FOXBOROUGH – Josh McDaniels took the podium inside the Gillette Stadium media workroom right around 1:00 on Thursday with a huge smile.

“Hello world,” he said.

McDaniels looked like a man who was thrilled to be back in the building with a chance to try and help the organization get back to where it was once he left. The problem with that is there’s one giant piece of the puzzle missing…the guy who wore No. 12.

But, McDaniels has a new shiny toy to play with in second-year quarterback Drake Maye. McDaniels hasn’t gotten to any actual football with Maye yet – that comes on Monday when the first part of the voluntary offseason program begins – but, he has quickly developed a relationship with No. 10.

“Yeah, I haven’t had a chance to really do football with him yet, Tom [Curran], but that’ll come,” he said. “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.”

The biggest question looming – aside from who will eventually play left tackle and if any more receivers are coming, whether it’s free agency or the draft – is what will McDaniels’ offense now look like? Having Tom Brady run it for all of those years is certainly something you can’t expect Maye to replicate.

With that in mind, McDaniels does plan on doing things differently, but there will always be some elements of the old scheme as well.

“Yeah, definitely. That’s the short answer,” McDaniels said when specifically asked if he’d be changing his offense to fit Maye and the personnel the team ultimately ends up with. “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.”

McDaniels believes his time away from the league has benefited him greatly too and in turn, could benefit the fan base if entertaining offense returns to Gillette Stadium on Sundays.

“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,” he added. “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. 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.”