There’s only one other guy on offense that everyone wants to hear from this training camp other than Mac Jones or Cam Newton and it’s not a player.

Josh McDaniels is the guy closest to the “competition” and we finally heard from him on Wednesday afternoon following practice. McDaniels said right now is still just a learning phase, so there hasn’t been true evaluation yet.

“Right now, everybody’s in a learning phase and so to me, what we’re trying to focus on is everybody getting enough reps at the core foundational things in our offense,” he said. “When we’re charting, I’m not necessarily, I mean, I know how many completions and incompletions we have because I’m an offensive coach, but that’s really not the important part for me right now. The important part for me is are we improving in our protection identification? Are we improving on our blitz pickup? Are we improving in our route technique?

“For the quarterbacks, are we improving our read progressions, our throwing mechanics? Those are the things really that are going to carry us through the entire season. It’s not going to be, well did we hit this today or did we hit that today, eventually as we all know we’re going to eventually end up widdling down a team and those guys will get more reps together, but right now everybody is taking reps and trying to build our foundation so we can carry ourselves the entire length of the season which is really what this time, to me, is all about.”

When Cam spoke to the media a few days ago, he acknowledged he felt much more comfortable making pre-snap reads than he did a year ago. McDaniels backed that claim up on Wednesday, saying Newton is clearly more comfortable with the offense.

“He just knows much more about what we’re doing,” McDaniels said. “It’s less new learning everyday, more repetition of things he already understands. That would be true, I think for probably every player I’ve ever coached in their second year of our system, it’s just things slow down, things make more sense. There’s things I was probably telling him to do last year that he didn’t quite understand, but I was telling him, hey try to do it this way, or try to make him the mike or whatever and he was trying to do everything I said.

“Now, he actually understands the why on most things and that’s really the goal for the quarterback is, when you’re out there trying to beat defenses on a play-to-play defenses, if you don’t understand why we’re doing something, or why you’re supposed to make this guy the mike…the protection slide here or there, it’s a tough position to play. The game has slowed down for him, the offense makes a lot of sense, like I said, there’s a lot less new learning for him.”

McDaniels also talked about how much adjusting there is for a bunch of new players on offense including Kendrick Bourne, Nelson Agholor, Jonnu Smith, Hunter Henry and others.

“We’ve got guys today, literally today, that ran routes they’ve never ran here for the very first time,” McDaniels said. “They’re running them for the first time, we’re throwing them for the first time and I’d love to have, every coach would love to have about 12 individual periods to start practice so we can practice every single thing that’s going to come up in a team period the same day. That’s impossible, so we try to pick our spots, work on a couple things a day, try to make some progress there and chop wood.

“Hopefully, by the end of training camp we’ve worked on most things we’re going to need as we go into the season, but there’s going to be some missed throws in this phase because we have so many different guys working with so many different throwers. There are literally some routes we just haven’t practiced yet.”

Of course, McDaniels was also pushed on who he may think would be winning the “competition” right now, but come on, this is the Patriots. No chance.

“We haven’t even gotten close to that conversation,” he said. “I’m not sure about that. The goal is to get all of them to improve, get close, let them compete and then eventually Bill will make a decision on what he thinks is the best thing for the team.”

The rollercoaster ride continues.