FOXBORO — The silliest media exercise this time of year begs the same question of all new NFL head coaches.

Did they win the press conference?

Obviously, there’s no scoreboard behind the microphone, and no connection between January talking points and September touchdowns. If you rile up a room of reporters and eager staffers over a half-hour, who cares? Football is coached and played on the field.

But let’s play anyway.

Mike Vrabel’s introduction Monday felt like a press conference pulled straight out of a Wednesday in Week 7, just dressed to the nines. Vrabel was even-keeled in his tone and messaging. There was nothing special, nor revelatory about his comments. Everything Vrabel said rang true, yet he never truly tipped his hand about what he’ll do next.

This scoreboard shows a tie.

Perfect.

More than ever, the Patriots’ football operations must prioritize substance over style; real wins over PR victories; brutal honesty over everything — something Vrabel has not only become famous for, but demonstrated Monday while sharing a snippet of his message to Patriots players.

“That’s what I’ve tried to tell all the players is, right now, I don’t know if we’re good enough to take advantage of bad football. I’m unsure,” he said. “Like we’re undefeated right now, but if we can just work towards taking advantage of bad football and being good enough to, when somebody makes a mistake, capitalizing on it and not being the ones that make the mistakes, and focusing on the little things and the details and helping them do their job better, that’s a great place to start.”

Translation: I can’t trust you to walk right now, let alone run. Let’s work on standing first.

In this way, Vrabel is both talking the talk and walking the walk.

The coach you saw and heard Monday is the same Patriots players can expect to encounter in the coming weeks and months, just a little less biting. Vrabel, to be sure, can be sarcastic and sometimes nasty. Next to his plaque in the Patriots Hall of Fame a quote Rodney Harrison once gave about his former teammate should hang and read: “He’s one of the best —holes I know.”

Vrabel is also, as league sources have described, brilliant and caring. In pushing players to their limits at practice and cutting them to their core with his criticisms in team meetings, he is trying to pull a better version out of them. But before Vrabel pushes or pulls, he wants to meet players eye to eye; something he said he learned over his first stint as a head coach in Tennessee.

“We’re going to make strong connections with our players so that we can coach them and we can push them,” Vrabel said. “I’ve really believed in this system, and I believe in having great teachers, great developers, and also coaches that will inspire our men by making a connection so that they know exactly what makes them tick.”

Immediately after his press conference ended Monday, Vrabel didn’t greet his new boss, Robert Kraft, nor his wife, Jen. In fact, he walked past both of them to embrace two other people, David Andrews and Joe Cardona, team captains who had watched his press conference from the first row.

Boston, MA – Robert Kraft poses with Mike Vrabel as the New England Patriots introduce Vrabel as their new head coach. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)

Of course, Jerod Mayo once spoke about relationships and connecting with players. He detailed a player-led culture at his introductory press conference, just as Vrabel did Monday.

The difference is Vrabel has given you every reason to expect he will deliver, while Mayo’s vision began to fray as soon as last August when players stopped running laps for committing penalties in training camp. That tradition, made famous in New England by Bill Belichick, should return again this summer. Vrabel is part Belichick and Bill Parcells; sharp, tough and unforgiving. His teams play the same way.

Ex-teammate and Patriots assistant Troy Brown remembered preparing to face Vrabel’s Titans teams by saying Monday, “We just had to be tough. You had to be tough, and had to be fundamentally sound to go up against a team that was coached by him. Kinda the same thing you would say about (Belichick).”

So when Vrabel said in his opening statement he will rip any entitlement out of the football team, believe him. And believe he said that with a purpose, knowing entitlement affected the Patriots’ operations last season.

“Mike showed us that he had a very deep understanding of our current team,” Kraft said. “and most importantly, he had a clear and focused strategy of how to get us back to the championship way that is not only so important to all of us, but also something that I think our fan base really deserves and expects.”

How?

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“We’re going to get everything that we’ve earned, from the head coach to the position coaches, all the way down to the players,” he said. “We’re going to earn the right to be here every single day.”

Perfect.

Not performative. Not exaggerated. Just direct, measured messaging. A show of control.

Just like when Vrabel casually deflected a question about recent reports suggesting he will hire ex-Titans executive Ryan Cowden to the team’s front office. Less than two hours later, Cowden’s hire was confirmed by NFL Network reporters; a scoop Vrabel or the Patriots may or may not have given them in exchange for information about the coordinators or coaches Vrabel wants to add to his coaching staff.

Because that is how the NFL’s real media game is played, and played best by coaches who understand information is currency, not something to be dispensed for free.

If Vrabel or a member of his staff, indeed, did play the game Monday, that scoreboard would not have shown a tie.

It would have shown a win.