PATRIOTS OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR JOSH MCDANIELS
PRESS CONFERENCE
April 3, 2025
Q: It's been a year since Las Vegas, took a year, back here. What are your thoughts just being back?
JM: I'm super excited to be working in football again. The process of getting acclimated with Mike [Vrabel] and the staff is obviously an exciting one for me. Working with a bunch of guys, getting familiar with them, learning things about them, our team and our players that we haven't had an opportunity to work with yet. But just the – this is why we do what we do in coaching, to form these kinds of relationships and hopefully build to something that we're all proud of once the season starts. So, I couldn't be more excited to be here, be back with this organization working for Mike, and I'm excited for Monday.
Q: Josh, relative to your expectations before you had a chance to meet him and spend time with him, where has Drake Maye been relative to what you expect?
JM: Yeah, I haven't had a chance to really do football with him yet, Tom [Curran], but that'll come. We'll have plenty of time here coming up next week, but I'm smitten by the young man in terms of just his personality. We've had an opportunity to spend some time that has nothing to do with football with one another, which I think has been great. Very beneficial and productive to just to get to know him, who he is, what he's all about, what he cares about, where he's coming from, his family, Ann Michael [Hudson], wedding plans, all that stuff. We've kind of had an opportunity to talk about those kind of things. So, I think next week and beyond will be super fun for me to really get to know him from a football perspective, start teaching our terminology and language, seeing how he learns best and how he acclimates, but I couldn't be more excited about the young man that we have.
Q: It's obviously very early in the process, but what's your overall feeling of confidence maybe in the state of the offensive line?
JM: I always start each year with a fresh perspective. I wasn't here last year, and I know every player on our team is going to get a fresh start. We're going to give everybody our best, and our job is to take the guys that we have on our offense and make them better. I think that's a huge part of an assistant coach's job is to develop the players that you have. I know our staff is excited to start doing that next week, and we'll get to know them more as we go, but I'm confident in the guys we have working right now offensively on our staff that are preparing to teach these guys the things we want to do. Then it's a process. We'll get to know them more as we go, but we're excited. I've met most of them and looking forward to meeting the rest of them.
Q: Will you be tweaking or revamping your offense in order to suit the quarterback you have and the personnel you have?
JM: Yeah, definitely. That's the short answer. I think this is always a very popular question. We have a language, and every offensive system, defensive system has a language. So, you have to decide the way you want to speak in terms of calling things and naming things and whether you use numbers, protections, or you use words or however you do what you do. So, our language has been refined a little bit between last year with the time that I had and then this spring with the coaches. I think that's really getting streamlined. It's been great to have their perspective on it. Just being in the same type of language for my entire career has been good, and probably in some ways, it's been a little different than most coaches. So, these guys have done a tremendous job of helping us streamline it. What's most important is that the players can digest whatever it is we want to do. But there's the language, and then there's the strategy part. The language is how you talk; the strategy is all based about your players and what do we have, what are our strengths, how do we maximize the personnel that's on our team and on our offense? That part is going to be different like it is every year. Whether you – '07 was different than '12, '12 was different than '17, everything was different than 2020. 2021 is going to be different than this year. So, the strategy and what we end up doing eventually will be all about what's best for our players and how we can maximize the guys here.
Q: How different is the language and everything for Drake though, compared to what he had last year going into the system now?
JM: It'll be different. I think that sometimes it can get overblown because one word is apple, another word is tomato, and one system it means one thing and another system it means something else. The guys, just like "Men in Black," you take the thing and just wipe the memory clean from some of the things, but a lot of it is what you call this, now we call this, and it takes them a little bit of time to acclimate to that. Our staff, we've done the same thing, and we've – honestly, we've changed some things, and I'm in the process of doing the same thing, too. So, what we used to call something, now we call something else because we've agreed that it's the best thing to do for the team. So, we're all going to be in that same boat. I'm sure we'll come up with a friendly, fine system when we use terms that don't mean anything to us now that used to. But no, I don't expect there to be – there will be a period of adjustment, but I don't think that will be a big deal.
Q: Can you go deeper into what you're going through, what you just mentioned there?
JM: Yeah, I mean, we've had a way to talk for a number of years, and so, when you have a great group of guys – I can't say enough about the offensive staff. So, when we come together, we've talked about every aspect of our offense. So, you look at it and you say, 'Okay, does that make sense now?' It might have made sense 10 years ago, five years ago. How can we streamline it a little bit to make it make perfect sense and make it even better? Even though we were doing that year to year, I think it's always great to have guys that have a different perspective because they're the ones that are going to teach it when they go into the individual position room. So, it's important for them to feel confident in the way they know it. It doesn't matter how I know it if they're in a different room. So, we've really done a good job of coming together. They've given me great input. We've taken a lot of their ideas and thoughts and tried to make it one. Whenever the ball gets placed down on the field, it's going to be our offense, it's our terminology and we'll all know it by then, but there's going to be a little bit of an adjustment period for everybody.
