Zac Taylor is among the NFL's most scrutinized head coaches, and the Cincinnati Bengals organization sure doesn't make life easy on him.
Not to make excuses for a man who gets to dial up plays for Joe Burrow, but to be fair, the Bengals haven't exactly supplied Taylor with the resources on defense to thrive in recent years. Combine that with Burrow's two major injuries — in large part due to the personnel department's failure in building a passable offensive line — and Taylor has often coached with one hand tied behind his back.
A newly published list of NFL head coach rankings has its flaws, as any such list does. However, despite missing the playoffs for three straight years, Taylor's placement is graded on an appropriate curve relative to the adverse climate in Cincinnati.
Bengals' Zac Taylor checks in at No. 17 on NBC Sports' NFL head coach rankings
NBC Sports' Patrick Daugherty kicked off his head coach rankings with an agreeable-enough top five in Sean McVay (Rams), Andy Reid (Chiefs), Kyle Shanahan (49ers), Mike Macdonald (Seahawks), and Sean Payton (Broncos).
Daugherty's write-up is rife with backhanded compliments, even if Taylor's 17th-place ranking feels about right:
"Taylor would have been churned in almost any other city by now. But Mike Brown’s Bengals will never be any other franchise. They favor thrift. They prefer slow and steady. They never win the race, but that’s a matter for another day. So, if Taylor isn’t going anywhere, what are the Bengals left to work with? A coach who at least abides by “you’re only as good as your quarterback.” When Joe Burrow is healthy, Taylor doesn’t get in his way and the Bengals score a ton of points. When Burrow is out, Taylor stands around waiting for him to return. Hardly ideal. Also not as disastrous as it could be. A replacement-level in-game decision-maker, Taylor is never going to steal a game on his own. I guess Bengals fans should be thankful he — usually — doesn’t lose them on his own, either."
We'll get into what I disagree about from this blurb re: the notion of Taylor as an alleged lost puppy when Burrow is out of the lineup. Let's first break down the rankings themselves a little deeper.
Four of those top five coaches are Super Bowl champions. Shanahan has at least been to two Super Bowls during his San Francisco tenure. Taylor brought the Bengals to Super Bowl LVI and the AFC Championship Game thereafter. That buys him some credibility.
Not that a Lombardi Trophy should guarantee top placement in the head coach hierarchy. I believe Taylor is far superior to, say, Nick Sirianni of the Eagles, who ranked ninth, and Tampa Bay's Todd Bowles (15th).
I'll focus on the former, since it creates a starker contrast on the football operations side of things. Unlike Sirianni, Taylor doesn't have some elite general manager like Howie Roseman to replenish the roster with studs at just about every position group. Cincinnati is a tad old-fashioned that way, as Duke Tobin doesn't hold the official title of GM.
The Bengals' scouting department is notoriously underfunded. Every draft feels like a near-aimless adventure. Free agency acquisitions come with the caveat of weirdly-structured contracts. In-house talent frequently clashes with the front office in contract negotiations.
And again, Taylor's specialty is offense. So to play his lawyer a little more here, when Burrow has gone down amid Cincinnati's playoff drought, Jake Browning stepped in and kept the Bengals in the playoff hunt during the 2023 campaign. This past year, Joe Flacco arrived via an in-season trade, and Taylor had the passing attack humming with the quadragenarian vet under center.
If not for Burrow's injuries, or any modicum of competent help from Tobin and Co. to build a competent defense, the harsh criticism that often besets Taylor would be a lot quieter.
Alas, that's not the reality. The Bengals enter 2026 in a playoffs-or-bust situation. If they miss the postseason yet again, Taylor is a convenient fall guy, and Burrow may very well demand a trade, a la Carson Palmer.
The 2026 NFL Draft presents a promising chance for Cincinnati to redeem the failures of yesteryear and, at the very least, draft an instant-impact defender with the 10th overall pick. Or even trade up in pursuit of a true blue-chip prospect.
We'll see if the Bengals organization gives Taylor a little more help this year. While he does have some say in personnel, the final call at No. 10 is not his to make. Here's praying it's someone good, because as things stand right now, the defense is, once again, not good enough to be in true Super Bowl contention — regardless of the best efforts from Taylor and Burrow on offense.