If your car breaks down, you call a tow truck.

If your lights go out, you call an electrician.

If your football team breaks down and the lights go out on its culture, identity and ability to punch above its weight, you call a coach like Mike Vrabel.

Well, the Patriots did. Vrabel answered.

And lucky for them, he’s coming home.

Vrabel is now the 16th head coach in franchise history and the right coach at the right time for a team wandering the NFL wilderness. The Patriots have lost 52 of 85 games since Vrabel’s Titans knocked out Bill Belichick and Tom Brady in their last game together in January 2020. That night, Vrabel out-coached Belichick, and Tennessee out-toughed the Pats for a 20-13 Wild Card win.

If the Patriots ever plan to resemble their dynasty-era selves again, Vrabel is the man for the job.

Not because of the player he once was, but the coach he’s become.

Over his six years in Tennessee, Vrabel never fielded an elite roster nor an elite quarterback, yet reached an AFC Championship Game one year and clinched the AFC’s No. 1 seed in another season. His Titans won a higher percentage of games as an underdog than every other head coach in the NFL except two. Vrabel finished with a winning record. All hallmarks of great coaching.

Sometime next year or the season after, Drake Maye will become the best quarterback Vrabel has coached. Together, they will form one of the best coach-quarterback combinations in the league, both in 2025 and beyond. This is the fastest, surest way for losing franchises to U-turn back to contention.

Hell, pending their moves in free agency, the Pats may push for a Wild Card spot as soon as next season. Imagine that if had they kept Jerod Mayo. Impossible.

The Patriots rushed to fire Mayo so they could hire Vrabel, make no mistake. Flouting the Rooney Rule in the days after was not just bad optically, but a poor business decision; eschewing an opportunity to pick the brains of great coaches around the league and learn about themselves as a franchise to simply get their guy. The Patriots are not so well-run they can pass on any chance to illuminate their blind spots and/or steal from the organizations that have passed them by.

But the bottom line is, Vrabel was both their guy and the best candidate on the market. You can’t do better than the best.

Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson may pay off one day as a head coach. He’s a well-regarded strategist, play-caller and motivator. But Vrabel is a winning ticket now; someone who has lived the difference between working as a coordinator and head coach — akin to the difference between a high school teacher and principal — and thrived. The Patriots are cashing him in.

To those concerned Vrabel is some kind of Belichick knock-off, the latest in a line of failures from Josh McDaniels, Matt Patricia and Joe Judge, you don’t know him as well as you thought you did. Vrabel was his own man in New England as a player. He clapped back at Belichick, sometimes interrupted him in meetings and cracked jokes at his expense.

More to the point, Vrabel never coached under Belichick. He hasn’t worked in Foxboro in 15 years. In that time, he developed his own network and identity, moving from Ohio State to the Texans, Titans and Browns. Vrabel collected invaluable experience that would have served Mayo, also his own man, had Mayo ever flown the New England nest.

He didn’t. He failed, undone by a poorly reinforced culture, bad fundamentals and poor accountability from the top down. That won’t be Vrabel.

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And he might fail. But Vrabel was destined to coach, according to a few people who know him well, and will arrive in New England a better head coach than he was in Tennessee. Since the Titans fired him, Vrabel spent the past year scouting for the Browns’ front office, then helping coach their tight ends and later moved into the offensive line.

Calling Vrabel a defensive coach belies facts like that. It belies who he really is; a coach players love, even as he’s cursing them out and jumping into practice drills trying to kick their ass.

As Rodney Harrison once said of his former teammate and fellow Patriots Hall of Famer: “(Vrabel) is one of the best —holes I know.”

A year ago, I called Mayo’s hire a “worthy gamble;” an educated guess that proved wrong. Dead wrong.

But there is no guessing here. In hiring Vrabel, the Patriots instantly raised their floor for the near future, and their championship potential for years to come.

Of course, there are no guarantees in the NFL.

But underneath his helmet and now a headset, Vrabel is who he’s always been: a winner.

Now a winner, welcomed home.