Paul Daughtery: Doc: Zac Taylor came in strutting, without actually strutting. He was

[Soonerpeace]

Great article touches on so many things this season Fredtoast has been praising Taylor for his culture.


Doc: Zac Taylor came in strutting, without actually strutting. He was right all along

Three years ago, Zac Taylor came in strutting. He wasn’t cocky about it. There’s a very slight line between arrogance and confidence. It’s a hard line to walk for even the most experienced and successful coaches. Taylor managed it as a rookie and he has never wavered.

That’s the most remarkable aspect of the Bengals' seemingly overnight success. A rookie coach, a guy who’d never been a head coach anywhere, who was all of 35 years old, came in walking his own walk and did it so gracefully he never came off as a blowhard know-it-all. Then in Year 3, he validated every belief he so publicly espoused on Day 1.

If there is a Bengal Way now, it’s Taylor’s

Culture wins games. Players who believe in the culture play winning football. The Bengals teach the culture, draft to it, spend money on it, live it to the extent that it matters as much as talent. "The process is important to them and they love the grind of it," Taylor said of his roster. "At times they care more about their teammates and coaches than about their own success.

"Lots of coaches, most of them college coaches, speak in effortless platitudes about "character." Most will happily blow off character when the talent is irresistible.

The Bengals?

I asked Taylor Tuesday to solve a riddle. You’re considering two players at the same position, either in the draft or via free agency. One is more skillful, the other you deem a better fit for Bengaldom. Whom do you choose?

"Sometimes when you watch a really good talent it’s easy in your mind to say, maybe some of the character stuff, we can get it out of him," Taylor said.

You mean you succumb to the lure of talent? 

"The character is what has carried us to this point, also. You can have a lot of talented individuals in your locker room that don’t love football. We want guys that love football. We have a lot of those types of guys.

"In Taylor’s first two years, when the Bengals went 6-25-1 and his were teams of characters more than character, it was very easy to be cynical. I might have referred to “Zac’s Culture Club’’ more than once, in a less-than-gracious way. It seemed an excuse when Taylor, after every loss, cited the C-word. You know: We’re changing the culture in the locker room, it’ll take time, we’ll get there et cetera.

It also came off as a backhanded swipe at Marvin Lewis, whose culture wasn’t perfect but was surely good enough to reverse the Bengals' perma-losing. By Bengals standards, Marvin moved mountains. Who was this kid to imply that Lewis ran a culture-free locker room?

Taylor tuned out the noise. His confidence might have been perceived as arrogant (or delusional) before last season. Now, it’s becoming a full-blown Way.

Joe Burrow sells it to free agents, Mike Hilton spreads it to all who will listen. Come to Cincinnati. We have a culture that works. We’ve only just begun. When someone asked Hilton if the '22 Bengals can reprise the camaraderie of '21, Hilton said, "It didn’t go nowhere.

"Said Taylor, "When our rookies show up here in two weeks, you begin that process of, here’s the values that are important to us, here’s what we believe. The more the guys are around what we want to be about, it becomes ingrained in them.

."Self-fulfilling, self-sustaining. The Taylor Way.

(Did you ever in your vast lifetimes dream of the Bengals being a model franchise, at least for their culture? I’d have bet you six Odell Thurmans and a couple of Tez Burficts against that possibility.)

"I don’t ever want to take it for granted," said Taylor "Who are the guys we think would be good Bengals? You want to hit the reset button with what’s important as far as our Bengals culture.

"It’s possible the big pile of praise the Taylor Way now enjoys could unravel. Last year was a dream. Very few injuries, a last-place schedule, a Three Musketeers locker room, a stride hit at a perfect, late-season time. All that bad Bengals karma, gathered over decades, reversed in one, touched season.

You could even suggest the bedraggled baseball team down the street could take a lesson from the Taylor Way: Find something you believe in. Don’t deviate from it.

Even if the 2021 magic doesn’t linger, the culture might. It could be built to last. Maybe that’s what Zac Taylor saw through 6-25-1 that the rest of us did not. "We could see it coming," he said Tuesday.

He was strutting, without strutting. And he was right all along.

[QueenCity]

Love it.... a new Bengals Way!

[bengals1969]

(05-03-2022, 05:59 PM)QueenCity Wrote: Love it.... a new Bengals Way!

