'Let’s be bold:' Inside Press Taylor’s office

Who's calling plays? Where is NFL offensive football heading? How can Trevor Lawrence take the next step? We sit down with the man central to it all: Jaguars offensive coordinator Press Taylor.

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Our 2024 NFL Season Preview series continues with today’s conversation with Jaguars offensive coordinator Press Taylor.

ICYMI:

• David Long Jr., and the beast within

• 'Undeniable:' Christian Kirk will attack this defining moment

• ‘We’ll get it done:’ The Buffalo Bills enter the great unknown at wide receiver

• Jordan Love will be an all-time great

• ‘All game long:’ Will Anderson Jr., The Terminator, is the Houston Texans' foundation

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — There’s a serene calm to this room. Massive windows overlook an empty practice field currently being nourished with sprinklers at full blast. As the Jacksonville Jaguars offensive coordinator, it’s Press Taylor’s job to put players in the right position to make plays down there.

This job’s an obsession, all-consuming. But perspective is all around him.

Behind the OC are pictures of his family. Taylor and his wife have four kids. The new family pool was a hit this summer.  

On top of his desk is a Celsius Sparkling Watermelon and various plans for this season. Underneath his desk is a miniature walking treadmill. This comes in handy during those 100, yes, 100-hour work weeks during the season. When players aren’t around on Monday and Tuesday, he lives at this desk.

He’s got a library full of books. All relate to football and leadership. On the shelf, you see Bill Polian’s book, Vince Lombardi’s book and Bill Walsh’s epic “Finding a Winning Edge.” This 550-pager that costs north of $500 is more of a required textbook for the football coaches most interested in championships. His parents got him this one as a Christmas present a couple years back.

He’s obsessed with finding his own edge… however small.

Taylor tries to bring a book with him on every Jaguar road trip. He’ll mark it up with a highlighter, take notes, then type those notes out to permanently engrain those lessons into his mind.

He’s got Simon Sinek’s timeless “Start with Why,” and actually met the exceptional author/speaker back as a quality control coach in Philadelphia. His first NFL boss, Chip Kelly, loved bringing in guest speakers. This memory brings him back to his favorite book of all-time: “Legacy” by James Kerr. The bestseller examines the most successful sports team in the world, New Zealand’s “All Blacks” rugby squad. Kerr spoke to the group, too.  

And during the Eagles’ 2017 season — under Doug Pederson — Kobe Bryant spoke to the team. Ahead of a game against the Los Angeles Rams, the Lakers icon stopped by the team’s hotel to address everyone for 20 minutes. Taylor still has the video, and plays a clip on the projector screen here in the back of this office. “The emotionality,” Bryant’s voice booms, “comes when you play.” Bryant spoke about living in the moment, a message that proved prescient. That Sunday, the Eagles lost MVP frontrunner Carson Wentz to a torn ACL and still went on to win the Super Bowl over Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. As the assistant quarterbacks coach then, Taylor discovered one trick play — the “Philly Special” — that still lives in NFL lore.  

Taylor later played this Kobe speech for these Jaguars, too.

A group that now faces its own defining moment.

This staff inherited a team battered by Urban Meyer’s reign of terror, a team that had managed one winning season the previous 14 years. You’d think back-to-back 9-8 campaigns would lift the spirits of all in Duval County. But the way last season deteriorated has only heightened pressure. After starting 8-3 — racing to the AFC’s pole position — the Jaguars fell apart. Down went Christian Kirk. Quarterback Trevor Lawrence suffered four injuries in a two-month span.

The defense stammered. (Those coaches were fired.)

The Houston Texans emerged. (They’re now everybody’s trendy Super Bowl challenger.)  

Jacksonville made its quarterback one of the richest players in the history of the sport. Lawrence, a former No. 1 overall pick, a $275 Million Dollar Man, will be expected to take a quantum leap this fall.

Playcallers and coordinators always attract the most scrutiny, and that’s certainly the case in Jags Country. So on our trip to Duval this summer, I sat down with Taylor. He’s the man central to everything.

