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The way that Dan Pitcher landed his first NFL job “never happens,” and it likely never would’ve happened in the first place if Paul Alexander, the then-Cincinnati Bengals’ offensive line coach, hadn’t made a phone call on the morning of the 2012 NFL draft’s first round.

Ryan Grigson, hired that year as the Indianapolis Colts’ general manager, sat in the nook of his new condo that his family hadn’t even moved into yet and the footprints on the fresh carpet only tracked to the kitchen, the bedroom and the one chair where he sat to watch television. He spent most of his time in the team offices, preparing for his first draft, one where the Colts held the No. 1 pick. That was life for a first-time NFL general manager trying to assemble his personnel staff, and the opportunity to hire Pitcher — SUNY Cortland’s wide receivers coach — as a scouting assistant was about to slip away.

Alexander called to tell Grigson that Pitcher was driving to meet with LSU head coach Les Miles, where the offer to become a graduate assistant might’ve materialized. “This kid’s special,” Alexander recalled telling Grigson. So as soon as he hung up, Grigson dialed Pitcher and offered him a sales pitch after he pulled over to the side of the road: “Dan, we’re going to take Andrew Luck in the draft, but you’re going to be the first quarterback I draft. I want you working in our organization.”

There was a bit of risk involved. Grigson didn’t have time for a formal interview, and he needed to trust his gut and the word of Alexander — who’d originally coached him in Cincinnati. Pitcher had also always hinted at a desire to coach long-term, something that former players and coaches could sense. For a general manager, Grigson said, this always led to the question of why he would “groom” Pitcher if he didn’t plan on working long-term in the scouting department.

“That was an instance where I totally kind of went counter to processes,” Grigson said.

When Pitcher accepted the scouting assistant position, he immediately called Dan MacNeill, Cortland’s head coach, and told him he wasn’t going to believe what had happened. Because in a profession where connections that open doors are key to igniting careers, this was the spark Pitcher, who was just a year out of school, needed.

Following five years in the Colts’ scouting department, Pitcher left for the Bengals in 2016 and rose through their offensive coaching ranks — a trajectory that ultimately led him to the Super Bowl last Sunday as their quarterbacks coach. Pitcher placed himself on the track to become a head coach one day, Grigson said, and now holds the valuable combination of front office experience with the Colts and coaching experience, with the development of Joe Burrow, to leverage himself for future roles.

“You can tell that it was in his blood to be a coach,” said Colts area scout Mike Derice, who worked with Pitcher in Indianapolis.

Pitcher shared an office with Derice while with the Colts, each of them possessing a laptop connected to a monitor for game film and another for typing up the reports. He learned how to compile unique reports each day for their logs even when the personnel didn’t change and there were lulls in between cuts and free agent signings. “It sharpened our eyes,” Derice said, forcing them to be concise, to articulate everything pointedly, to string together observations across practices and understand everything in the context of the season instead of from day-to-day.

During breaks, they’d walk over to the indoor complex and throw back and forth for 90 minutes. Derice would mimic routes that a receiver might run, and Pitcher would drop back — just like he did as a quarterback with Colgate and Cortland — and zip the ball to that spot. And when they wrapped up for the day, they carpooled back to their shared apartment and continued those conversations. If Pitcher’s then-girlfriend, Marissa, wanted to surprise him, Derice would fake driving back to the complex and instead pick Marissa up from the airport. They’d alternate cooking dinner for each other, then wake up the next morning at 6 a.m. and do it all over again.

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That was the routine that defined Pitcher’s first year with the Colts, with Derice and him always locked in unison as the two scouting assistants. Derice said that Mike Gillhamer, a positional coach with the Colts, dubbed the duo the “Miami Vice” — referencing the Crockett and Tubbs pairing — and posters were hung around the Colts office. Derice became an area scout after the season and moved to the New York City area, and the year after that, Pitcher earned his first promotion to a pro scout.

There, Pitcher was assigned to teams in the NFL, and he was responsible for knowing their depth chart inside and out. Pitcher would put grades in the system for free agents and one week before the Colts were scheduled to play the Steelers, Grigson called Pitcher from a gas station parking lot and said he couldn’t make it back from the scouting trip in time. He needed Pitcher to step in and complete the tape work and two-deep roster analysis.

But at the same time, Grigson knew Pitcher would eventually want to get back into coaching. After Pitcher tore his Achilles in 2009, he started to take on more of a coaching role at Cortland. He returned the next year, took over the starting quarterback job and then capped off his collegiate career with a final season that included a 31:5 touchdown-to-interception ratio, a 62% completion percentage and a 9-2 record.

After he finished his graduate year at Cortland, he briefly became the wide receivers coach in the spring while attending coaching conventions. Alexander invited Pitcher to the 2012 scouting combine, where he originally met Grigson and Bengals owner Mike Brown, to help expedite that trajectory.

The relationship between Alexander and Pitcher — now two Cortland alumni with NFL coaching experience — started when Alexander built a log cabin in the Skaneateles woods and asked MacNeill to send players every summer to help move rocks and wood. Alexander watched from his porch as Pitcher didn’t dive right into the labor, but instead coordinated the other players to make sure they finished everything efficiently. And when they broke for lunch, Alexander listened as Pitcher gave off more signs that demonstrated a natural draw to coaching techniques.

Eventually, in 2016, Alexander called again about an open offensive assistant position with the Bengals. Despite it being difficult to get out of a scout contract, Grigson had always promised Pitcher that if a coaching opportunity intrigued him, he’d grant his blessing and allow him to leave. Grigson had spent years honing Pitcher’s scouting instincts, and even if he did transition back to coaching, that experience would benefit him in future years, Grigson said.

For Grigson, that was validated a few years ago after he joined the Seahawks as a senior football consultant and traveled to UMass to scout a speedy wide receiver, Andy Isabella. John Schneider, Seattle’s general manager, had sent him, and Grigson arrived to find the “whole league converged” on UMass. But eventually, as he glanced around at the scouts there, Pitcher, along with Derice, caught his eye. Pitcher had found his way to a school without significant NFL talent — even after transitioning out of a scouting department — and Grigson was thrilled.

“Dan’s got it all out in front of him,” Grigson said. “His career is clearly on the right trajectory.”

That was before his promotion to quarterbacks coach, before the Bengals drafted Burrow No. 1 in the draft and Pitcher had a prospect to mold. It was also before Pitcher realized, and texted Grigson, that Burrow was a “different cat,” then turned that potential into a reality with a Super Bowl berth while giving his rising career its largest boost yet.

Published on February 20, 2022 at 10:49 pm

Contact Andrew: arcrane@syr.edu | @CraneAndrew