It was a podcast that crystallized John Schneider’s thinking two years ago, back when the Seattle Seahawks’ general manager was looking for a coach for the first time in nearly a decade and a half. The topic of the episode: hiring. The question that stuck with him: Who’s going to reshape the market?
A few days later, Schneider could feel several sets of eyes fixed on him at church. It was conference championship Sunday. “The people around me were probably thinking, ‘This guy’s praying his tail off,’” he remembered.
Schneider had good reason: He needed the Baltimore Ravens to lose the AFC Championship Game that afternoon. That way, he could hire their 36-year-old defensive coordinator a day or two later. Mike Macdonald, he’d decided, was about to reshape the market.
“A disrupter,” Schneider called him.
That Schneider was willing to buck the decade-long trend that had tilted the NFL’s hiring cycle — most teams believed they had to find the next Sean McVay or Kyle Shanahan — is further testament to why he’s one of the best executives in football. Instead of mimicking what his division rivals had done so successfully in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Schneider sought a counterpunch. He wouldn’t scour the league for the next great offensive mind, trying to chase down McVay and Shanahan on their terms. He’d land its next great defensive one and refuse to get out of the way.
Enter Macdonald, who never played a snap of college football, turned down a job at business giant KPMG to become a Ravens intern and was suddenly the youngest head coach in the NFL. Schneider’s first meeting with Macdonald lasted two hours. The GM later said it went by in 20 minutes. The coach was that sharp, his plan that sound.
The last four defenses Macdonald has coached — two in Baltimore, two in Seattle — have finished third, first, tied for 11th and first in points allowed. And nearly two years to the day when Schneider could feel all those eyes on him at church, the Seahawks beat the Rams 31-27 to hoist the George Halas trophy. Schneider’s instincts were right all along: Macdonald outmaneuvered both Shanahan and McVay on his way to his first Super Bowl.
Schneider’s hits in free agency and the draft have certainly helped. During his 15-year tenure, he’s acquired 32 different Pro Bowlers, including quarterback Sam Darnold, whom the Minnesota Vikings let walk after a 14-3 season last year. Darnold threw for 346 yards and three touchdowns Sunday, one of the best games of his career.
For the four teams still with head-coaching vacancies, and for those that will have one in 11 short months, Schneider’s gamble remains instructive. Contenders start by competing in the division. The Seahawks found a way to curb what their biggest rivals do best. Macdonald’s immediate success should reshape how teams think — and for the smart ones, how they hire.
And so much for a league dominated by offense. With the New England Patriots’ 10-7 win over the Denver Broncos in the AFC Championship Game, we now have a Super Bowl between teams both led by defensive coaches for the first time in nine years. Call it further validation that the right coach is the right coach, no matter which side of the ball he cut his teeth on.
A year ago, the Patriots were in a hurry like Schneider was 12 months prior. Robert Kraft’s instincts were telling him it was Mike Vrabel, full stop. It was telling that New England hired Vrabel eight days before any of the other seven head-coaching vacancies were filled. Kraft, the team’s longtime owner, had fired Bill Belichick after a storied 24-year run, then Belichick’s successor, Jerod Mayo, after a disastrous 4-13 debut. Kraft said his mission was to “expedite our return to championship contention.”
It was a noble, if not slightly implausible, notion at the time.
Entering 2025, the AFC was a conference owned by Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs, with contenders — and MVP quarterbacks — lurking in Buffalo and Baltimore.
To the rest of the NFL’s relief, the Patriots’ dominance was dead. They’d stumbled back into the league cellar, where they mostly resided before Kraft bought the team in 1994. Across Belichick’s final season in 2023 and Mayo’s first a year later, New England won the second-fewest games in the NFL (eight) and averaged just 15.4 points a game, last in the league. Its scoring margin was minus 258. The Patriots had consecutive top-five picks for a reason. They were a sagging franchise that in no way resembled what they once were.
The playoff drought was three years long. And they hadn’t sniffed a Super Bowl in — gasp — six long seasons. (It must’ve been a grueling couple of years for Patriots fans. How’d they make it through?)
