It was five years ago, but less than a mile away. Brian Callahan was at his second combine as Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator. Cincinnati had the first pick. LSU Heisman winner Joe Burrow had just left the team’s suite at Lucas Oil Stadium, and out with him went owner Mike Brown, after Brown’s only combine interview that year.
Brown, it turns out, had seen enough. The rest of the staff had, too.
Callahan walked out with Brown’s granddaughter Elizabeth Blackburn, who was at her first combine working for the team, having formally come aboard earlier that month. The coach who’d worked with Peyton Manning, Matthew Stafford and Derek Carr before coming to Cincinnati, leaned over to her on the way out and said, “That’s what it sounds like.”
Burrow killed it on the board. He had a funny conversation with Brown about how fast he could cover the drive from Cincinnati to his hometown of Athens, Ohio. He owned the room.
“You could just tell this guy is wired to be a killer,” Callahan says, all this time later. “There’s just something about the way he carried himself, how he talked, what he said. Film aside, when you saw it in person, there’s just, and of course, you’ve met him over the years, there’s just something about him that you can’t really put your finger on, but you’re like …”
Callahan then paused, and added, “You know it when you see it.”
In coming days and months, Callahan, a reworked Tennessee Titans front office and his coaching staff will be looking for it again. The draft is seven weeks from Thursday. Tennessee has the No. 1 pick. There may not be a Burrow in this year’s class, like there was in 2020—or even a Justin Herbert or Tua Tagovailoa. Or maybe, just maybe, Miami’s Cam Ward or Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders can be that guy.
It's on Callahan, new GM Mike Borgonzi and president of football operations Chad Brinker, among others, to figure that out. Just weeks into the new setup, with the Titans’ power structure shaken up for a third consecutive offseason, the three guys in charge may never make a bigger football decision than they will on what to do with the first pick.
And in The MMQB lead this week, we’ll take you through where they are with all this.
I’m in transit now from Indianapolis back home, the combine is complete, and we got you covered in The MMQB this week. Over in the takeaways, you’ll find …
• The story of Quinn Ewers, once a phenom, and now trying to prove himself again.
• Some more background on how Stafford’s return to the Los Angeles Rams materialized.
• How the New York Giants plan to pivot at quarterback, post-Stafford pursuit.
And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with the Titans, the first pick, and how Tennessee is trying to get the most from it, whether it’s spent on a quarterback or not.
With less than two months to go, Borgonzi and Callahan, who barely knew each other on New Year’s Day (they’d had one previous exchange, arranged by a mutual friend on a text thread), are sitting together in a quiet corner of the downtown Westin, knowing what’s on the line for both and explaining the position they find themselves in.
There’s no getting around the amount of work there is to do.
The Titans don’t just need a quarterback. They need a lot of things. They have Jeffery Simmons and T'Vondre Sweat on the defensive line. They’ve got some pieces for the offensive line, in Lloyd Cushenberry III, Peter Skoronski and JC Latham. Tony Pollard and Calvin Ridley can still play. But there are needs pretty much everywhere else.
So they could use the first pick on Ward or Sanders. They could use it on Colorado’s two-way dynamo Travis Hunter or Penn State’s furious edge rusher Abdul Carter. They could also trade the pick.
The good news? Both Borgonzi and Callahan have been in this spot before. Callahan, as we said, was in it in 2020, after a similarly deficient Bengals roster bottomed out in his first year with Zac Taylor, and Cincinnati got the first pick as a result. Borgonzi was in it in 2013, when he was held over from Scott Pioli’s staff as Andy Reid and John Dorsey took over the Kansas City Chiefs’ operation
Reid, Borgonzi recalls now, went to work almost right away, digging into that year’s quarterback class, which was headlined by Florida State’s EJ Manuel and West Virginia’s Geno Smith, with Dorsey and the scouting staff. Ahead of the combine that winter, as Borgonzi remembers it, “We didn’t deem any of those guys as worthy of the No. 1 pick.”
So they pivoted, and while the league was in Indy for that February’s combine, pulled off the trade to poach Alex Smith from the San Francisco 49ers. Then, after eliminating Dion Jordan from consideration for the top pick for off-field reasons, Kansas City honed in on the three tackles at the top of the class, ultimately picking Central Michigan’s Eric Fisher over Texas A&M’s Luke Joeckel and Oklahoma’s Lane Johnson.
“He had rare athletic traits,” Borgonzi says. “It’s a big kid, who’s athletic, he was long, we thought he would be the top tackle. He had some good years.”
