Mike Vrabel won’t be spending his time on the couch after being let go by the Tennessee Titans. The Akron native will be coming back to Northeast Ohio to work for the team for which he grew up rooting.
The Cleveland Browns are hiring the former Walsh Jesuit High School and Ohio State star as a coaching consultant, a person with knowledge of the situation confirmed to the Beacon Journal. ESPN’s Adam Schefter was the first to report.
Vrabel was fired by the Titans following this past season after six seasons as their head coach. Tennessee was 54-45 in the regular season, won the AFC South twice and made the AFC playoffs three times in his tenure.
The Titans let Vrabel go after the team went 6-11 this past season, the worst record of his tenure. Tennessee dealt with quarterback issues all season, eventually turning the offense over to rookie second-round pick Will Levis midway through the season.
Vrabel returns to his native Northeast Ohio, where he was a high school star at Walsh Jesuit before graduating in 1994 and becoming a star linebacker at Ohio State. He was inducted this past fall into the Summit County Sports Hall of Fame.
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“Yeah, I grew up a Browns fan,” Vrabel told the Beacon Journal’s Nate Ulrich in September before his induction. “My first NFL game with my dad was in the Dawg Pound and was at Municipal Stadium for the last game (in 1995 before the team moved to Baltimore).
“(Fans) were taking the rows of chairs off and throwing them onto the field. … I grew up wearing the dog bones and all that other stuff, just because football was popular and important where I grew up.”
The opportunity being presented to Vrabel is similar to what he provided Browns defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz from 2021-22 while Schwartz was recovering from a health scare. Vrabel hired Schwartz to serve as a ‘senior defensive assistant,’ and essentially gave Schwartz carte blanche to do as he pleased for the organization.
Schwartz made a point to thank Vrabel publicly during a news conference this past September ahead of the Browns’ Week 3 game against the Titans at Cleveland Browns Stadium. The Browns won the game 27-3.
‘I started feeling a little bit better, got my vision back and a bunch of different things and he invited me to start just like one day a week, and one day turned into two and turned into three and Vrabes never once made it anything about other than do what you feel that you can do,’ Schwartz said. ‘And pretty soon, about six months later, I was pretty much back to normal and pretty much working normal hours, but it was really an honor to be back in that organization. It was an honor to work with guys on the staff.
‘I think I have some lifelong friends on that staff and I’m greatly indebted to Vrabes for what he did and for helping me out. I just hope that I gave as much as I received in those two years.’