Significant praise for soon-to-be Bengals head coach Zac Taylor

This is one of those postings that may only interest me — AKA, I’m thinking about something and I answer it via a Chop Block post. There’s very little insight, story structure, or analysis here; just answering random musings from the couch during a stormy Cincinnati afternoon. There might not even be a conclusion; I’ll just stop when I’m finished.

The Cincinnati Bengals are allegedly getting an impressive head coach who has been blowing away teams with his football intellect, according to one insider. Fox Sports Insider Jay Glazer writes in The Athletic:

He’s a guy that the Bengals actually targeted for weeks toward the end of the season as they knew they were moving on from Marvin Lewis. They did a ton of backchannel work on him.

When you talk to people on the Rams, you learn he is a football guy non-stop. When he went in and interviewed some places, I was told when he talked about offense — what he was able to use from Sean McVay’s offense plus some twist he put on it — other teams were blown away. He commanded the room in the interview process. He’s a guy who is very family-oriented, and he’s one of these 24-7 football guys who can connect with players and coaches, both old and young. Cincinnati, I thought, was going to be a hard place to get a good hire. If they do make this official, they’ll end up getting one of the hidden gems of this coaching class.

Of note, the Bengals had obviously decided to move away from Marvin Lewis before the season ended. Not that this is news: We’ve had a feeling a divorce with Lewis was imminent since the end of last year — sometimes it just takes them longer to figure these things out.

Cincinnati can’t sign or announce Taylor as their head coach until the Los Angeles Rams postseason concludes — either via elimination or a Super Bowl victory. Once that happens, the Bengals are expected to offer him the job and Taylor is expected to accept.