Johnson, of course, ended up being the best of the bunch. But Fisher started a Super Bowl for the Chiefs and the real key was this—they were right not to take a quarterback. Smith wound up making the playoffs four times in five seasons as Chiefs starter, and bought Kansas City time to find Patrick Mahomes and take everything into the stratosphere.
So just as Callahan was part of hitting a home run with a quarterback at No. 1, Borgonzi has the experience of going the other way with it, with all the lessons taken that the Titans hope will inform their decision-makers to make the right call this time around.
Jumping in on this year’s crew, Borgonzi uses that phrasing he used on Fisher again.
“When you’re taking a guy that high, they have to have rare physical traits,” the GM says. “For every player that you’re looking at, and I don’t want to go too far into the quarterbacks, but obviously with Abdul, it’s the get-off, the bend, and with Travis, it’s the rare instincts and ball skills—there’s a rare quality about each one of these players.”
That’s an acknowledgment, if a tacit one, that this decision really is boiling down to four players—Ward, Sanders, Carter and Hunter. And, as we said, the Titans are already headlong into speeding up the process of vetting and fully evaluating those four.
Three of the four will be in Nashville over the next week for their “30” visits. Ward will be at the facility this Friday. Sanders will get to town next Sunday night, with his visit the following day. Carter will visit Thursday, and Hunter is slated to come to town in a couple of weeks (Hunter is later for scheduling reasons, and because his pro day isn’t until early April).
The work didn’t just start, though. It’s been going, really, since Borgonzi was introduced as GM on Jan. 22. More or less right after the press conference, the new GM, Callahan and Brinker flew to Dallas for East-West Shrine Bowl practices, where they’d get their first shot to meet and interview Sanders.
From there, there was juggling between pouring into draft prep, and the first pick in particular, readying for free agency, and Borgonzi, new assistant GM Dave Ziegler and VP/football advisor Reggie McKenzie learning Callahan’s staff’s schemes. That group also mixed in another trip, this one to Alabama for Senior Bowl practices.
Draft meetings would start on a normal day at 8 a.m. Around noon, as they’d break for lunch, Callahan and a position coach would come in to discuss what was already on the roster, and what the prototype for a position would be within the scheme with the scouts. Then, meetings would resume until 7 or 7:30 p.m. The guys would then get dinner and a workout in, and Borgonzi, Ziegler and McKenzie wouldn't reconvene until 8:15 or 8:30 to watch the quarterbacks as a group, often going until 11:30 or midnight.
And Callahan, balancing the coaching side of this, was getting as far ahead as he possibly could before arriving in Indianapolis—getting here having watched every 2024 snap either played, a lot of their ’23 tape and even some ’22 tape of Sanders at Jackson State and Ward at Washington State, plus enough defensive tape from Penn State and Colorado to have a handle on Carter and Hunter.
Then, in Indy, armed with all that information, the four guys did formal interviews with Brinker, Borgonzi, Ziegler, McKenzie, Callahan, the coordinator and the position coach in the room for it. Those, of course, are just 15 minutes long, but they were done with the idea that they’d set the stage for the players’ trips to Nashville, which are coming up fast, and will test them in just about every way. And test Ward and Sanders, in particular, intensely.
“It’s trying to figure out if they can learn, how well they can process information. And it’s simulated, you’re never gonna give them a full install. But a Day 1 install, it’s a healthy amount of information,” Callahan says. “And you want to see how quickly they can learn it, because that’s the name of the game at quarterback—especially with young players, how fast can you get this off the ground, and can we get you ready to go, knowing where your gaps are. Because they’re not eight-year vets.”
“It’s just gonna be really meeting with a lot of people in the building, spend the whole day there, a lot of one-on-one meetings,” Borgonzi adds. “I’ll have a sitdown with him, [Callahan] and the coaches will be with him throughout the process. They’ll meet with Chad.”
Next, then, will be the convoy going to pro days—with Brinker, Callahan, Borgonzi, Ziegler, McKenzie, a coordinator and position coach expected on the ground and on campus in State College, Boulder and Miami—through March and into early April, with dinners with the prospects the night before. After that, and as the final touchpoint, the crew will double back and travel to do private workouts, likely in April, to close the loop.
By then, the hope is not just to know the player, but the person. Because Callahan and Borgonzi, and the rest of the brass, know that everyone, and most importantly the players, will look closely at what kind of person is coming in at No. 1.