Here he is on…  

• Expectations for the 2024 season, and how the Jaguars plan to evolve on offense. The staff put the unit through an “autopsy” over the offseason. Taylor himself studied every single one of his play calls last season. Multiple times.

• Inside the hunt for the next innovation in offensive football.

• Criticism. Mean tweets. Does any of it get to him?

• How will Gabe Davis, Brian Thomas Jr. and Tank Bigsby help the offense evolve?

• Who’s calling plays? In fascinating detail, Taylor explains how the gameplan is pieced together each week in Jacksonville. It may surprise you. Worth noting: The QB has a ton of input.

• Trevor Lawrence. The OC’s belief is strong. He doesn’t want Lawrence to ever lose his “stinger.” But how does he reach the Mahomes/Burrow/Allen level?

• Stealing secrets from coaching friends around the NFL.

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You’ve said you don’t want to be a fringe contender and need to take that next step. What’s your mentality going into a season where you’ve got to win?

Taylor: If you’re not trying to win, what are you doing? And I think there’s a lot of that. I think decisions get made out of self-preservation at times. We spend too much time in this thing working every single day talking about giving our players edges. Let’s try to win. Let’s be risky. Let’s be bold. That’s one of coach’s big phrases this offseason: Be bold. Let’s do what we need to do to go win. And surviving or fighting to be 9-8, that’s not what we’re about. Let’s go try to win a Super Bowl and if somehow the rug’s pulled out from under us and we flame out, so be it. We’ll move on. But let’s take a shot at it and see what can happen if we do it.

That’s what you were preaching about last year, right? It starts with Doug Pederson and spreads through the staff, through all the players: Play to win. You can’t be scared. You can’t be trying to play “not to lose.” But what else goes into that that?

Taylor: Part of it is just letting everybody know that we understand there’s expectations on the outside, but there shouldn’t be any greater expectations than we have for ourselves inside the building — as a team and then obviously as a unit offensively and as a staff offensively of “let’s do everything we can to attack,” and like you’re saying, “play to win as opposed to play not to lose.” One of the most common phrases is that more games are lost than won. Which is true. We turned the ball over a lot. We had a bunch of self-inflicted penalties. A lot of the games that we did lose, we don’t feel like we gave ourselves the best possible chance — getting in our own way. So let’s just have everybody cut it loose with their mindset. Try to do everything you can to take that pressure off and just play free and go after it a little bit.

You’ve got to be serious. You’ve got to get shit done. But you don’t want to put a tightness into your team. You don’t want everybody afraid of their own shadow.

Taylor: Exactly. We try to tell our guys we’ve got to tighten things up, but we don’t want to be tight. There’s a fine line in the way you’re saying it, but as a staff, let’s look at the things we do really well that our players really believe in and let’s do more of that. We can come up with every play known to man, which people try to do from time to time. It’s great if we know it, but do our players believe in it? There’s nothing wrong with running the same play twice. That tends to work out in our favor a lot of times when you do that.

You could sit in this desk and research 12 more Philly Specials.

Taylor: You come up with whatever you want. Everything’s out there. Everything’s been done. You can do it. You can try to be cutting edge and all that, but ultimately (players) are the ones that make it work.

Are you researching like you did back in your QC days looking for anything?

Taylor: Always. It gets a little harder. I’ll probably have our QCs a little bit more on those projects just because of my time commitment. But there’s always stuff you’re seeing that people are doing that you want to make sure you’re staying relevant within what’s going on around the league. And you’re on top of it. You’re using things that still fits you that are creative, that are challenging these defenses.

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Where is offensive football in 2024 headed? We’ve spent so much time talking about what Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan are doing, but even a lot of stuff they did three, four years ago is outdated. They’ve changed. Where do you see the game going next?

