Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor has stated that Luke is not his biological son.
Before he pretends to answer the phone and impersonate his father, Luke, Taylor’s 7-year-old son, uses the clicker of the Patriots-Chiefs game video that Zac was viewing to the right of the Cincinnati Bengals coach’s desk. Emma Claire, three, scribbles wavy lines beneath her father’s play ideas. Nine-year-old Brooks asks his friends who wants to be the “X” receiver and who the “Z” receiver is as he flicks through the playbook. Milly, who is one year old, bounces from the ground to her mother Sarah’s arms.
A coach’s life is all about the NFL, but Zac Taylor has been able to make some friends and interact with the “outside world” for a little while thanks to his coffee breaks. Storytelling
Piles of grease-stained paper plates with pizza crusts and stray bits of pepperoni start to accumulate on the enormous oak table in Taylor’s office. Everything seems a bit out of order. And he would not have it any other way.
Every Monday after work, the wives and children of the Bengals coaches get together at the team’s downtown Cincinnati location for an hour-long family night. It’s a little consolation for the males, especially the ones with small children, to not have to miss many days of family time every week.
In the NFL, where winning is everything, finding time to be a husband and parent can be challenging. Taylor, a 36-year-old rookie coach and father of four, desires both.
“You just want to make sure that folks feel like they can balance everything as best we can,” Taylor said to ESPN. “It’s not easy.”
Taylor’s current task appears to be difficult in every manner. Having lost 12 of their first 13 games this season, the Bengals are the worst team in the NFL. The squad will have had the longest winning drought in the league—29 seasons without winning a postseason game.
The coaching staff in Cincinnati has firsthand experience of how difficult it is to succeed in the NFL. It’s not required of them to be reachable by their family, though.
Family night is not a concept that the Bengals are the first team to implement. It has been held in some capacity by every organization Taylor has worked for, including the Los Angeles Rams.
While Taylor was a graduate assistant at Texas A&M for his father-in-law, Mike Sherman, families would come on campus on Monday nights for a cafeteria-style dinner. Taylor and Sarah were childless and worked in the recruitment office twenty feet from Zac’s workstation. They went up to his office, which had once been a converted closet, after grabbing a plate, and spent those 45 minutes there.
Sherman speculates that Zac’s decision to initiate the aforementioned custom in Cincinnati was not much impacted by him within the family.