Mike Brown had a history of bringing players with character issues if they had outsized talent and lower cost.
Marvin Lewis had a similar outlook.
Maybe Katie Brown is the real reason the culture has changed?
Zac Taylor is here with his vision of because it’s what she wanted to change?

In any case all of this happened with stars on rookie deals and stars with recent free agent deals. Let’s see how the locker room behaves as more and more contracts come up like Jessie Bates’s.

[Frank Booth]

They’ll still take a guy with character concerns

ie, Jackson Carman

[*Go Cards*]

The culture change is a refreshing change in my book.

[HarleyDog]

That was a good read. One thing I know about culture in the workplace is when you have a good one, there's nothing you can't do. While a bad one is a company killer. Leadership can carry a lot of the blame, but it starts on doing you due diligence on investigating who you hire in the first place.

[NUGDUKWE]

(05-03-2022, 07:13 PM)Frank Booth Wrote: They’ll still take a guy with character concerns

ie, Jackson Carman

Good point. I didn't think much of the report. But all the talk of character and they still took a bit of a surprise 2nd Rd pick when they apparently already saw the report?

[*bengalfan74*]

(05-03-2022, 07:13 PM)Frank Booth Wrote: They’ll still take a guy with character concerns

ie, Jackson Carman

Nobody, coach, manager, system or whatever is perfect are they ? Perhaps they thought it wasn't that bad for whatever reasons we don't know about ?

[*bengalfan74*]

(05-03-2022, 07:19 PM)Go Cards Wrote: The culture change is a refreshing change in my book.

For sure and I'm onboard.

[jj22]

Good read, but I read "culture" as Burrow....

Without Burrow, would this have materialized. We may never know (or care). Either way, Bengals have arrived, and it's nice to be able to a model Franchise.

[PDub80]

(05-03-2022, 07:13 PM)Frank Booth Wrote: They’ll still take a guy with character concerns

ie, Jackson Carman

(05-03-2022, 07:25 PM)NUGDUKWE Wrote: Good point. I didn't think much of the report. But all the talk of character and they still took a bit of a surprise 2nd Rd pick when they apparently already saw the report?

Bill Burr just touched on this today when talking about the Johnny Depp trial.... There will always be idiots who believe any allegation without proof or sense enough to get all of the details before coming to conclusions. For them, just because 1 person claims something against another, that's good enough for them. Those people never apologize to the level of which they level blame and just hop from one headline to another believing anything they read as long as it fits into their preconceived biases. They are utterly clueless, willfully ignorant humans and generally go without care of being right or wrong. They just want to judge without fact and be heard....

Congrats to you both for making it onto Bill's podcast. He's talking about you.

[PDub80]

(05-03-2022, 06:54 PM)bengals1969 Wrote: Mike Brown had a history of bringing players with character issues if they had outsized talent and lower cost.
Marvin Lewis had a similar outlook.
Maybe Katie Brown is the real reason the culture has changed?
Zac Taylor is here with his vision of because it’s what she wanted to change?

In any case all of this happened with stars on rookie deals and stars with recent free agent deals. Let’s see how the locker room behaves as more and more contracts come up like Jessie Bates’s.

Did Mike Brown do this often BEFORE Marvin? I don't recall any major or recurring character issues until Marvin was in Cincy... and virtually NONE since he left. If MB made a habit of this pre-Marvin, I would honestly like to hear the examples.

[PDub80]

(05-03-2022, 05:53 PM)Soonerpeace Wrote: Great article touches on so many things this season Fredtoast has been praising Taylor for his culture.


Doc: Zac Taylor came in strutting, without actually strutting. He was right all along

Three years ago, Zac Taylor came in strutting. He wasn’t cocky about it. There’s a very slight line between arrogance and confidence. It’s a hard line to walk for even the most experienced and successful coaches. Taylor managed it as a rookie and he has never wavered.

That’s the most remarkable aspect of the Bengals' seemingly overnight success. A rookie coach, a guy who’d never been a head coach anywhere, who was all of 35 years old, came in walking his own walk and did it so gracefully he never came off as a blowhard know-it-all. Then in Year 3, he validated every belief he so publicly espoused on Day 1.