Taylor: There’s a lot of trickle-up, honestly, with the high school game, the college game. The rules are different, which makes things very creative at that level. There’s things that maybe you couldn’t get away with in the NFL, but there’s an idea: “Oh, that’s really cool. We can’t technically do it that way based on the rules in this league, but that can lead to another thought-provoking idea of something that’s creative. I hadn’t thought of that.” Or just trying to see it a different way of, “We’ve always run this play out of this group. Why can’t that guy do it?” That’s part of the special thing that Miami and San Francisco do with their fullback and things like that. They’re using that guy as as a receiver-type body with the way he’s moving or the pre-snap motion where he’s like a tight/receiver and he’s distorting the pictures for the defense.

Bob McGinn does his draft stuff here and there wasn’t one fullback in it for the first time ever last spring.

Taylor: And a lot of those guys will end up lining up in a fullback spot at some point in time. That’s the thing. You’re not going out and finding fullbacks anymore in the college game, but you’re finding these guys that I can envision in this type of role where he puts his hand in the dirt like a fullback would. We’ve delved into that a little bit here and there.  

For a team that does want to win the Super Bowl — that’s the realistic goal — you’ve also said you had to rip it down “to the studs?” How so?

Taylor: A lot of that is you put your ego aside. We built something we thought would help us get to that point when we got here in ’22. And you’ve got to be honest with yourself and look at the results. Two years in a row, we’ve been 9-8. So that’s ultimately not the goal we’re trying to accomplish. We’ve all got to be open to change. And it’s not just change to change. It’s growth. Evolution. Adaptation to what’s going on across the league and trying to find a way to present to our players that we’re digging in. We’re not just saying “We’ve got to do this better.” We’ve got to give you guys the best possible chance to go win, and we’re trying to grow as a coaching staff.

You can’t rest on your laurels when you see C.J. Stroud and Bobby Slowik, with what they’re doing in Houston. Diggs, Danielle Hunter. The Titans signed everybody. And here comes Anthony Richardson all in your own division.

Taylor: Exactly. It went from everybody dubbing us the worst division in football to all of a sudden now there’s a lot of good young quarterbacks, a lot of explosive offenses and it’s a tough division to be in.

A lot of defensive coaches walking these hallways last year aren’t here now. So, that’s a message in itself, I’d imagine? Everybody knows what’s at stake.

Taylor: I think part of it is the culture here has changed from what you used to think of as Jacksonville to now, the expectations of what we expect to happen with our team and our offense. You want nothing less. You don’t want to go somewhere where people think, “Oh, congratulations. You had two winning seasons.” That’s not why we spend a hundred hours a week working every day: to have “winning seasons.”

A hundred hours a week?

Taylor: Give or take.

How do you envision the offense being different this year vs. last year? We see the personnel changes, obviously. Two big receivers who can go deep, that’s probably part of it. Running the ball better.

Taylor: We’d like to be even better in the pass game, but really our run game has not gotten us to where we wanted it to be. There’s a number of reasons for that. So we try to dive in and diagnose all those issues — really through an autopsy of our entire offense, starting with the run game, and then build ourselves into what we think we can be, take the pieces that we thought we were really good at. It may be the language. What we call a certain run, and then building a certain progression as we move forward in our run game to where everything kind of is built off everything else. To where the guys understand: “This play goes in this day, that play goes in the next day,” how they all work together, how that works to complement our play-action game or movement game. Really kind of be able to lay out this progression of what the offense looks like and why it looks this way so everybody has a true mastery of it. Not just memorizing what this word means, but truly understanding what this word means.

Vince Lombardi’s playbook was not thick. The second-and-longs you guys were in — because of the run game — that makes life as a play-caller tough.  

Taylor: I take a ton of responsibility for that. Some of it, you want to get the run game going so much that — on a lot of first and 10’s — you probably run the ball and maybe that’s not the best thing for you, but you get a little stubborn in it: “I’m going to get the run game going here,” and then you end up in second and 9, second and 10, just because it’s not hitting for you right then. I try to certainly go back and study every single play call I had and how could I serve us better in terms of putting us in favorable positions.

