BUILT TO LEAD: The Arduous Rise of Cincinnati Bengals OC Dan Pitcher
These are scary times for the Bengals. Decisions they make this month will chart the entire course of the franchise. But in truth? They've already scored the greatest win this offseason.
Letter, to letter, to letter, to heartfelt letter, Dan Pitcher wrote until his right hand throbbed and the pain pierced through his wrist.
“My hand,” he says, “would practically fall off.”
Yet, he never stopped. Pitcher’s dream was to coach football. The one person he knew in the NFL advised he personally reach out to coaches and explain why they should take a chance on him. So, this Division III quarterback at SUNY Cortland swapped the pigskin for a pen and spent two months personally reaching out to the coaches of every Power 5 college football program, every NFL team, every day.
The gesture was antiquated… but that was the point. Pitcher didn’t have a father or brother or uncle working in the NFL. There were no favors to call in. Nor did Pitcher possess a sparkling SEC resume as a player to serve as a passport into a graduate assistant position at the school of his choosing. Yet what he lacked in connections he made up for with this inexorable diligence.
To hell with emails and texts.
Bring on the stationery, baby.
He’s pretty sure Mom picked up something nice at CVS. Overall, Pitcher stuck to a general script. He included a profile of his background and told coaches he’d do any job. Whenever possible, Pitcher added a personal touch. A nugget or two specific to that team. Then, he’d slide the letter into an envelope, include the necessary “Attention” atop that generic mailing address and hope for the best. In all, Pitcher wrote about 120 letters to head coaches and coordinators and — honestly? — a college grad in this position has a better shot of asking 120 supermodels for a date.
“I’m a kid,” Pitcher says. “I don’t know any of these people.”
This was right when our society was eroding into its current dystopian, digitalized state. If a coach saw his handwriting on the page, Pitcher reasoned, that coach would know he was committed. Different. “There’s a level of care and investment,” he says, “that’s different than typing it once and printing it out 120 times.” He dreamt of getting one literal foot in the door. That’s it. One coach supplying one opportunity. For every 50 letters sent, he received one or two responses. Chan Gailey, the head coach of the Buffalo Bills, took the time to write a generous note. So did Ken O’Keefe, the offensive coordinator at Iowa.
His mailbox wasn’t exactly overflowing with interest, no.
But that wasn’t the point of the exercise.
Say hello to the most fascinating team of the NFL offseason: The Cincinnati Bengals.
A team that missed the playoffs in 2024 could realistically boomerang to Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, Calif. For starters, they’re not afraid of the big, bad Kansas City Chiefs. They’ve won at Arrowhead in January. All quarterback Joe Burrow did last season was lead the NFL in passing yards (4,918), touchdowns (43) and completions (460), fresh off tearing ligaments in his wrist. If Patrick Mahomes deploys dark magic, Josh Allen Hulk-smashes and Lamar Jackson is Madden 2004 brought to life, Burrow is the clairvoyant killing you with his brain.
Of course, football’s a business. Drama’s ramping up in the southwest corner of Ohio.
No. 1 wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase warrants $40 million per year. No. 2 wide receiver Tee Higgins, tagged again, warrants $30 million per year. The best player on defense — DPOY finalist Trey Hendrickson — is officially on the trade block. This team’s historically frugal owner finally sold the naming rights to the stadium, built a practice facility and inked his prized possession, Burrow, to a $275 million contract, but is Mike Brown willing to pay up to this extreme? Urgency is officially at its apex. This should be the golden age for a franchise still searching for its first Super Bowl title, one that’s 403-479-5 all-time.
The Bengals waited too long to pay their best players and the rent’s due.
Oh, yeah. The defense also requires a full lobotomy.
All of which has justifiably been hyper-scrutinized on the television and podcasting airwaves.
And yet? So often it’s the names barely mentioned at all in March that lift a team to the championship dais 11 months later. The Philadelphia Eagles made waves with Saquon Barley, but Vic Fangio and Zack Baun were relative footnotes.
