What should the Bengals go with Zac Taylor?
The Cincinnati Bengals aren’t likely to fire head coach Zac Taylor after his team missed the playoffs for the second straight season.
But there are some compelling reasons for and against the idea after what has been a wild ride of ups and downs for the franchise since his arrival in 2019.
The case for firing Zac Taylor
Taylor is now 46–52–1 as a head coach in the NFL coming off a season in which he had an MVP-level player (Joe Burrow), a Triple Crown winner (Ja’Marr Chase) and a DPOTY performance (Trey Hendrickson).
Even worse, Taylor is 17-36 in one-score games. He’s just 13-23 against the AFC North.
Perhaps worst of all, he’s just 1-11 over the first two weeks of a season. The team started 1-4 this year. 1-3 last year. 0-2 in 2022. 1-1 in 2021, the win in overtime. 0-2-1 in 2020. Technically, 0-11 in 2019.
Taylor was a developmental coach when the Bengals hired him, which was fine. But the development hasn’t been there (a quarterback equivalent would have been benched long ago). The lack of readiness, in-game decisions and results just aren’t there.
In the end, Taylor is the head coach. If, for example, Lou Anarumo’s defense isn’t working because it leans too much on lost-a-step veterans, it’s his job to step in and make a change. Draft picks on both sides of the ball, such as Cam Taylor-Britt, aren’t panning out, which at least partially falls on him, too.
Were the Bengals to move on, they would be a top destination for head coach candidates. Hanging on to him runs the risk of wasting Burrow’s window while making excuses that are reminiscent about hanging on to Andy Dalton (or Marvin Lewis) longer than they probably should have.
The case against firing Zac Taylor
Obviously, some of this isn’t Taylor’s fault. He was tasked with one of the biggest rebuilds of the last decade and continues to deal with a stingy front office.
A front office that is notoriously small, often cheap and stubborn in its ways. Hence, letting Jessie Bates walk and DJ Reader, getting a trade request from Hendrickson and failing to get Chase’s deal done. There’s a reason Burrow is in press conferences putting pressure on that front office to extend Tee Higgins. There’s a reason Taylor made Burrow-Chase-Higgins the captains for the coin flip over the five-game run.
Taylor’s poor record is inflated by a lost tanking season and Burrow’s untimely injuries and sheer bad luck of never having a normal summer, too.
While Dalton-like in its reasoning, there is a risk that a new head coach is a dud in how they mesh with the family-like front office and how it runs things, wasting more Burrow-Chase-Higgins seasons. That front office could also limit the team’s candidates for the job, too.
Taylor also, obviously, gets the credit for the four winning seasons and Super Bowl run. While they remain vague on the process as a shared thing, he’s an offensive-based coach heading up an elite offense.
And in the end, he gets the credit for overhauling the culture. One can argue an elite defense and a special young passer carried the franchise to the Super Bowl. But they can’t argue against the modernization that came under his supervision and the clear impact he has on the players in the building after he scoured away the apathy of the previous regime.
Verdict
Not how they do it in Cincinnati comes up often and will here, too. It would be a stunner if the Bengals started fresh. The case for letting Taylor go is super compelling and would make sense for a lot of organizations. And if the team starts slow again next year…there will be a lot of told you so going around the fanbase.
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