Did you really do that? Did you go back and rehash and relive every single play call?

Taylor: The season ended for us in January and you know you don’t have these players until April 16, so you go through and watch every single game. Then, you watch situations. Then, you watch cut-ups. You watch every play so many different times, so many different ways. Part of it drives yourself crazy, but I think that’s part of what you have to do.

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What did you learn about yourself? What would you have done different?

Taylor: I don’t think there’s one thing I could necessarily say. You’re learning and growing. Every single situation you’re in: “What can I learn from this? What can I learn from games where it went well?” And there’s a pretty decent stretch there in the middle of the season where we felt like we were playing really, really good as an offense and moving the ball and being explosive and you have some injuries, miss practice time, you play good defenses and certain games are tougher than others or certain things just go wrong. Being resilient as a group and continuing to lead this offense, this staff, it’s a long season.

You can’t really stand at a podium and say, “Well, Trevor had four injuries and Christian Kirk missed five games with a torn groin and Zay missed eight games and Cam Robinson missed eight games.

Taylor: Those are excuses. Everybody has everything. The team that stands there at the end of the year holding the trophy, they dealt with something throughout the year. Everybody has something, so nobody really cares. We know when all the games are scheduled, we know they’re going to played. It doesn’t matter who’s available. It’s “What can you do to go win a game?” We always tell our guys it’s all about three hours on Sunday. Really nothing else matters. So everything you do tries to put you in the best possible position for that moment. Those three hours on Sunday is really all that matters. You either won or you lost.

Whether it happened on Monday or you knew it was coming going into the week or happened in the first play of the Cincinnati game, you lose Christian Kirk, it doesn’t matter. The game goes on. Figure out how to win.

There’s a sign behind you as you’re saying this that reads “Accountability over excuses” and “Standards over feelings.”

Taylor: It’s a results-based business. There’s a fine line. You want to be very process-oriented, but ultimately you’re going to be held accountable for the results. You either did it or you didn’t.

But you’re the convenient whipping boy for a vibrant fan base.

Taylor: It is what it is. A lot of that happens in cyberspace, so you can allow that in, or not. You can allow it to affect you, or not. I’ve been a fan, I get it. You want your team to win. They’re not winning. That’s somebody’s fault. So I certainly understand the expectation that comes with the job title and I get it. No big deal.

It doesn’t get to you at all?

Taylor: You want to defend yourself, but ultimately what does that get you? You’re trying to win. That’s all that matters. So if you win, maybe it’ll stop, maybe it won’t. But you can deal with it if you’re winning. If you lose, then it’s warranted in some way, shape or form. I understand it, too. You have a great head coach/play caller that’s done it with a great quarterback and the expectations are through the roof. So I certainly understand that. And honestly, I’ve never had any of those moments to my face out in public, anything like that. If I want go searching for people that write mean things, say mean things, I can find all that. But ultimately, what good does that serve us? How does that help us win?

You can ignore it?

Taylor: You hear it or you see it or you read it, whenever people say something in passing. Your friends will say, “Did you see this article?”

What kind of friend is that?

Taylor: A lot of times it’s in jest with your friends. I can take it. That’s part of the job.

We touched on your roots a little bit a couple years ago, but what should people know about you? What makes you the right guy to lead this offense?

Taylor: I feel like I’m a coach’s kid. My Dad coached before I was born and was involved in it and then coached all of us, but I’ve always understood the expectations of playing quarterback, leading a team, leading a unit. So you’re always going to get more credit than you deserve and more blame than you deserve. That’s how it goes. But ultimately you compete to win and so if you don’t win, there’s going to be criticisms that come with that and there’s got to be self-evaluation that help you get to winning. And so that’s all I’ve ever cared about. If people are upset that you don’t win, great. I’m upset we didn’t win. If people are upset with the way you’re winning, there’s not much you can do about that. You’re just doing everything you can to win at the end of the day. So I’ll never quit trying to do that. Every time I’ve ever walked in a building from the day I started working, it was all about trying to win.

