New England Patriots - NESN.com
Mike Vrabel obviously is well-familiar with the New England Patriots’ rivalry with the New York Jets, so his move late in the first half Sunday certainly seemed to have shades of knife-twisting.
The Patriots dumptrucked the Jets in East Rutherford, N.J., scoring on their first six drive en route to a 42-10 win over a woeful Gang Green. Most of the scoring took place in the first 30 minutes, with New England going into the break up 35-3.
And the final minute of that second quarter was borderline comical.
The Patriots kicked a touchback with 31 seconds to go after scoring their seventh touchdown of the game. Jets quarterback Brady Cook completed a nine-yard pass, and New York took a timeout.
Cook promptly got sacked coming out of the timeout, at which point the Jets were at their own 32-yard line with 19 seconds to go.
The timing was perfect, then, apparently, for Vrabel to call a timeout.
That was the final timeout for both teams, so the clock quickly ran out after the ensuing play. It was nevertheless intriguing that Vrabel burned a timeout ahead by 32 points, and the Jets not even in the zip code of field goal territory.
“Well, I mean, just trying to think and work the game and, regardless of what the score was, but forcing them to run another play or do something and they don’t carry over to the second half,” Vrabel explained after the game, via a team-provided transcript. “So, defensively, we hadn’t had a whole lot of opportunities to play. Those guys want to rush, they want to play defense and so I called it and, you know, really didn’t affect the game.”
Indeed, it did not impact the game, and it would only have been truly consequential had someone gotten injured on what ultimately was an unnecessary play.
In any event, it allowed the Patriots to, as Vrabel put it, get their defense another rep.
It just so happened to also serve as a decent way to jab a rival.