Central to everything on this F1 offense in Cincinnati is a name casual fans have never heard before. We see Burrow airing out bombs 50+ yards deep that neatly land into the bread baskets of those receivers. We see Burrow swagged out in chains and a sherpa jacket and assuring the masses this team’s Super Bowl window is open as long as he’s playing. He’s forever the badass lounging in the LSU locker room with a stogie in his mouth.
But there’s also the stoic, steely-eyed, 38-year-old coordinator perched high above in a coach’s booth. A coach who is uniquely qualified to both match intellectual wits with Burrow and relate to the quarterback on an emotional level. The Bengals have issues this March but the fact that nobody stole this coach to be their head man is one of the greatest wins of the offseason.
Dan Pitcher was built for this moment in Cincinnati.
With all due respect to all wives, all girlfriends, nothing in life toys with a man’s heart quite like football. You love it. You hate it. Doesn’t matter if you’re playing or coaching in high school, college or the pros. This sport has the power to fill you with ecstasy — to bring you heaven on earth — or hurl you into a pit of despair. As a quarterback himself, at Cortland, Pitcher had every reason to quit the sport cold turkey.
Each time he was on the cusp of such joy, he slipped into a “dark place.” He can still clearly see that fork in the road.
Rather than break up with football, he inched closer toward his football destiny.
Gut Check No. 1
First, it was the shoulder. Dan Pitcher attended Colgate University because the Cortland, N.Y., native wanted to test his quarterbacking skills at the highest level he could. For him, it was Division I-AA. After serving as a backup through the 2005 and 2006 seasons, he hoped to get his chance in ’07. Yet after originally hurting his shoulder in a spring practice, Pitcher re-injured it while power-cleaning in the weight room.
His shoulder joint would not stop subluxing in and out of socket.
His labrum? Effectively “shot.”
On the cusp of that third year — two weeks into summer camp — Pitcher had a choice.
He could stay. He could fashion a harness around that loose shoulder, stick around as the third-stringer and get surgery after that season. Go down this road any further academically and it’d make zero sense to leave. Only 12 percent of applicants even make it to Colgate and his grades were exceptional. Pitcher, a psychology major, knew he could enter the real world with a prestigious degree. Forever fascinated by the human condition and why people behave the way they do, he believes there’s nothing more complicated in the world than a human being. Pitcher didn’t harbor dreams of becoming a clinical psychologist, instead reasoning that these skills would apply to anything in life. Perhaps coaching.
Staying also would’ve meant not playing all spring, not competing for the No. 1 job in ’08 and likely seeing his playing days grind to an anticlimactic halt.
His other option? Get the surgery ASAP and transfer. Pitcher had only burnt one year eligibility. He wasn’t on scholarship. There was no financial reason to stay.
“I was kind of like, ‘Alright, how many eggs do you want to put in this football basket? How big a part of your life is this? How important is this to you? And if you’re going to do something, now is the time to do it,’” Pitcher says. “I pulled the trigger and said, ‘Let’s go. I want to play. I don’t want to look back and regret not giving it everything I had to go play.’”
That August of ’07, he got surgery and plotted to resume his football career again for D-III Cortland the spring of ’08. In the meantime? He’d work at an insurance company back home and chip in as an assistant coach at his old high school. Pitcher had no clue how he’d react to his first fall not playing the sport since age 7. But in deciding to continue his career of playing football with this gap year, he also found his true calling: coaching. As luck had it, wrestling coach David Darrow had just taken over the football team and wanted all the help he could get. After a couple days of seeing a 20-year-old Pitcher interact with the 16- and 17-year-olds, Darrow asked if he’d like to run the entire offense.
Suddenly, Pitcher wasn’t only coaching his little brother’s senior year of high school — sweet in its own right — he was now authoring gameplans, calling plays, completely thrust into a new role: teacher. He couldn’t get enough. His offense was essentially a watered-down version of what he learned at Colgate. His quarterback was a kid named AJ Meldrim and Pitcher admits he rode Meldrim far, far, far harder than necessary but, hey. He was a lefty. (“He’s lucky I didn’t just fire him on the spot,” Pitcher jokes.)
