Making The Call
After the season, Zac Taylor gave Pitcher the opportunity to interview for an offensive coordinator job where he would call the plays in Tampa Bay, a job that hypothetically should yield more interviews for head coaching jobs. He went to Cleveland for his first top job interview last month.
"Obviously, I have career ambition. I've never been shy about that," Pitcher said. "So grateful to get a chance to talk to some organizations. But happy where I'm at. Happy to be the offensive coordinator of the Bengals. I've got a really important job here and excited to attack that."
While he didn't get the OC gig in Tampa Bay, that doesn't mean he's bound and gagged in Cincinnati. Taylor is the play-caller, but only after much give and take with Pitcher and the rest of the offensive staff. So much give and take on game day that Taylor thinks it would make for a good all-access show.
"Clearly, there is communication between every single play and every single series. What is the difference in you saying it and me saying it?" Taylor said this week. "We are all on the same page and the same outcome. But there obviously is something to going somewhere and being the primary play-caller. I understand all that entails. He and I coexist really well together. He calls a lot of the plays we run. They are just coming out of my mouth and I speak it to (Burrow)."
And, Taylor calling plays aided by a kitchen cabinet has worked and made his offenses one of the NFL's most consistent of the 2020s.
"It's just what fits your team, what fits the coaches you have, what fits the players you have," Taylor said. "Everywhere it's a little bit different. For us, I feel like this is what fits us best."
Besides, Pitcher knows what gets jobs.
"I'm far less concerned with anything in that realm and far more concerned with getting us to where we need to be as a football team," Pitcher said. "Above all else, that will take us all to where we want to go."
Slants and Screens
Golden's M.O. coming from South Bend was bringing heat. But with his best pass rusher (Hendrickson) hurt for most of the year and his most experienced player (linebacker Logan Wilson) traded to Dallas, that lack of experience made games and blitzes tough.
The Bengals never moved out of the last spot in the league and finished with the lowest blitz percentage at 16.6. Sounds like it won't happen again.
"This was the least amount of pressure that I've had in forever. By a long margin, the least amount of line stunts," Golden said. "We made a lot of progress with that, and a lot of it was Barrett and D-Knight settling in and being able to call some of those on the field. Because it's hard to call line stunts just as a pre- snap call.
"There are a lot of reasons that went into that. Everything runs through the middle, and when those guys (Knight and Carter) started to get more comfortable, then we got more comfortable in them. For me, that will be the floor now, not the ceiling." …
No one in the universe has the Bengals drafting an offensive player at No. 10. But don't tell Pitcher. He's preparing like they are.
"You've got to think and prepare like every pick that Duke is going to turn to you. 'What do you think?' And you've got to make sure you've got the work so that you can answer that question in that moment with confidence," Pitcher said. "It's the same as you put a gameplan together. You put a call sheet together, you might call 20% of the plays on that sheet. You're going to study all these college players, all these free agents, and you might acquire one percent of those guys. But if you don't do the work, you're not going to be confident that you got the right one percent." …
Veteran defensive tackle and captain B.J. Hill turns 31 in April, and he's coming off an extremely tough year. He's a staple of the pundits' lists of salary cap casualties, but maybe not so fast. After injuring his foot early in spring drills, Hill did the team guy thing and opted to gut it out instead of getting it fixed. Golden says it's fixed now, and he thinks it's going to make a difference.
"Obviously, we love B.J. and B.J. went through a lot last year. Missing the offseason, missing most of the training camp, really fought through some things," Golden said. "I know he had something fixed after the season. So I'm excited to get him back healthy." …