The Bengals play the Titans on the road Sunday (1 p.m.-Cincinnati’s Fox 19), but it might as well be a Thursday night pizza break at home on the mezzanine level at Paycor Stadium as the coaches make the week’s final push.
On this Thursday night, shortly after the players have been dismissed, it is anchovies, pepperoni, and everything thing else on top because the opposing head coach is one of their own.
Justin Hill, the Bengals running backs coach, is in his office scrolling his phone to see the last few times he texted Brian Callahan.
Pretty much everybody in the building had texted him in the last hour of Sept. 30, the Monday night he won his first NFL game.
(“You can tell your grandkids you won your first game on a Monday night the day Pete Rose died,” one Bengals employee texted. Callahan fired back at 12:02 a.m., “thanks, Hob. Pete Rose died?” Hey, he works nights.)
Hill saw there was also a text from last month. And back in October. They chatted about wine, the wives, kids, quarterback play and how the challenges of the first year in Nashville resembled that first year in Cincinnati back in 2019. Back when Hill was coaching the backs at Tulsa.
By the time Hill came here from Tulsa in 2021, Callahan had been ensconced in the offensive coordinator’s office for two years and was beginning a second decade in the league during a career that had already seen stints with three overall No. 1 quarterbacks.
Never mind a childhood spent with a dad who is one of the NFL’s finest offensive line coaches of his generation. Hill, 32, third generation, unpacked his briefcase in the office next to Callahan and found a mentor.
“I was over there all the time. Walking around. Asking questions. Especially that first year,” Hill says. “You can’t even say football is football. Going from college to pro, it’s so different. He helped me a ton. That’s just who he is. He wants everybody to grow, he’s got…
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