Q: Josh, last year you had a year away from football. How did you reflect on who you are as a coach, and how do you expect to evolve next now that you're back in the league?
JM: Yeah, I think it was something you don't ever think about doing, but I would say it's a blessing to have the time to go back and look at what you've been through in terms of the changes and different highs, lows. You look back at the past in terms of what we've done schematically and what the league is doing now strategically. I had a really good opportunity last year to watch football without a lot of deadlines, which was a new, interesting opportunity for me and just see different things that were coming up throughout the course of the league. There's younger quarterbacks that are playing a little earlier than maybe they were 10, 12, 15 years ago. There's different things that people are using and doing schematically that are having a lot of success. There's some trends like there always are that are kind of, I'd say, in vogue now. Whether they stay in vogue for long, I don't know, but it was just a really healthy opportunity for me to go back and look at what I've done, what I've been a part of, and then what else is going on in the league right now that I need to get better at, that I need to start thinking about incorporating. Then obviously, this opportunity with Thomas [Brown], Todd [Downing], Ashton [Grant], Doug [Marrone], Hoss [Jason Houghtaling], Kugs [Robert Kugler] and the guys we have here, I mean, it's been tremendous for me to have this opportunity to really pick their brains, see what they know and glean as much information from them as I possibly can. I got an opportunity to go to a few different places last year; I won't say where those were, but there were some great coaches that were very welcoming. College, pro, I had an opportunity to see for the very first time in my life somebody else run a meeting, somebody else run a practice, somebody else coach a quarterback, and those were invaluable opportunities for me. I know I'll be a different person in terms of going forward because of the experiences that I've had an opportunity to see.
Q: When you were here before, Josh, there were some players who couldn't get your system, who really couldn't pick it up. So, I'm wondering, as you've evolved as a coach, and you're talking here this afternoon, how much of a growth did you have to be able to now place all players in a position to win and be successful?
JM: Hopefully a good one. Again, I think it's a good process for our staff to be going through. I would argue we have a lot of guys that did get it pretty well, but I understand the point and the question, and that's always going to be the case. There might be some guys that have a little bit of a harder time of getting something, and part of our responsibility is to take those things we're learning about the players and try to figure out, 'Okay, if he can learn this but not this, this, and this, then we've got to try to do more of that.' So, a big part of that is the decision-making process that we need to go through once we start to get familiar with the players that we have.
Q: Josh, we've heard Mike and Eliot [Wolf] talk about the coaches having some collaborative voices in the upcoming draft. Have you been able to give your input on what kind of players you'd like to see added on the offense, and were you able to do that in free agency as well?
JM: Yeah, they've been great. I know all of us have had players we've evaluated both in free agency and in the draft. Our job is to give them our honest opinion and input on the evaluations that we see, then they have the hard job figuring out how to get them on the team. So yeah, it's been great. We've had plenty of opportunity to look at players and compare and contrast across position groups, what have you, then give them our input and then let them go to work.
Q: I'm curious what your thoughts are on the wide receiver room, just who you have in that room currently and the Stefon Diggs addition as well.
JM: I'm excited about all those guys. Everybody's got a clean slate, and to me, that's going to be an important message that I know Coach is going to give on Monday, and we're going to echo that. I've always – it's best to really refrain from making assessments on people until you really have them in your room, until you get to know them, until you coach them, until you put them on the field. You're running drills and running things offensively, and then you have an opportunity to correct things, see if they can fix it, make the corrections and get better. So, we have some young players that certainly have a lot of ability, and we have some guys that have some experience, some of which I have a little experience with. KB [Kendrick Bourne], Mack [Hollins], some of those guys. I'm starting to get to know some of these other guys that are trickling in here now, and I'm super excited to work with all of them, I really am. Stef [Stefon Diggs] is a unique individual, a unique player. He's got a really good skill set; he's been a very productive player for a long time. I'm excited about his addition. My brother had an opportunity to coach him last year in Houston, so I have a little bit of insight into what he's like day to day, and I'm really excited about having him here.
Q: The Patriots signed three guys that you're familiar with: Mack Hollins, [Robert] Spillane, [Marcus] Epps. Can you sort of give us a little bit of insight on those guys?
JM: Yeah, I was fortunate to be around all three of them. Good football players, super individuals, really high character, care a lot about the little things and the details. They set a high bar for the standard in their rooms and what they expect from themselves, and I think that then relates to their teammates on their respective sides of the ball. I think all of them are about the right stuff. They play hard, they do the things that it requires to be good, and I'm excited about having an opportunity to work with them again here.
