Mike Vrabel returned to Ohio State in 2011 to begin his new coaching career under Luke Fickell as a linebacker coach.
Despite the accolades Vrabel earned as a player and his one-year stint as a position coach, he still had to interview for his job when Urban Meyer arrived in 2012.
Up until that time, the only interview experience Vrabel had was with his old teammate and friend Fickell, which probably wasn't much of an interview at all. Meyer, however, held Vrabel to a different standard—one he didn't meet right out of the gate.
According to Vrabel, he bombed his first interview so bad Meyer made him do it again.
From Doug Samuels of footballscoop.com:
“I bombed my first interview. Urban Meyer interviewed me and I bombed it. It’s an amazing and humbling story that I shared with [owner] Amy [Adams Strunk] and [GM] Jon [Robinson].”
“But Urban had faith in me, and he called me that night and said, ‘That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I want you to come back tomorrow at 6 in the morning, and I want you to do it again.’ So I left the house, and went down and stayed in the office, stayed up all night, cleaned my thoughts up, got things in order, did the interview, and he hired me at Ohio State.”
The move shows why Meyer has been so successful in hiring assistants. Vrabel served as his defensive line coach for two years before departing for the Houston Texans.
Six seasons after Vrabel almost washed out of Columbus, he's now an NFL head coach.
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