality. We just didn’t think we could lose to be honest no matter what was going on in the game.”