Josh McDaniels has spoken.
The Patriots offensive coordinator opened up to The Boston Globe on his decision to turn down the Indianapolis Colts’ head coaching job to stay in New England.
It’s the first time McDaniels has spoken since the decision was made the Tuesday after the Patriots’ Super Bowl LII loss to the Philadelphia Eagles.
So what changed?
“I wasn’t 100 percent sure what the future was,” McDaniels told The Globe’s Jim McBride on Monday. “I just hadn’t had any clarity on that. So, where did I fit in? Where there any plans? I just didn’t have much clarity on what my role was here moving forward. …
“Once I heard from Robert and Bill on that Tuesday, it just gave me reason to pause and consider this whole situation.”
McBride reported McDaniels wasn’t given any guarantees to succeed Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, but the offensive coordinator did “have his contract adjusted.”
“The opportunity to stay here and work for who I think is the greatest owner in sports and the best head football coach in the history of our game, to work with the best quarterback that has ever played,” McDaniels said. “Look, I’m privileged to have the opportunity to do that and when they kind of crystallized that — ‘Hey, here’s what we see going forward and here’s how we would like you to fit into it’ — it gave me a reason to stop and say, ‘all right, what’s the best decision for me?’ And certainly it was difficult. But I made the decision on my own, nobody pushed me into it.”
McDaniels, who was the Denver Broncos head coach in 2009 and 2010, also told McBride he wants to be a head coach again some day and that having to uproot his family from New England didn’t play into the decision to stay.
