Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels has a new toy for his offense. On Tuesday, McDaniels shared his initial thoughts on having receiver Antonio brown at his disposal.
“Antonio’s been a productive player, obviously, his whole career,” McDaniels told reporters. “We’ve had to defend him numerous times in my time here in New England. [He is] just an overall solid player that has done a lot of good things in our league. I think for us, it’s just how quickly we can get him acclimated to our process and our system and to things we do here and just build trust on the practice field, and then see how it goes and kind of let that determine how we build it from there.”
McDaniels was asked whether there’s pressure to get someone like Brown involved in the offense early.
"[T]he goal for us is always the same -- have a really good week of preparation, try to make sure our guys know what our plan is and we’ve prepared them as best we can for the opponent, and then go out there and take care of the football and score as many points as we can playing complementary football,” McDaniels said. “We have a lot of good football players on our team and a lot of guys that have roles that they can perform well. We’ve got to go out there and put our guys in good positions to be successful, hopefully, with a really good week of practice. We’ll see how it goes as we go forward, but certainly we’ve always had the same concept in terms of our run game, pass game, our offense in general. We’re going to try to throw it where we’re supposed to throw it and we don’t try to force the ball anywhere or to anybody because that’s not necessarily the way we do it.”
That’s something the Patriots never will do, not with Tom Brady as quarterback. Brady never will force the ball to any player, no matter how much he makes or what his profile may be. For Brown, who is used to being the focal point of the Pittsburgh passing game, adapting to that will be as challenging as adjusting to the Patriot Way.