One common sight was Pitcher going ballistic on the sideline if a play didn’t work.
“Losing my mind as an unhinged 20-year-old,” Pitcher says. “Here I am screaming at these 16-year-old kids that are just trying to figure out whether to go right or left. Probably showing my lack of maturity in that moment.”
But, man, it was fun. Pitcher had always been fascinated with the strategy of the sport — the “planning” and “execution” of a plan. That fall, he fell in love with teaching strategy to others.
“That was such an affirmational experience for me. Like, ‘Yes, this is what you want to do,’” Pitcher says. “You come alive when you’re doing this.
“I felt at home. Like I was doing what I was meant to be doing, what my skillset allowed me to do at a really high level. Even though I was young and I was still trying to figure it out, I got enough positive feedback internally — my own sense of purpose and drive was fulfilled as I was doing that — that it was a sign to me: ‘Keep going down this road, dude. This is what you’re supposed to do.’”
Into ‘08, it was back to quarterbacking. Pitcher spent his first year with the Red Dragons playing sparingly as the No. 2 on a team that fell to Mount Union in the national quarterfinals.
Into ‘09 — finally — he was The Man. Five years of patiently waiting for his turn, his time led to this opportunity. And in the fourth quarter of Game No. 2, a 24-14 win against the Rowan Profs, Pitcher took the snap to run a quarterback draw. Upon hitting his back foot on the dropback, he felt something strange. Very strange. As if a rogue defender appeared out of nowhere to stomp on his calf.
Pitcher turned around.
Nobody was there.
Panic set in.
“Oh my God,” he told himself. “What just happened?”
Gut Check No. 2
What happened was the worst-case scenario: Pitcher tore his Achilles tendon.
Instantly, he realized another year of playing football had just blown up in smoke. Pitcher pinpoints this juncture of his football life as “transformational” because there’s no sugarcoating his state of mind. He entered a “dark place” — livid, sad, helpless. For a half-decade, he waited to start a college football game and the sport was promptly ripped from his hands. (Er, heel bone.)
“There’s a big part of you that just wants to say, ‘Screw it. You tried, man. It wasn’t meant to be. Move on with your life,’” Pitcher admits.
Frustration subsided. He underwent surgery. He instead made the conscious choice to view this all as the challenge of his life. Pitcher convinced himself that this would be one hell of a story when he’s leading Cortland to wins. One day, he knew it’d help him relate to players as a coach. Adversity’s a guarantee in this violent sport. The science around Achilles injuries wasn’t the same 15 years ago. Pitcher didn’t put any weight on his leg for a full three months.
By the time his cast was removed, Pitcher barely had a calf muscle — it completely atrophied. The injury zapped his athleticism. Never to be confused with Michael Vick, he was still a quarterback who used his legs. Now he quite literally didn’t have the same legs as before.
“But again — in a weird twist — it made me become a better quarterback and forced me to have to think the game at a higher level,” Pitcher says. “I relied on my athleticism a lot prior to the injury. I was quick to use my legs and create without fully understanding how to play the game. And so, I had to really learn how to play the game from the pocket because I really couldn’t use my legs that next year the way I wanted to.”
Which would inevitably help him as a coach. He was forced to read the entire field.
That 2010 season, he also tapped into his snarling competitive side. For one fleeting moment, Pitcher nearly lost everything. Again. The team’s offensive coordinator, Greg Roskos, isn’t much older than Pitcher and says Pitcher even sat in on his interview for the job. By the questions he asked, Roskos could tell this was an unusually smart quarterback. But that first year back from the Achilles, Pitcher was undeniably rusty. Cortland’s defense allowed the sixth-fewest points in the country and the ninth-fewest yards, whereas the 125th-ranked offense was mostly trying to not turn the ball over.
