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 great ideas, always looking for everybody's input. A lot of guys would have been, 'Sink or Swim.' But Cali was always helping me."
Bengals head coach Zac Taylor hates it, but call this the First Zac Taylor Tree Game, anyway.
After five years as Taylor's offensive-coordinator-aide-de camp-best-friend, Callahan plays him and the offensive staff he helped develop. In his sixth season as the head man, it's the first time Taylor is facing a guy who worked for him, thus The Coaching Tree Game.
(The last time it happened in Bengaldom, a Marvin Lewis Branch came to Paycor in 2018 when Vance Joseph's Broncos beat a Bengals team quarterbacked by Jeff Driskel in his first NFL start.)
No one is closer to Callahan than Taylor. They text all the time. You could almost say it's the second time this season a Bengal has played against a twin even though Taylor is older by a year.
But Callahan, 40, left a big impact across Taylor's staff, and you can start with guys like Hill and Dan Pitcher, the quarterbacks coach who succeeded him as offensive coordinator.
Hill, a Texas native and a nomad like young coaches are, was in a new town with a wife and little kids and gravitated to the NFL vet. Callahan opened his home and family to the Hills, as he did his staff. For Hill, it was especially important.
"A thousand percent he helped make me comfortable," Hill says.
Both in and out of the playbook.
"I thought Brian was very comfortable in his own skin, and knew his strengths and his weaknesses and played to that," Pitcher says. "That's advice that everyone should follow. That doesn't mean you don't try to get better in areas where maybe you need a little work and you don't push yourself to expand. But know thyself.
"Treat people with respect and show them that you value them. That's how I felt with Brian. He listened to me. He knew how hard I worked, so he was willing to listen to my input."
Pitcher had already been in the league for several years and been coaching with the Bengals for three seasons when Taylor arrived and kept him on. Hill was an NFL rookie. Yet both are grateful how Callahan helped them with the art of pro pass protection.
"I didn't know a thing about it. He was great helping me understand the pro pass game and pass protection," Hill says. "Just understanding what we were trying to do and how to communicate that with the players."
Hill and Pitcher saw Callahan do it every day because one of his roles during the week was crafting the protections and then presenting it to the players.
"The drop-back pass game and protection would really be the two areas I would say that I expanded my knowledge," Pitcher says of Callahan's influence. "Look at the background, obviously, with his dad being one of the best offensive line coaches to ever do it. He has that kind of pedigree in terms of the line play, understanding that part of it. He just has been around it his whole life.
"And then he's had extensive time working with Peyton Manning and Matthew Stafford, two Hall of Famers, two guys that see the game at a tremendously high level. He brought so much of what they did in Denver and what they did in Detroit with those two really high-level players and were able to put it to work with our really high level player. Those would be the areas definitely being around him shaped who I am today."
Before last season, Callahan told Hill he was ready to pass on that protection role to him in '24 and Hill spent all of '23 hoarding whatever he could get his hands on.
"All the work he did, categorized it and put things together just coming up with the plan. All of that came from him," Hill says.
Hill and Pitcher learned so well that they now jointly prepare the protections. And Hill, just three years into the pro pass game, presents it every week to an offense that is protecting for a guy having one of the best years an NFL quarterback has ever had.
Which does spawn some unique challenges Sunday.
"He knows the holes. He knows the cracks in the protection. He knows what to do," Hill says.
What Callahan did, Hill believes, is be generous with his generosity. During one of those many sojourns into Callahan's office ("The door was always open"), he might say to Hill, "When you're in this job one day, don't make the same mistake I did here," or, "When you're an offensive coordinator, try this."
"He was also making a note to himself when he said something like that," Hill says. "I say it to the players. 'When you're coaching one day, don't forget to say X, Y, Z.' He used it in staff and skill meetings. He used it with all the coaches. That's how he talked to us. I thought that was pretty cool."
The one thing about a tree, it has more than one branch and Taylor's got plenty set to blossom.
Defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo has interviewed for some head coaching jobs. Special teams coordinator Darrin Simmons' quarter of a century in the league makes him well qualified. Pitcher could have gone elsewhere to be a coordinator but stayed with Joe Burrow. What Troy Walters has done with the wide receivers is eye-catching. Offensive line coach and run game coordinator Frank Pollack has played and coached in the league since the '90s. Tight ends coach James Casey, another former player, always draws raves from coaches and players alike immersed in a position so entwined in both run and pass.
And the list doesn't stop there.
Hill says he's been inspired by Callahan's move to the corner office.
"Him getting that job, it really hit close to home," Hill says. "Watching someone you work next door to, share a wall with, him giving everything he gave me as far as knowledge and then he's going off to be a head coach, that's encouraging to me. I feel like I can be that one day."
Down in Nashville, it is surprising no one that Callahan is still being generous and transparent despite getting rocked in a typically difficult rookie year as a head coach. Asked about the emergence of second-year Bengals running back Chase Brown, one of the last skill Bengals he helped draft, Callahan made sure he mentioned Hill as Brown goes into Sunday's game as one of 22 players with 1,000 scrimmage yards.
"He's kind of turned into everything that initially we had hoped he would. You see his explosiveness, his ability to create yards after catch and yards after contact," Callahan says. "I was really excited about what he could become. And Justin Hill, who I'm still very close to, has done a great job and they've done a great job using him in the scheme and finding ways to make him effective.
"They've found a lot of cool ways to get the ball in his hands and he's impacted the offense quite a bit and used all the things that I was hopeful when we took him. And I think that's a nice tip of the cap to Justin and those guys on offense to find ways to do that."
On a Thursday night, as the pizza was still hot and they were waiting on the wings, Hill, who has moved offices, pondered the protections Callahan taught so well.
"We'll do what we do," Hill says, "and they'll do what they do."
