Three years ago, it was one of the biggest jokes in football.
If you ever had a cup of coffee with Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay, you had a good chance of becoming an NFL head coach yourself. Three years ago, the Cincinnati Bengals hired Zac Taylor to be their coach after he spent two seasons coaching wide receivers and then quarterbacks under McVay.
Whether that constituted a cup of coffee or something more substantial, nobody is laughing at that hire now as Taylor will face McVay in Super Bowl LVI on Feb. 13 (6:30 p.m. ET, NBC).
“Working with Sean was two of the best years of my life,” Taylor said. “It was fun. You loved coming into the building every single day. That’s a lot of our messaging to our building and our staff and our players.
“We want guys who are willing to come in here and work, but they enjoy the process of walking into this building with a smile on their face every day.”
When the Bengals hired Taylor on Feb. 4, 2019, he spoke about how much he learned working for McVay, but he said he was going to do things his way.
Fast-forward three years, and Taylor is again talking about his friend and former mentor, but the context is much different. Taylor is no longer a rookie head coach with no experience as a coordinator. He’s now a proven winner, someone who took a team from the bottom to the precipice of a championship.
But the process was not without growing pains. The Bengals were a franchise-worst 2-14 in Taylor’s first season, and slightly improved to 4-11-1 the following year. But this season, despite some bumps on the road, the Bengals put together a historic turnaround, matching the 2003 Carolina Panthers and the 1981 San Francisco 49ers for the fastest turnaround from the league’s worst record to a Super Bowl berth.
Source : espn