Into the first round of the playoffs, Cortland issued a gentle threat to their QB.
Roskos informed Pitcher that he’d insert backup Chris Rose at the start of the second quarter.
Pitcher started the game 8 for 8 with two touchdowns.
“He was pissed,” Roskos says. “Like, ‘OK, go ahead and put that kid in now.’”
They did, and Rose threw an interception. Pitcher played the rest of the game, the season, his career. No way was he letting the coaches send his ass back to the bench.
“He knew he was struggling, so he just bit his lip and took it and said, ‘OK, I’m going to prove you wrong,’” Roskos says. “Every talented guy has a chip on their shoulder. There’s still somebody who’s doubting them. You see Jalen Hurts. The best players in the world still have people who don’t believe in them or use something to put that chip on their shoulder. So that was something that helped Dan and then helped our team.”
The next season, Pitcher was one of the best players in the country. He completed 197 of 317 passes for 2,712 yards with 31 touchdowns and only five interceptions. Good enough to be named a finalist for the Gagliardi Trophy, the “D-III Heisman.” He dissected defenses at an advanced level. He also happened to be a 24-year-old college player at that point. On this Zoom call, Pitcher points to the gray hairs on his head and assures his hair was changing colors way back then. “So,” he adds, “I was thinking the game at a way higher level than most of the guys I was playing against.” Teammates viewed him as more coach than teammate.
All Pitcher had left academically was a final capstone project to complete his Masters in sport management and he figured out a way to make that project a crash course in coaching. That 2011 season, he was basically a grad assistant — the entry-level job for all aspiring coaches. He’d get into the GA office around 7:30 a.m. and spend five hours breaking down film and joining coaches for meetings. He’d grab lunch. Then, in the afternoon, he was a QB again.
Thinking back, Pitcher quips that maybe he wasn’t supposed to manipulate his capstone as such but, hey, the right people signed off on it and this is what college should be: real-world experience.
A strong relationship with head coach Dan MacNeill helped and Pitcher praises Roskos as a “low-ego guy” who granted him autonomy over the offense. Both saw how many hours their starting quarterback was pouring into the job, and let him go. Every day, Pitcher says he was “directing” and “coaching” and “telling guys exactly how I wanted them to do things.” This might’ve been D-III — not exactly Alabama or Georgia, 4.6’s replace 4.3’s — but the schematics of the game aren’t drastically different. As Roskos says, it was right around then that defenses were obsessed with wacky, high-risk fronts straight out of Rex Ryan’s playbook. Five players would line up on one side of the ball with only one on the other. Defenders blitzed ‘n dropped devoid of any rhyme, any reason.
Pitcher decoded it all. Nothing fazed him.
Everyone who’s ever played bids football a tearful farewell eventually. Tumult could’ve crushed his soul for good. Instead? Pitcher kept staggering back to the center of the ring for another next round, and that dominant 2011 campaign did something more profound than simply load Pitcher’s hardware with football intel. He realizes that today, interacting with stars like Burrow and Chase and Higgins. Above all, 2011 supplied an everlasting rush of confidence. Pitcher feels so comfortable speaking in front of the Bengals offense to “project a vision” and “sell a plan” because of that success.
Obviously, he knew his playing days would max out at Cortland. But he was damn good and he knew he was damn good.
“I was one of the best in the country at that level,” Pitcher says, “and I knew what to do. I prepared. I could communicate. All the work was going to show up on the field. And it was the confidence that I developed during that that has carried me to where I sit today really. I’ve gained a lot more along the way. Even looking back now, I didn’t know shit then. But that was big for my development.”
Too often in the NFL, the proverbial “offensive mind” — the X ‘n O savant, the quarterback guru — is wholly incapable of commanding a room full of grown men. They’re promoted because of statistics on a screen when the role of Offensive Coordinator or Head Coach demands more. Those coaches put on a mask and try to project a vision when, at heart, they’re uncomfortable. Not authentic? Not yourself? Those grown men in the room smell fake a mile away. The NFL is full of smart football people who cannot effectively communicate because they never experienced such a confidence breakthrough.