The landscape of a conference New England once reigned over had drastically changed. The AFC now ran through Kansas City. The Chiefs were coming off three straight Super Bowl appearances and five in six years. The division the Patriots once owned now belonged to Josh Allen and the Bills, who’d ripped off five straight AFC East titles. Lamar Jackson and the Ravens were always a threat. With Joe Burrow healthy, the Cincinnati Bengals were, too. C.J. Stroud and Justin Herbert figured to join the conversation soon.
The AFC was stacked, it seemed.
Twelve months later, the Patriots have punched their ticket to the franchise’s 12th Super Bowl after scoring 10 points and beating Denver’s backup quarterback in the AFC title game. In two weeks, they’ll have a chance to win a seventh world championship and break their tie with the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most ever.
Vrabel was the answer, and Kraft knew it. One hire can change everything, and change it fast, and the owner deserves credit for pulling the plug on the Mayo experiment so quickly — and shouldering the blame while he was at it — to lure his former linebacker back to Foxboro.
All of which bodes well for a team such as the New York Giants, whose all-out pursuit landed them the coaching candidate they wanted most, John Harbaugh. A year ago, Kraft resisted the urge to pair an offensive coach with his young quarterback — as mentioned, the overwhelming preference of NFL owners throughout the last decade — and instead landed the candidate he was convinced was the best on the market.
Kraft’s spoils came sooner than even he could have envisioned. If Harbaugh turns around the Giants in such quick succession, he’ll own New York forever.
It remains possible in a league where worst-to-first happens on an annual basis. The Carolina Panthers, Chicago Bears and Patriots won division titles after finishing last or tied for last the year before. Across the league, at least one team has done so in 20 of the past 23 seasons.
Six more — the Panthers, Bears, Jacksonville Jaguars, San Francisco 49ers and both Super Bowl teams, the Patriots and Seahawks — made the postseason after missing it last year. That extends a streak of 36 consecutive seasons in which at least four teams have made the playoffs after missing them the year prior.
Mike Vrabel has New England in the Super Bowl two years after his dismissal from Tennessee. (Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)
There’s a saying in the NFL: The easiest way to see how good a coach really is is to watch what happens after he leaves. Vrabel was pushed out in Tennessee after four winning seasons in six years, including a trip to the conference title game. Owner Amy Adams Strunk said then she considered trading Vrabel, but ultimately decided against it because prolonging the process might cause the Titans to “miss out on someone they really wanted.”
The Titans have won six games since they fired Vrabel. Vrabel’s team has won that many since Dec. 21.
And consider how fans across the AFC East are feeling this morning: The Patriots are about to play in their 11th Super Bowl since the Bills’ last appearance in the game (1994). The Patriots are about to play in their 10th Super Bowl since the Dolphins’ last playoff win (2000). The Patriots are about to play in their sixth Super Bowl since the Jets’ last playoff appearance (2010).
New England jumped from 30th in scoring a year ago to second this season; Vrabel tapping Josh McDaniels as offensive coordinator proved one of the best hires of last year’s cycle. Drake Maye, who will become the second-youngest quarterback to start a Super Bowl, is a 23-year-old MVP finalist. A defense that was 22nd last season was fourth in 2025 and has forced eight turnovers and allowed just two touchdowns in three playoff wins.
That’s only part of the Vrabel effect: New England was one of just two teams in the league without a loss in a game this season decided by three points or fewer (Shanahan’s 49ers were the other). Vrabel is 22-14 in such games dating to his time in Tennessee. Amid a season in which a record 67 games — including the postseason — were decided by a winning score in the final two minutes or overtime, few coaches are better than Vrabel. He can motivate with the best of them. He’s also a situational master in a league when it’s never mattered more.
And so, in a season where it felt as if the door had opened in the AFC thanks to the Chiefs’ struggles, it’s not Allen and the Bills or Jackson and the Ravens or Burrow and the Bengals hoisting the Lamar Hunt trophy. Maybe it would’ve been Bo Nix and the Broncos had Nix not broken his ankle at the end of Denver’s divisional playoff win. Maybe it would’ve been Jarrett Stidham, starting in Nix’s place, had the snow not picked up in the second half Sunday.
No matter now. Vrabel’s Patriots are the AFC’s last team standing. After winning just eight games in the two seasons before his arrival, they’ve won 17 and counting this year.