What goes into that hunt?  

Taylor: An obsession with football. I love football. I love trying to do everything you can to find some sort of edge that’s going to attack a defense a certain way or uncover something within a defense that you can’t expose, and then being able to bring that to life with your players, being able to put the right people in the right position to execute those things, being able to get those called in the right situation. A lot of that comes from the endless amount of study you do from Monday to Saturday. If you’re looking for the moment where “I think this play can work,” and trying to map out your call sheets where that play is going to hit you at that moment where you think they’re playing this defense and all of that comes together? That’s the pride as a coach of when something you’ve taught your players or a tool you’ve given them comes out in the right moment. And it works. And it doesn’t mean it’s a 99-yard touchdown. It might be a block that springs a three-yard run, but it’s everything you worked for. A moment you cultivated with this player comes out at the right time and it hits and that brings you that joy. Makes you feel alive as a coach.

What do you see in Gabe Davis?

Taylor: Gabe’s been awesome. Gabe’s a great personality in the meeting room, so he brought a lot of energy. He brings experience that receiver room doesn’t necessarily have and he’s got a good perspective of who he is as a person, as a player. The confidence, the humility, the respect he presents himself with is cool.

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Do you think what he brings and what a Brian Thomas brings is how this offense can evolve? Something this group was missing?

Taylor: Yeah, I think so. We had the players in place to do good things and for whatever reason it didn’t all come together consistently. At least last year. So we’re just trying to grow and those two guys particularly have unique skill-sets. They bring the element of the deep threat. It’s something they’ve done in their past. It’s something they’d like to continue to do. Everybody wants to be as explosive as possible.

Which can be tough in today’s NFL. We talked in the middle of the season about defenses taking that away.

Taylor: It’s hard. So the more guys you have that can create those plays, whether it be running past the defense or catching something short and taking a long way, you need different elements of all that to really be that explosive offense.

Maybe a little more Tank Bigsby will help Travis Etienne. Do you plan to mix him in?  

Taylor: Yeah, I think just a manageable workload for Travis to where he stays healthy throughout the course of the year (helps) because obviously he’s a special player. We think Tank can be a special player as well, and so just giving him those opportunities, him taking advantage of those opportunities and seeing where he goes.

Are you calling plays this year? That’s the billion-dollar question.

Taylor: In all honesty, we really haven’t gotten into a lot of that. We talk every day before the game, during the game, leading into the game, coming out of the game, everything. So we’ve diagnosed it a million times together, and we’re so far from that having to be who’s going to read the play off the call sheet to the quarterback to really dive into that right now.

You’ve been with Doug forever. He stands up for you and you know what it’s like to work for him. I did a series on the Chicago Bears and one element of it was that when Matt Nagy and Bill Lazor were together, players didn’t know who in the hell was calling plays. It went back and forth. But that was more of an arranged situation. They didn’t have the past that you two have.

Taylor: I think so, and I think it’s probably easy for me to say because there’s a lot of criticism. But I don’t know that it’s the most important thing of whose voice is reading the play, because a lot of the call sheet is built Monday to Saturday in relationship with the quarterback. Doug and I obviously meet through every single scenario. We also do a pregame meeting like three hours before the game where we go through everything: “Are you good with this sequencing? We have these two plays that are the same formation. We’re going to call the run first, pass second. You good with that? We’ll iron out all the little details to where there doesn’t have to be a lot of discussion in the game. We pretty much know where we’re going with it. And in-between series — even within series — we’re talking through it. And it’s not just us. It’s collaboration. The line coach, quarterback coach, the quarterback, there’s this ongoing communication collaboration throughout the whole process of it. The play that comes out — whoever calls it — everybody kind of knows where it’s going anyways.