At a scenic state school in Central New York that’s home to less than 6,000 undergrads, Dan Pitcher sincerely found himself.
After seven years, it was finally time to turn passion into profession.
He aimed to coach in the NFL.
He sat down, grabbed a pen and got to work.
‘Education in Pro Football’
Long before he was coaching an MVP-caliber quarterback, Pitcher could be found at the end of a narrow, winding road about 10 miles from campus on the Finger Lakes. For two summers, he hauled massive rocks, cut down trees and stained the deck of a Cortland alum.
Paul Alexander, an offensive line coach for the Cincinnati Bengals, was in the process of building a spacious cabin on Skaneateles Lake and told MacNeill that if a few of his players were interested in making money during the summer, he’d put ‘em to work.
To this day, Alexander can picture the scene at his property. He chuckles.
Every crew needs a leader, right?
“Dan was the foreman. Not that he was chosen or assigned or anything — just because he was Dan Pitcher,” Alexander says. “They would be cutting logs and splitting firewood and carrying rocks and digging trenches, you name it. I told Dan that he was way better at giving commands than actually doing them himself. Which is pretty funny in a way. I saw a guy who was a natural leader and very bright and knew he wanted to coach.”
Pitcher was straightforward, not bossy. Peers listened.
When his playing days wrapped up, into the spring of 2012, Pitcher coached Cortland’s wide receivers as a volunteer. The stint was brief, but impactful. The previous two years, the Red Dragons’ JUGS machine was inoperable. Now, that it was finally fixed? Roskos recalls Pitcher wearing “the shit out of that JUGS machine.” The next decade-plus, Cortland’s coaches would repeat to all players how much Pitcher busted out that JUGS nonstop. “It became a staple in the program after he left, that JUGS machine,” Roskos adds, “we’re going to work the hell out of that. And that was Dan.”
Pitcher was open to sticking around through the fall but obviously had his sights set higher.
He asked Alexander for advice and, yes, Alexander is the man who suggested Pitcher personally reach out to every coach he could. The QB even referenced the work he did at Skaneateles Lake within those handwritten letters. Pitcher went to Rutgers for one interview and had another set up with Les Miles at LSU. But once Alexander witnessed how committed Pitcher was to becoming a coach, he took it one step further by inviting him to the NFL Combine to meet people face to face.
Granted, a touch of deception was required.
The credential hanging around Pitcher’s neck was the most basic available. He wasn’t permitted to roam freely through Lucas Oil Stadium. Whenever the two approached a security guard, Alexander whispered to turn his badge around. No way was Pitcher allowed to watch these workouts firsthand. (“I definitely wasn’t supposed to be in these hallways.”) At one point, Pitcher got valuable face time with Bengals owner Mike Brown. One person Alexander wanted Pitcher to meet was a lineman he coached in 1995 who had just become the Indianapolis Colts new general manager: Ryan Grigson. Right inside of the GM’s suite, they chatted for 10 minutes. Two months passed. And the same day he was scheduled to meet with LSU’s Miles, Grigson offered Pitcher a job as a scouting assistant.
This wasn’t exactly a coaching job, but this also was the NFL. Off to Indy he went.
The offer didn’t materialize out of thin air. He earned Alexander’s recommendation. Conversations with Cortland’s coaches. All labor on the lake. All football talk with the QB between those “foreman” duties. Alexander grew to truly believe in this aspiring NFL coach — no small feat. Colleagues know how extremely conservative Alexander is when it came to dishing out praise. He rarely ever was this complimentary because Alexander always knew his own ass was on the line if he said a generous word about anyone. And here he was virtually standing on the table for Pitcher.
Initially, Alexander describes Pitcher as “extremely bright.” He catches himself. That’s not strong enough.