If there is a Bengal Way now, it’s Taylor’s

Culture wins games. Players who believe in the culture play winning football. The Bengals teach the culture, draft to it, spend money on it, live it to the extent that it matters as much as talent. "The process is important to them and they love the grind of it," Taylor said of his roster. "At times they care more about their teammates and coaches than about their own success.

"Lots of coaches, most of them college coaches, speak in effortless platitudes about "character." Most will happily blow off character when the talent is irresistible.

The Bengals?

I asked Taylor Tuesday to solve a riddle. You’re considering two players at the same position, either in the draft or via free agency. One is more skillful, the other you deem a better fit for Bengaldom. Whom do you choose?

"Sometimes when you watch a really good talent it’s easy in your mind to say, maybe some of the character stuff, we can get it out of him," Taylor said.

You mean you succumb to the lure of talent? 

"The character is what has carried us to this point, also. You can have a lot of talented individuals in your locker room that don’t love football. We want guys that love football. We have a lot of those types of guys.

"In Taylor’s first two years, when the Bengals went 6-25-1 and his were teams of characters more than character, it was very easy to be cynical. I might have referred to “Zac’s Culture Club’’ more than once, in a less-than-gracious way. It seemed an excuse when Taylor, after every loss, cited the C-word. You know: We’re changing the culture in the locker room, it’ll take time, we’ll get there et cetera.

It also came off as a backhanded swipe at Marvin Lewis, whose culture wasn’t perfect but was surely good enough to reverse the Bengals' perma-losing. By Bengals standards, Marvin moved mountains. Who was this kid to imply that Lewis ran a culture-free locker room?

Taylor tuned out the noise. His confidence might have been perceived as arrogant (or delusional) before last season. Now, it’s becoming a full-blown Way.

Joe Burrow sells it to free agents, Mike Hilton spreads it to all who will listen. Come to Cincinnati. We have a culture that works. We’ve only just begun. When someone asked Hilton if the '22 Bengals can reprise the camaraderie of '21, Hilton said, "It didn’t go nowhere.

"Said Taylor, "When our rookies show up here in two weeks, you begin that process of, here’s the values that are important to us, here’s what we believe. The more the guys are around what we want to be about, it becomes ingrained in them.

."Self-fulfilling, self-sustaining. The Taylor Way.

(Did you ever in your vast lifetimes dream of the Bengals being a model franchise, at least for their culture? I’d have bet you six Odell Thurmans and a couple of Tez Burficts against that possibility.)

"I don’t ever want to take it for granted," said Taylor "Who are the guys we think would be good Bengals? You want to hit the reset button with what’s important as far as our Bengals culture.

"It’s possible the big pile of praise the Taylor Way now enjoys could unravel. Last year was a dream. Very few injuries, a last-place schedule, a Three Musketeers locker room, a stride hit at a perfect, late-season time. All that bad Bengals karma, gathered over decades, reversed in one, touched season.

You could even suggest the bedraggled baseball team down the street could take a lesson from the Taylor Way: Find something you believe in. Don’t deviate from it.

Even if the 2021 magic doesn’t linger, the culture might. It could be built to last. Maybe that’s what Zac Taylor saw through 6-25-1 that the rest of us did not. "We could see it coming," he said Tuesday.

He was strutting, without strutting. And he was right all along.

LOL!!!! Yeah, AFTER ZT started winning and went to the SB. Of course. Before? LOL!!!! No, Fred absolutely didn't. He railed against and badmouthed this coaching staff for those first 2 years. Especially how they handled Dunlap and the locker room ZT was creating. Fred crapped on Joey B a ton, too and repeatedly said Joe couldn't throw the deep ball..... And then this year happened and everyone's hanging on these guy's nuts. Ahhhhh, the weather is quite fair in Cincinnati these days, eh? But don't get it twisted. Many... many many many of these JN ra-ra cheerleaders were all about firing ZT, Lou, etc early and often. 1,000s of posts on here about it to go sift through.

Jumping on the ZT wagon now is EASY and mindless. Show me the people wanting to stay the course and be patient enough to give the guy 3-4 years from the start to change the org. There are but a small handful on here. THOSE are the ones with foresight and who were interested in character and seeing a change. But the ZT kite tail grabbers after they see success? After the things they posted about him, Lou, etc? To quote a famous Bengals: Child.... please.