You have a whole week to figure out every possible…

Taylor: (cuts in) I would imagine somewhere over 50 percent of the game plan is just reading off the call sheet. The way we do our third-down process, our red-zone process, the quarterback ranks it. And for most part, we’re going with his ranking. And then there may be something come up, but you’re probably talking to the quarterback, saying: “Hey, instead of No. 3, we’re going to go with No. 5 or we’re going back to No. 1. Are you good with it?”

What do you mean by a call sheet? It will have specific situations listed?

Taylor: If we have a third-down scenario — third medium or so — we have five, six plays in there. He truly ranks them. That’s my one, that’s my two, that’s my three. That’s on a Friday morning typically, so the call sheet reflects that. The top call in that section is Trevor’s No. 1. That’s always been the case since I’ve been with Doug. The quarterback is super involved in what the call sheet gets mapped out as. And for the most part, you stick to that ranking and there may be certain scenarios, but you’ve probably talked about them with the quarterback: “Hey, you’ve got this one, but maybe it’s a double move and if it’s the first third down of the game, I may skip that. Are you good with that?” “Yeah, yeah, that’s great.” And they go through it, so everybody has an idea of where you’re going with things. He’s the guy pulling the trigger, so if he doesn’t believe in it, I’m not calling it. And we’ve gotten to that point where if you rank it six, I’m going to come back and ask you, “I’m going to take this off. Are you OK with that?” “No, no, no. I like it. If it comes up, I just like the other ones more.” We go into a game with plenty of plays and take ‘em out. Take out as many as you want.

And at the same time, you have to steer him away from that tendency to want to be that “Superman,” instead of Clark Kent, in certain situations. Brett Favre has said that early in his career, if Mike Holmgren gave him a play, and there was a deep ball in the call to Sterling Sharpe, he didn’t care what the play called for. He’s going deep. So Holmgren would start calling plays where that wasn’t even an option. Trevor takes chances, but you also don't want to neuter that from his game.

Taylor: Exactly. You don’t want to take a stinger off him. So you want him to be that guy who has that killer instinct: “I can make this play right here.” And we want to talk through so many of these situations that we all know, “OK, he’s going to take the shot if he gets this certain look.” Or he kind of knows based on the situation of the game — the coverage, the way they’re playing — yes, that’s there but that’s probably not what we’re thinking. You want to be so far along with your quarterback that you all are seeing the game exactly the same way.

What has prevented him from getting into that stratosphere with Mahomes, Burrows and Allen? What in his game can still improve?

Taylor: I think you’re fighting to be consistent down-in, down-out. And I think that's something as a young player, he will continue to grow. I would argue through the middle or first half’ish of the season, he was playing as good as anybody. His numbers may not show it. He didn’t have a ton of passing touchdowns in there, but we were Top 3 in the league in rushing touchdowns. We’d get in the tight red and we’d run one in where maybe a lot of times he might have an opportunity to throw a touchdown pass and we kind of took it out of his hands and ran it. So, the numbers maybe didn’t show it. And I think that’s a little bit of people maybe not watching the game and seeing how well he is playing or how well he is managing a game and doing the right things for us. At the same time, we probably didn’t maximize our primetime opportunities for guys like him to kind of get their national credit. But it’s doing the right thing consistently down-in and down-out. And that’s something that he’ll continue to grow in. Because he’s got all the ability. He can make every throw on the field. He can make all the great plays. He’s athletic as anybody out there. But just making the right decision, doing the right thing, every single down with the ball. That’s what some of those great guys do.

I’m guessing your confidence hasn’t wavered one bit when it comes to Trevor Lawrence.

Taylor: Trevor and I are in lockstep as we’ve ever been.

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Life’s good for you?

Taylor: Love the guys we get to work with, players included. We have a special group. We’ve added to that with guys like Brian, guys like Gabe adding to this group. Kind of feel like that core group — Evan (Engram), Trevor, Christian, Brandon (Scherff), some of those guys we brought in here in our first year — and then Trevor obviously being here, it’s been a lot of fun to really work with that group, see them grow in the offense and see them take ownership of the locker room. So it’s been fun getting to build something here. Come down here and build something.

