FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Patriots coach Bill Belichick addressed reporters upon the team's return to Gillette Stadium today, and acknowledged that it was nice to receive a warm welcome from fans.

"It was great to see our fans out there, that were here, to be here when the buses pulled up," he said. "It says a lot about those people, the fan base we have here. It's much, much appreciated by all of us.

"We'll try to take a little time here and regroup, and figure out some of the things we need to do and move forward. The combine is in two-and-a-half weeks and I'm sure there will be a lot of other things on the agenda between now and then. So we'll just take them as they come. For right now, we're just kind of collecting our thoughts and we'll figure it out here in due course."

With another 16 hours or so to decipher what went wrong in the wake of the heartbreaking Super Bowl loss, he held his cards close to the vest as usual on X’s and O’s -- “I don’t have much to add after last night,” he opened up.

But when asked about how proud he was of this squad, Belichick did not hold back.

“I thought they worked hard all year, they competed well all season,” Belichick said. “We won a lot of games and even the ones we didn’t win, we fought right to the end and played very competitively. We did that last night, just came up a little bit short.

“I have all the respect in the world for the team and all the players and what they’ve done for over six months. It’s not about one game or one play or anything, it’s the whole body of work.

“I really, really enjoyed coaching this team and have a lot of respect for them.”

To probably little surprise, Belichick was short on many things in his five-minute session with the media. He confirmed that Josh McDaniels will take over the offensive coordinator reigns from Bill O’Brien, who is leaving for the head coach position at Penn State, with a simple nod: “It’s Josh.”

When pressed about the future of veterans Kevin Faulk and Brian Waters, saying he didn’t feel today was an appropriate time to address that situation. Asked if he could go over his thought process on letting Ahmad Bradshaw fall in for the winning score with a minute left, Belichick retorted, “No, not really, I don’t want to get into that.”

“Basically, we felt like that was our best chance with the field position they had,” he said. “To try to get the ball back and give ourselves an opportunity to have the last possession, rather than have the game end on a kick that [is a] well over 90 percent success rate from the field position they were in.”