He just seems to be a sponge and writes everything down to remember it”, he said of Fitzpatrick’s classroom habits. “I like to take notes but this guy takes a ton of notes. Sometimes, he’s like, ‘I’m just writing the date, chill’ because I say so many snarky comments to him. It’s fun. He makes me want to take more notes too because I’m next to him. And I’m like, man, I should probably pay more attention”.

Perhaps that’s why it didn’t take long for Mike Tomlin to invite him to sit in on some meetings. As he told the Around the 412 podcast earlier this month, and transcribed by AL.com, he likened his experiences with Tomlin in a classroom setting to the relationship that he had with Nick Saban at Alabama.

“I’ve got opportunities to sit in the actual coaches meeting before with coach Saban as he’s breaking down film and going through stuff as I was learning a new position, so I got to see the way that he broke the game down and the way that he thought about the game”, he said.

“I’ve also had the same opportunity with coach Tomlin. He has meetings with three or four guys in the room, and he has his notebook out, and he’s just checking off a whole bunch of different stuff”, he continued. “He has numbers on the board, stats on the board from the offense that we’re going against — Hey, second-down-and-long, second-down-and-7 is this, is that – and is just really detailed when it comes to the game. I think that’s definitely something that they have in common and a big part of why they’re successful”.

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