[NUGDUKWE]

(05-03-2022, 08:15 PM)PDub80 Wrote: Bill Burr just touched on this today when talking about the Johnny Depp trial.... There will always be idiots who believe any allegation without proof or sense enough to get all of the details before coming to conclusions. For them, just because 1 person claims something against another, that's good enough for them. Those people never apologize to the level of which they level blame and just hop from one headline to another believing anything they read as long as it fits into their preconceived biases. They are utterly clueless, willfully ignorant humans and generally go without care of being right or wrong. They just want to judge without fact and be heard....

Congrats to you both for making it onto Bill's podcast. He's talking about you.

Umm. Nobody has any idea as to if there is truth to it or not. They still ignored it. The Depp trial hasn't shown any solid proof one way or the other as far as I know. Just a bunch of he said she said. So maybe your the one Bill Burr was talking about. Not surprising you wouldn't pick up on that.

[Soonerpeace]

(05-03-2022, 08:23 PM)PDub80 Wrote: LOL!!!! Yeah, AFTER ZT started winning and went to the SB. Of course. Before? LOL!!!! No, Fred absolutely didn't. He railed against and badmouthed this coaching staff for those first 2 years. Especially how they handled Dunlap and the locker room ZT was creating. Fred crapped on Joey B a ton, too and repeatedly said Joe couldn't throw the deep ball..... And then this year happened and everyone's hanging on these guy's nuts. Ahhhhh, the weather is quite fair in Cincinnati these days, eh? But don't get it twisted. Many... many many many of these JN ra-ra cheerleaders were all about firing ZT, Lou, etc early and often. 1,000s of posts on here about it to go sift through.

Jumping on the ZT wagon now is EASY and mindless. Show me the people wanting to stay the course and be patient enough to give the guy 3-4 years from the start to change the org. There are but a small handful on here. THOSE are the ones with foresight and who were interested in character and seeing a change. But the ZT kite tail grabbers after they see success? After the things they posted about him, Lou, etc? To quote a famous Bengals: Child.... please.

I was kidding lol. He doesn’t praise Zac for squat lol

[PDub80]

(05-03-2022, 08:28 PM)NUGDUKWE Wrote: Umm. Nobody has any idea as to if there is truth to it or not. They still ignored it. The Depp trial hasn't shown any solid proof one way or the other as far as I know. Just a bunch of he said she said. So maybe your the one Bill Burr was talking about. Not surprising you wouldn't pick up on that.

You clearly haven't been following the Depp trial and the mountain of evidence against her from texts, recorded conversations, eye witnesses, etc etc. But, that's not a shocker.

How do you know the Bengals ignored the stuff about Carman? What leads you to believe that?

[PDub80]

(05-03-2022, 08:29 PM)Soonerpeace Wrote: I was kidding lol. He doesn’t praise Zac for squat lol

^ THANK GOODNESS! I was like, WTF?! 

[J24]

The first 2 seasons were not great but many players stood up for Taylor and believed in him.

[NUGDUKWE]

(05-03-2022, 08:30 PM)PDub80 Wrote: You clearly haven't been following the Depp trial and the mountain of evidence against her from texts, recorded conversations, eye witnesses, etc etc. But, that's not a shocker.

How do you know the Bengals ignored the stuff about Carman? What leads you to believe that?

I have followed it some for the comic value and my wife is into the court stuff. To me it seems like it was just a toxic relationship which was my initial thoughts about it. 

I didn't think much of the Carman report because there's most likely no way to verify any claims. But I believe the Bengals acknowledged hearing about the report before the draft. Perhaps I'm wrong on that. Not saying it's a reason not to draft someone but he was already a bit of a shocking pick for us. 

[bonesaw]

(05-03-2022, 08:17 PM)PDub80 Wrote: Did Mike Brown do this often BEFORE Marvin? I don't recall any major or recurring character issues until Marvin was in Cincy... and virtually NONE since he left. If MB made a habit of this pre-Marvin, I would honestly like to hear the examples.

Good question because I was little during the Sam Wyche days and probably didn't know or care about such things but I do remember a RB going missing on a crack bender during the Super Bowl.  Not sure how many more incidents like that their were though.