“Like genius-bright,” the longtime O-Line coach says. “There’s guys who are passionate who aren’t smart, and there’s guys who are hard workers who are not smart. But to have the combination of being bright and passionate and hardworking with leadership skills is a unique guy. He had it all. He really didn't have a weakness that would prevent him from being great.”
Adds Pitcher: “If you’re going to put your name on somebody, you’ve got to believe in them. Ultimately, it’s going to come back on you if it doesn’t work out. I was able to earn his respect and I’ll always be super, super grateful to Paul.”
He was in. He did not devise a plan to Magellan his way into the coaching wing of the building, either.
As a scouting assistant, Pitcher simply did what he’s always done. “Don’t say shit,” he recalls. “Do whatever they ask.” Work and work and work, so if a superior does ask him a question about a player? He’s ready. Pitcher embraced all grunt work. One of his jobs was to pick up players at the Indianapolis International Airport at 1 a.m. and cart them around. Instead of quarterback-whispering to Andrew Luck in any capacity, there he was picking up the Pro Bowler’s potential backup — free agent Matt Hasselbeck — before then squinting his eyes to see through a vicious snowstorm. Pitcher chauffeured Hasselbeck from doctor’s office to doctor’s office. It wasn’t a drag. Pitcher took pride in the fact that he was the veteran’s first impression of the organization.
Elevated to pro scout, it was his job to study six teams. One of those teams happened to be the Bengals. When injuries hit the running back position, Pitcher recommended Grigson poach Daniel “Boom” Herron off Cincinnati’s practice squad. He knew their roster like the back of his hand. On film, Herron wasn’t fast, wasn’t big. But Pitcher loved that he ran angry, ran “violent.” Boom was a hit. Through a 2014 postseason run to the AFC Championship Game, Herron was the Colts’ leading rusher.
Right then, it hit Pitcher: This is why you never half-ass anything. At any given moment, the GM may need your expertise and you better have an informed opinion in the holster.
Urgency was palpable.
This was the NFL. Pitcher could feel those high stakes every day.
“No matter what you’re doing, you better be on top of your game,” Pitcher says. “Because there’s a line of 1,000 people out the door that would take your job in a heartbeat. I always felt that, and I still feel that to this day. And I don’t think I’ll ever not feel that coming from my background. I didn’t play. I didn’t have a family member who coached.”
He doesn’t want to trash all coaches who received such a golden ticket to this chocolate factory, but it’s the truth. Outside of a few nice words from an offensive line coach, he’s been a lone ranger in this cutthroat league.
Seated inside his office at Bengals HQ, Pitcher says that part of him still expects someone to knock on his door, tap on his shoulder and tell him, “Hey, man, you’ve got to go.”
“So I’m always trying to prove that I deserve to be in the chair that I’m in. I had that from Day 1 in Indianapolis, and I still have that today.”
The result is a completely different perspective than his coaching peers.
Whenever he does get the chance to interview for a head-coaching gig, Pitcher knows these four years in a scouting department will be his edge because he worked in areas of the building 99 percent of coordinators never see. Roster-building. Salary-cap crunching. Contract negotiations. Advance scouting. Right down to practice-squad workouts and gameday inactives, Pitcher was exposed to… everything. That’s why he calls those Colts years a pure “education in pro football.” When you’re not in that personnel seat — when you haven’t been forced to live with the binary consequences — it’s easy to become arrogant, easy to think you’re hitting that bull’s eye in evaluation. Up close, Pitcher learned how genuinely difficult it is to be “right” on a player.
Eventually, he weaved his way back to coaching. The Bengals had an “offensive assistant” position open up in 2016 and Alexander again went to bat for Pitcher. Flatly told Mike Brown that Pitcher would become the team’s offensive coordinator in the future. Maybe even the head coach. Brown was stunned. A decade later — Marvin Lewis to Zac Taylor — his role’s only grown in Cincinnati. Pitcher was the quarterbacks coach who broke in No. 1 overall pick Joe Burrow. Now, he’s entering Year 2 as the OC.
