NEW ENGLAND Patriots coach Bill Belichick confirmed that Josh McDaniels will be the team's offensive coordinator next season.
McDaniels was brought in during the playoffs to serve as an offensive assistant. He was widely seen as the heir to offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien, who had been hired to replace Joe Paterno at Penn State.
But it wasn't official until Belichick confirmed the move yesterday, a day after the Patriots lost to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLVI, 21-17.
McDaniels was the Patriots' offensive coordinator from 2006-08 until he left to become head coach of the Denver Broncos. He lasted just 28 games before he was fired with a 3-9 record in 2010. He was the offensive coordinator for the St. Louis Rams this season.
The Patriots flew back to Boston yesterday afternoon and rode buses to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., where a few hundred fans greeted them. Belichick said he appreciated seeing the fans who came out to see them despite the loss.
"It says a lot about those people and the fan base we have here," he said. "It's much, much appreciated by all of us."
Patriots owner Robert Kraft met with reporters and attempted to put the loss in perspective.
"Look, we're all disappointed in what happened," he said. "I can say this as chair of the [NFL] broadcast committee: The reason that the networks pay us the large fees that they do is that no one knows what is going to happen in a game. Head coach, quarterback, owner, d-linemen, no one knows.
"It's two or three plays that make the difference, that makes the game so exciting."
Those plays went against the Patriots on Sunday, when they lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl for the second time in five seasons. Among the turning points was Belichick's decision to allow Ahmad Bradshaw to score the go-ahead touchdown with 57 seconds left so that the Patriots might have enough time for a comeback.
"I don't want to get into the whole thing, the whole sequence there," Belichick said. "Basically, we felt like that was our best chance with the field position they had, to try to get the ball back and give ourselves an opportunity to have the last possession, rather than have the game end on a kick that [has an over] 90 percent success rate from the field position they were in."
For the third consecutive year, the Super Bowl set a record as the most-watched television show in U.S. history.
