When they were kids, Bears offensive coordinator Press Taylor viewed his older brother Zac as a role model he was determined to emulate.
"I grew up idolizing him," Press said. "Everything he was doing was something I wanted to do in the future, so why not follow this path ahead of me?"
With Zac being five years older, the ink on the blueprint was already dry, making it easy for Press to follow in his brother's footsteps — all the way from high school to the NFL.
“There’s nobody I root for harder, but there’s nobody I want to beat more than my brother, and he’s the same way.” Press Taylor on older brother Zac
Just like Zac before him, Press played quarterback at both Norman High School in Oklahoma and Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kansas, before transferring to a Division I program, beginning his coaching career in college and entering the NFL as an offensive assistant.
This week, the path that Press followed will lead to Cincinnati for a joint practice and preseason game against Zac, who is entering his eighth season as Bengals head coach. While the brothers will be busy doing their jobs and won't get to spend much time together, Press' wife, their two sons and two daughters plan to visit Zac's wife, their two sons and two daughters in Cincinnati, where they likely will play Catan, a classic strategy board game that both families enjoy.
While Saturday night's contest is just a preseason game, Press, now 38, and Zac, 43, have faced each other with much more at stake. Last year in the regular season, for example, the Bears rallied to stun the Bengals 47-42 in Cincinnati on Caleb Williams' 58-yard touchdown pass to tight end Colston Loveland with :17 remaining.
That remarkable victory enabled Press — who was then the Bears' quarterbacks coach — to claim the Taylor Family Bro Bowl Trophy that is housed in their father Sherwood's office. It also evened Press' record against his brother at 3-3-1.
The strangest meeting came in 2020, when Press, then a senior offensive assistant with the Colts, and Zac's Bengals played to a 23-23 tie in an empty stadium.
"The only tie in my career was against my brother the Covid year," Press said. "It was the worst. We met at midfield and were like, 'What just happened?' That was rough."
Every meeting between the brothers is rough on the family.
"I don't think my dad cares as much because he gets it," Press said. "But our wives and our mom don't like the intensity of it all and the anxiety. We get it. There's nobody I root for harder, but there's nobody I want to beat more than my brother, and he's the same way. We're not going to be friendly during the game, [and] the second it ends, one of us is going to talk trash. We pretend like we're not, but we won last year, so I'm going to talk trash and he knows it."
Due to their age difference, the brothers never played with or against each other in an organized sports league. But there were plenty of battles at home and in their neighborhood.
"We grew up with a ton of friends in our neighborhood and playing sports was a big part. That's what we did every day," Press said. "I was always kind of the hanger-on that early on had to go get my mom to let them let me play. And then eventually, when I got to middle school, I could hang. I was just one of the numbers that could keep the game going, so they let me play.
"We grew up basically playing 7-on-7 every single day with buddies. Some ended up playing football, some didn't. It was either playing home run derby in the backyard or playing basketball in the front yard. I felt like we always had someone with access to one of the high school gyms, so we could get in and play pickup there. Anything we could do, we were doing."
When it was just the two Taylor boys, the youngest was at a decided disadvantage.
"There were a number of battles in the front yard that I can think of that probably ended with me losing and getting upset most of the time," Press said. "He's five years older than me, so it wasn't always fair. I remember a lot of times him dragging me to go outside and play catch, and I didn't want to. And I end up sitting in the front yard, and he's just throwing a ball at me as hard as he could. That was our idea of playing catch, I guess, for a long time.
"We had a 10-yard grass area in the front yard. We played punt return. So, I'm, say, eight, he's 13, and it was him throwing the ball as high as he could, and I would look up and catch it. And we're 10 yards apart, so he just smoked me. But that was the gist of our games for the most part when it was just he and I. So, I look forward to getting after him again."