Coaches practically never get to live in one city this long, so he’s grateful. For all the sacrifices he’s made in his life, this is his dream. That’s not the case for the spouse of a coach. Spouses, he explains, essentially absorb the lifelong dreams of their husbands. That’s why he wanted his college sweetheart, Marissa, to live with him in Indy — to see if she was cool with these ridiculous hours before going all-in. They got married in 2016 and haven’t looked back. During this conversation, Marissa is back home taking care of their three-year-old son. Oliver has a double ear infection. (“She’s a rock star,” Dad says.)
The partnership at home is strong.
So is the partnership at the office.
‘The Partnership’
Crafting a weekly gameplan with Joe Burrow always becomes more of a science experiment. Pitcher will present the quarterback with a specific adjustment if that week’s defense flashes a specific front… and the conversation does not end there.
Give Burrow answers and he asks more questions.
He runs the cost-benefit analysis. Nonstop.
OK, but if we do this, then they’ll do that.
Both know there’s no “magic bullet,” Pitcher says, no play that guarantees 100 percent certainty. But through those hours upon hours of prep, they live in a world of probabilities. Pitcher wants Burrow to poke and prod and push back because that means the Bengals are inching closer… and closer… and closer… to the best possible play for every conceivable situation.
“If he’s poking, it means he’s thinking,” Pitcher says. “That’s a good thing. As long as it’s done respectfully. And it is done respectfully because he knows that we’re going to do the work and we’re going to give him the answers. Even if I don’t have it in the moment, we’re going to go get it. And then we’re going to design the plan in a way that tries to account for all these things as best we can.”
This is unequivocally the most difficult path to take at the position. There are quarterbacks who excel with a quick trigger, who are told by Kyle Shanahan exactly where to throw the ball in their headset. There are quarterbacks who can athletically or physically overwhelm any given moment. The elites stay on an eternal hunt for answers. The elites kill you with their brain.
Fresh off winning the Heisman Trophy by the largest margin in college football history, Burrow was obviously advanced upon arrival. But looking back, it’s funny that so many outsiders painted Cincinnati as a quarterback penitentiary for the LSU virtuoso. Fellow No. 1 pick Carson Palmer even called the franchise a “mess” and a “disaster” on a 2019 podcast ahead of the draft. He didn’t view this an organization invested in winning. In truth, for Burrow, the coaching infrastructure made Cincinnati the perfect destination.
It's lazy to say that Burrow, and Burrow alone, is responsible for waking up this franchise from the dead because all of the greats need coaches who get them.
Pitcher was exactly who Burrow needed. A coach capable of challenging him intellectually. A coach who lived the sport’s crushing lows himself.
“He’s different in every sense of the word,” Pitcher says, “and ‘different’ is good. When you’re trying to be the best in the world at something, you better be different. And he’s the best in the world at his particular brand of playing that position.”
How he thinks the game before the ball even touches his hand. How quickly he decrypts all moving parts to either pull the trigger or morph into a playmaker. All of it’s different. Therefore, the power dynamic should also be different. Pitcher believes Taylor’s Bengals have built a support system that allows Burrow to be himself. From Day 1, Pitcher has approached his relationship with Burrow as more of a “partnership.” The first meeting of every spring Pitcher got into the habit of reminding Burrow that it’s his job to be his greatest resource.
All counterpoints are welcomed. There’s nothing Pitcher says that Burrow cannot challenge.
“When you’re dealing with somebody like Joe, who I do think is incredibly smart and looks at the game a certain way,” Pitcher adds, “you have to approach it that way to get the most out of them.
“And listen, Joe would be successful no matter who was coaching them. But I think the optimal way to approach a guy like Joe is to do it the way we’ve done it. Some people may disagree. But that’s also an authentic way for me to do it right. If there’s not authenticity — if it doesn't feel real — then it’s not going to work. And that is a style that I can authentically employ and I think he feels that from me.”
