CINCINNATI -- When Mario Alford first opened the Cincinnati Bengals' playbook, the rookie thought he was reading a foreign language.

Back when he was at West Virginia, the running back-turned-receiver had fairly simple concepts to learn. Mountaineers coach Dana Holgorsen's play-calling method of choice was to have hand signals flashed to players on the field. Depending upon what hand signals he saw, Alford knew what routes to run.

The Bengals instead use a word-based play-calling format. Plays are relayed through headsets to quarterbacks who rattle off a jumble of words to the others in the huddle. To the non-Bengals ear, they might sound like complete jibberish.

"He'll go in there and call like a 10-word play and you've got to memorize it," Alford said.

Thanks to daily midday study sessions inspired by backup quarterback AJ McCarron's time as a true freshman on Alabama's scout team, the memorization is starting to stick. The foreign language Alford was first exposed to three months ago has begun sounding like a native tongue.

"He's getting better and better," McCarron said Saturday, just after completing a 24-yard touchdown pass to Alford during a "mock game." "He's come a long way; him and Des [Desmond Lawrence]. Both of them have done a great job with that."

Lawrence has barely been in Cincinnati a week. The undrafted rookie was signed entering camp after the Bengals placed wide out James Wright on injured reserve.

Each day during training camp, McCarron, Alford and Lawrence break from lunch by huddling inside a meeting room and going over routes, formations and the timing it takes to sync certain cuts with certain throws.

While inside the room, McCarron tests the receivers by having them draw route trees and formations on one side of a white board. He does the same himself on the other. Once the drawings are complete, they trade notes to see what was right and what was wrong in their scribbles.

"He's tried to quiz us every now and then, call us out, and then he'll let us write up the formation," Alford said. "If we get it wrong, he'll be like, 'This is how you do this.' And then he'll come back maybe five minutes later and he'll ask me to write the same play. It's all really helpful."

Alford said he had similar midday discussions with Browns receiver Terrelle Pryor when Pryor was in Cincinnati this spring attempting to make the roster as a quarterback.

McCarron's desire to lead the young receivers goes back much further than three months. It's rooted in days he spent angering Nick Saban and his national championship-caliber defense.

"When I was on scout team, I used to every night would order pizzas for the scout team and I would have all of us upstairs and we would watch our film," McCarron said. "We used to do that all the time my whole first year at 'Bama till I became the backup, and then I took my second-group guys and did it that way."

According to McCarron, the 2009 Crimson Tide offensive scout team that included Packers running back Eddie Lacy was so good it regularly made Saban "lose his mind."

Saban's sanity aside, Alford contends McCarron has helped him keep his.

"Especially with a guy like me, with potential, I just needed to learn the plays a little better. That way I can play fast," said the speedster Alford. "It's just real helpful. AJ taught me by saying, 'Come on, man. I need you. You can be a great player.'"