I think that the issue is less one of search committees and more one of the specific facts at issue here:
1. The Patriots just fired a one year coach after an absolute disaster of a hiring process. Unmitigated disaster. I’m tempted to go look at the thread on that to see how sanguine people were in real time.
2. When questioned about that hiring process, in its immediate aftermath, the owner pointed to his track record of hiring coaches as evidence that he didn’t need a different process.
3. Very early on, it seemed like Vrabel was the owner’s choice, almost a fait accompli. It’s not entirely fair to put all of this on the organization, given Vrabel’s ties to the team and relationship with the owner; people would have speculated no matter what. But that Patriots seemed to do nothing to dispel that notion.
4. The interview season kicked off with two obvious sham interviews.
5. Some reporting before the Johnson interview was that the Patriots were open to being “wowed by him,” which doesn’t give the impression of an open minded process.
6. There has also been a fair amount of reporting of general institutional decay and failure to modernize operations, putting the Patriots well behind other teams in the league in terms of infrastructure and function.
Look, Vrabel seems to have some good qualities that make him a strong candidate, and I really hope that it works out. He was obviously in demand, so maybe the result is good even if the process wasn’t.
But there’s plenty here, directly about the Patriots themselves fucking things up with a bad process just the last time around, with enough smoke of similarities for concern. We don’t really have to look at what Woody Johnson is doing to be concerned independently.