Press Conference: Zac Taylor on Bengals' Defensive Growth, Tee Higgins’ First Game Back & Young Players Stepping Up

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SPEAKER_4 (0:49)

What do you see prominent most that you guys can build on on defense next year?

Zac Taylor (0:55)

Well, I think, you know, we've always wanted to be a relentless defense, something where the effort flies off the tape and you see guys swarming the ball. So I think those are things, when I watched the tape yesterday, is you see everyone in the picture. Everyone, after first contact, trying to get in the mix, make sure the ball carrier gets down. They got the one run on us that was a big run and you can't excuse that because we got to get them on the ground. We had opportunities to do it, could have knocked it down. We didn't. They scored touchdown, but you look at the mixture of runs after that and they're tough. They scheme your runs up, they give you a lot of different looks, ton of different personnel groupings. I thought our defense did a great job getting that run game settled down and minimized toward the second half. You got to make them throw the football, and we were able to get the ball off of them that way. So just overall really impressed with the growth of our defense and how these guys responded. They understand the scheme, the communication has been really good.

And again, taking the ball off people, so there's that confidence to scoring there as well. So it's been fun to watch.

SPEAKER_4 (2:03)

It seemed like the defensive line had a pretty good game yesterday in terms of containing the run between the tackles.

Zac Taylor (2:08)

Doing a great job playing with their hands, understanding the techniques, we're asking them to play.

And so again, you're just seeing guys grow, a ton of guys grow. Getting Shamar back was fun to watch yesterday. I thought Cedric played a good game yesterday. Miles continues just to have a really good season right now with where he's at. And so again, it's just, and there's guys I'm not even naming, I thought everybody played really well yesterday. So just a fun group to watch them continue to grow and ascend. And that's all we're asking for right now. Just get better every single week and minimize your mistakes. And we're seeing that from those guys.

SPEAKER_6 (2:43)

I think after the game, Tee Higgins said he saw specialists to go. When did he go see that?

Zac Taylor (2:48)

Thursday morning.

SPEAKER_6 (2:49)

OK, and kind of what led to y'all come to that conclusion and say, hey, let's go have this checked out and kind of walk us through that process?

Zac Taylor (2:55)

Yeah, it was the doctors. You know, I think just making sure Tee in conjunction with our doctors, just making sure you got that final checkpoint there to make sure we were seeing everything and the clearance was appropriate. I think with the two issues he's had, you know, that was the appropriate way to do it. And so get him out there quite early. It was a it was a bang bang Thursday morning. Got out there, got back before I wasn't expecting him to practice. And there he is, walks in the door, you know, right after stretch.

So that was I think it's good for him to hear that, too. He could probably answer that better than I can. But we just want to make sure we were doing right by him. If he's going to go out there and play that everybody feels good about it. He feels good about it. Family feels good about it. And he went out there and to my eye, felt really good.

SPEAKER_6 (3:39)

What hurdles did he need to clear Saturday and Sunday morning in order to finally have the green light to go to point Sunday?