“This pick, when we’re picking this high, this guy should drive the culture,” the GM says. “It’s like, This is the type of guy we’re looking for. When you make a pick this high, you don’t want to just get enamored by the talent you see on film—that’s part of the process. The other part is making sure that that person fits the culture, and he’s going to drive the culture too. That’s an important part of it.”
And that’s why all the work here is, too.
Then, there’s the other reason for driving the process as fast as the Titans are—the chance they may not pick at No. 1.
Teams have called about trading up. The answer they’ve gotten is, simply, that Tennessee is not quite ready yet to really consider a trade. “I want to get through the entire process before we make a decision on that,” Borgonzi says. And so just as having enough information to be informed before free agency is important, having a full scope of each of the four aforementioned guys before deciding whether to trade the pick is paramount.
“I think that’s why we’ve set up all these 30 visits and pro days that we’re going to, private workouts, because it’s such a monumental decision, we want to go through an entire process before we make a decision in terms of, Are we gonna stay there? Or are we gonna move back?” he says. “I want to make sure we go through X, Y and Z, go through an entire process, hit every possible touchpoint we can with this. And a lot of the time, you’re digging, you have all the information from the scouts, you start to call around, not only to coaches, but to support staff [with the college programs].
“You want to see what the real makeup of this player is. You wanna do that with every pick, but certainly with this pick. You want to make sure you’re bringing the right person into the building.”
So maybe it’s a veteran bridge quarterback next week, and Carter or Hunter. Maybe it’s a bridge quarterback and Ward or Sanders. Or maybe it’s a trade down to No. 2 or 3 or 6, to focus on plugging more holes, rather than just land one special talent.
The reality is, the Titans have plenty of options with this one pick.
And as they’ve worked through this, both individually and as a group, perhaps the most important thing has been getting to a place where all the opinions and reports and time spent get synthesized down to where a collective decision is made.
“It’s everyone’s opinion—you need buy-in,” Borgonzi says. “That was a big thing we went through in Kansas City, everybody’s gonna have different opinions. At the end of the day, you have to have buy-in, especially on a decision like this, at the top of the draft. There has to be buy-in, that you’re all on board to make this pick.”
“And at some point, we’ll sit down to go through pros and cons of all the players, and say, All right, this is where we’re headed, and you have the conversation, talk through positives, negatives, the issues,” Callahan adds. “Are we all on the same page with X, Y and Z? And then you move forward. It’s our decision at that point, and we all have to be on board with what it winds up being.”
Along those lines, since Callahan and Borgonzi are working together for the first time, and Ziegler and McKenzie are coming in, too, they are projecting a bit on how all that will work.
But the good vibes through the interview process—“The thing I liked, first and foremost, is that he came across like a normal person, just a guy that I’d like to be around,” Callahan says—have sustained thus far. And so, too, has a good sign that the coach took from the day of Borgonzi’s second interview, as the then-Chiefs executive was leaving town.
He was flipping through Borgonzi’s hyper-detailed GM book again, and came across the “organizational values” page. On it were four C’s: Character, Communication, Connection, Commitment. It hit Callahan then that three of the four were on a sign he’d made for the Titans’ team room, a sign that read “Three C’s: Character, Communication, Connected Team.”
Callahan thought, “Oh, that’s f---ing fantastic”, took pictures of both, and texted them to Borgonzi.
“And I was like, We haven’t even talked for more than two hours and we see the value of what makes championship football teams,” Callahan says. “I think that’s probably what drew me to Mike the most. I saw those things. And then you look at all the things that he’s done in his tenure at Kansas City, part of it’s the success, but then all the s--- it took to get there, that was what really connected me the most. He’s been through a whole bunch of s---.
“Everyone sees the seven AFC championship games, and the Super Bowls, but it was the other part that was fascinating. I felt a little bit of a connection, because it’s a similar journey. I’ve been part of building a football team two different times, different ways, and just the idea that … I felt like he got it, at least from my perspective. So I just sent him that, I sent him the picture, and said, It seems like we’re aligned as it is.”
In other words, both guys had seen highs and lows, had seen barren rosters and loaded ones, had seen it done right and wrong, and had all the perspective that brings, too.
And, yes, they’ve also seen how to get and bring along a star quarterback.
Now, we’ll see whether these guys wind up with the same feeling Callahan had leaving the suite in Indy back in 2020. Maybe they’ve already gotten it. Maybe it’s coming.
Either way, we’ll know by the end of April.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside the Titans’ Evaluation Process for the NFL Draft’s No. 1 Pick.