All of this allows the greatest talent in team history to play with a free mind. Pitcher’s grateful that Taylor and former coordinator Brian Callahan allowed them to cultivate such an intimate relationship and — now that he’s the OC himself — Pitcher gives the same green light to QBs coach Brad Kragthorpe.
Coaches are determined to account for everything imaginable because that’s what fuels Burrow. It’s impossible to overload the quarterback’s mind with permutations. The All Pro draws immense confidence in knowing Pitcher genuinely listened to every single one of his concerns and acted on those concerns in devising the gameplan. By Sunday, the quarterback’s fingerprints are all over every play call.
“Instead of ‘Hey, this is what you’re going to do because we told you this is how you’re going to do it, and we’re not worried about these other things,’” Pitcher says. “That might be the optimal way to coach some guys. That might be freeing for some guys. But for Joe, I don’t think that would be freeing for him. That would create a little bit of anxiety for him of like, ‘Well, we know that this could bite us in the ass. Why aren’t we accounting for this?’”
Together, they search. And search. And search. And score more points than any Bengals offense in the franchise’s 57-year history. Pitcher is forever the graying college kid at Cortland walking into the GA’s office at 7 a.m. to complete that capstone. So even when Burrow was lost for the ’23 season, the team didn’t self-destruct. Pitcher got No. 2 Jake Browning up to speed to keep Cincinnati in the playoff hunt. At the heart of success in this league is synergy between coach and quarterback.
Despite all of his work with Burrow, despite Chase winning the triple crown and this offense torching just about every defense it faced, Pitcher didn’t receive interview requests the last coaching cycle because… uh… why exactly? Because the Bengals defense was a train wreck? The NFL is a bizarre business.
To those who know him best, it’s not a matter of if he’ll become a head coach.
Rather, when.
“He’s able to connect with everybody,” Roskos says. “He won’t say it, but I imagine he’s the smartest guy in most rooms. I know he said that Burrow is on a different level as well. But he’s going to be able to connect with intellect. He’s a polished public speaker and he’s a smart dude. You believe him when he starts talking. That’s something guys can rally around, relate to, and he’s going to be detailed, organized. There’s not going to be any questions. He was above a 4.0 student here and all that. He’s got that laser-type focus.”
Beyond the gameplan, he connects with Burrow on a deeper level. He’s coaching a quarterback who tore his ACL in Year 1, lost a Super Bowl on the final drive in Year 2, was one penalty away from reaching another Super Bowl in Year 3, suffered a season-ending wrist injury in Year 4, then didn’t even make the playoffs after having the season of his life in Year 5.
Pitcher knows a thing or two about suffering anguish through five years of football.
He doesn’t relive his own experiences for Burrow. He’s aware there’s a difference between D-III football and the NFL. Few people outside of Pitcher’s family even knew how he was dealing with those injuries. But the inner-pain is the same. He knows what Burrow’s been going through emotionally. Calls it an “unspoken understanding.”
“You devote your life to something,” Pitcher says. “You’re confident you’re the best in the world at it. And you get to the precipice of ultimate success and you don’t have it. And then multiple times, it’s been taken away from you for a season — physically. But look at what he’s done.”
After one injury… Burrow led Cincy to a Super Bowl.
After the next… Burrow had an MVP-caliber season.
“It’s not just like he comes back good. He comes back insanely good,” Pitcher says. “Like, stupidly good. Shouldn’t-be-able-to-do-it good. And that’s not me or anybody — that’s him. That’s why he’s him.”
Pitcher could’ve told the sport itself to shove it when he tore his Achilles. He did not.
Now, these 2025 Cincinnati Bengals face a defining moment. The roster’s in flux. A team that was one herculean Aaron Donald feat shy of Super Bowl glory at SoFi Stadium is in the midst of brutal decisions. But there’s no reason to panic in 2025. They’ll be in Super Bowl contention again because this explosive offense is still in very good hands.
Even if one of those hands is still a little sore.