Mitch seems like a good fit, too. He’s not afraid to speak up — he did that night when Damar Hamlin almost died on the field. He’s been on those front lines, which for a team on the cusp, trying to take that next step, I would think that’s a good leader to have around.

Taylor: Yeah, and you bring in an Arik Armstead who’s been to the final game. You bring in Gabe and Mitch, who’ve been in AFC Championship battles. I think that’s a big deal, guys that have that experience and have that expectation for themselves and what it looks like, what it feels like, what it’s like on the sidelines and in the locker room. I think that helps.

The hunt for anything that could give you an offensive edge could drive you nuts. It keeps you away from your family, from your kids. Where are you with that relationship with the sport? Is it tough to constantly be on that hunt for something new, something different?

Taylor: Yeah, it’s tough but it’s fun. I would tell people we don’t do it for free, but you do it for free and then it’s the same thing when I go home, I like reading about football, I like watching old games. My wife likes to read books and she doesn’t understand why I want to watch some old game that I’ve seen 100 times or why I want to watch all of the Green Bay Packers’ third-down offense. You’re just looking for something. To me, that’s like watching a TV show. Then you see something, and say, “Oh, that’s cool. I could add that.” You save it, you send it to somebody, you write a note.

How old are your kids now?

Taylor: I’ve got 7, 5, 3 and 1.

You come home and they’re going to want to play with Dad. How do you get that time in?

Taylor: My son doesn’t have Army guys. He has these little football characters. We’ve got the down-set-hutters, the linemen. He calls ‘em the “down-set-hutters.” They’re just little Army guys. A red team, a blue team, I think there’s a green team and a teal looking team. So they’re all just generic guys, but there’s a receiver, running back, quarterback and then there’s linemen. We line ‘em all up and we’re just playing all the time and Spider-Man gets in the game and Ironman gets in. So it’s great. He’s obsessed with it. My other son just likes carrying around the football. Now, he’s one. He doesn’t know what's going on, but they love it. And then it’s just watching the NBA Playoffs or random football things.

Do you YouTube or record games?

Taylor: NFL Network always has old games on or I’ll have DVR of our games, and Bengals games.

You’re probably watching your brother’s stuff as much as you can.

Taylor: I don’t watch as much of that as I used to. I know a lot of the coaches around the league. I’m not really the young guy anymore. Now I know a lot of the guys and so I have no problem watching something and ripping off a text to somebody that I know called that play. I’ll ask, “Where’d this come from? Why’d you do this?”

People will respond to help you?

Taylor: Those guys are the same way on a lot of teams on a lot of different things. A lot of the guys I know are now young offensive coordinators. We bounce ideas off each other all the time.

Fans probably think it’s all top, top secret.

Taylor: Nobody’s giving any secrets away, but there are certain: “Why’d you do this vs. this?” And it’s “They have this tendency. They like to do that.” Or, “That was purely just a complement of something.” It may be something that doesn’t help you, but I was just curious to ask a question and figure out what the something was.

Who do you reach out to?

Taylor: I always say my brother being No. 1 and now Jim Bob Cooter was here and spread out to Indy. Nick Holz is in Tennessee. Kellen Moore and I have developed a friendship. Gotten to know Zac Robinson. He was out in L.A. Ben Johnson was the guy, he and my brother were working together in Miami, so I’ve known Ben for a long time now. A lot of guys that I’ve been friendly with over the years or maybe worked with in Philly or crossed paths in Indianapolis or just through the scouting circuit. You’re on the road. Kellen and I got to know each other at Mike White’s pro day at Western Kentucky and kind of started our friendship whenever that was and we’ve kept in touch ever since. I was telling him where to live when he moved to Philly and things like that.

Everybody keeps in touch… while they’re all trying to kick each other’s asses.

Taylor: Exactly. You never give anybody the trade secrets. Nothing that will hinder your team. But I’ll ask questions. So it’s a lot easier to talk to guys that aren’t on your schedule or aren’t in your division.

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