Josh McDaniels wishes he had a do-over.

The Patriots offensive coordinator, who spoke with the media via video conference Tuesday, knows his play calling down by the goal line in the second quarter against the Chargers was suspect, choosing to throw the football instead of handing the ball off for a yard against the worst run defense in the league.

“I look back on that sequence and it’s probably one of the ones I could do differently,” said McDaniels. “If it works out on third-and-goal . . . and you end up with the play-pass, and it works, it’s great, and everybody thinks it was a great call.”

Only it didn’t work. It loomed as a head-scratcher for much of the game, one the Patriots eventually won, 27-24.

The Chargers wound up taking over on downs after stopping the Pats at the 1-yard line, with McDaniels opting to go with pass plays on third and fourth down, the latter a corner fade to Jakobi Meyers that had little to no chance of succeeding.

McDaniels explained his thought process, saying they had scored on a goal line run earlier, with Jakob Johnson making a great block to help Damien Harris pound it through.

He should have gone for the run again, but was overthinking the situation.

“We only have a handful of things you do down there, inside that yard line, so I chose obviously at that point incorrectly,” said McDaniels. “At that point, is it the wrong thing to do to run it? No, it’s not the wrong thing to do to run it at all, but I was kind of using some of the things I had seen previously, made the choice to do that, and it didn’t work out in our favor. Then obviously, we didn’t convert the fourth down play, either.

“Not a good sequence for me,” he went on. “I think I can do better than that, and I want to do better than that for our team. So, those are always really important plays. Hard to sometimes to choose between certain things based on what you’ve done previous. But I gotta do better, and we can do better than that for sure.”

MIKE ONWENU LOOKED looked like a budding star at right tackle as a rookie. So why did it take so long to put him back there in Year 2? There are a couple of layers to it, McDaniels said.

Now entering Week 9, the Patriots finally seem to have their previously porous offensive fixed with an effective starting five. That was far from the case earlier this season when right tackle Trent Brown went down with injury, leading the team to try Justin Herron and Yasir Durant in that spot.

Since then, the Patriots have opted to put Onwenu back at right tackle and slide Ted Karras up into Onwenu’s spot at left guard. From a distance, it seemed like an obvious solution for the Patriots to fix up their offensive line right away.

So why did the team wait so long to do it? That’s the question McDaniels received from reporters. McDaniels said it was mostly due to the team committing to putting him at left guard during training camp in an effort to put the best starting five out there this season.

“Well, Mike’s got a lot of lot of versatility, there’s no doubt about that,” McDaniels said. “At the same time, as you’re preparing for the season and you’re going through spring and the training camp portion of our year, you try to develop players in the positions you feel like they’re going to be able to contribute the most and not, let’s call it, waste repetitions in other spots.”

McDaniels said that the Patriots’ focus in training camp was to get a starting five together and to build continuity with that particular group. That means that Onwenu spent most of his time at guard.

Meanwhile, McDaniels said that the Patriots felt good about their young backups at tackle – Justin Herron and Yodny Cajuste – who were getting plenty of reps at that position.

It did not work out well, as rookie quarterback Mac Jones saw a heavy amount of pressure from the right side while the offensive line struggled as a whole. McDaniels, of course, put it more delicately.

“I think the move was to take one of the guys who’s been working a tackle and try to go ahead and see how that worked,” McDaniels. “There was some good plays and some things that we need to work on, obviously.”

McDaniels said that the team is still “eager” to have Onwenu excel at guard when they have Trent Brown back at right tackle to play alongside Isaiah Wynn.

But for now, the Patriots need their best five offensive linemen on the field to get immediate results while Brown is out. Through the past two games, it’s been apparent that the best five includes Karras at left guard and Onwenu at right tackle.

As for what happens after that, the Patriots will reevaluate when they get there.

“Ultimately we’ve made the decision here, the last so many weeks that this is the best for us right now and we’ll try to evaluate it as we go toward in terms of what’s going to happen if some guys get healthy.”

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