PHOENIX _ The NFL gathers here this week for its annual meeting in the breezy swank of the Arizona Biltmore, which just happens to be where Bengals head coach Zac Taylor had his first photo snapped in the league's annual portrait of the head coaches seven years ago.

Seven years?

2019?

Joe Burrow was still an Ohio State transfer on first reference. Joe Flacco had just finished his run in Baltimore. Zac Taylor's youngest of four, Milly, was crawling at his introductory news conference. Now her father volunteers to ref her sports.

Seven years?

A good time to note that only Andy Reid, Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan have been in the NFL photo with the same team longer than Taylor. Or that only Taylor, Marvin Lewis, Sam Wyche and franchise founder Paul Brown have coached the Bengals for eight seasons. Or that only Lewis and Wyche have coached more games in Bengals annals than Taylor.

Zachary William Taylor has been around longer than Dan Campbell in Detroit, the guy who taught a green-as-grass-graduate-assistant how to coach tight ends at College Station. Longer than Ben Johnson in Chicago, his disciple in the days Taylor coached the Miami quarterbacks. Just as long as Matt LaFleur in Green Bay, his office neighbor and waste basket ball partner with the Rams across the hall from McVay himself.

"I feel old now. I was really young when I came in," says Taylor, a geezer who turns 43 later this spring.

How old?

"I've got enough gray hairs," Taylor says. "One year feels like four."

Hot seat? You'll never be able to tell.

Charles Burks, the Bengals cornerbacks coach who game-planned against Taylor before coming to work for him in 2022, knows this about that NFL photo.

"In the five years I've been here," Burks says. "I've never seen him blink."

That's the key to his longevity, say the people around Taylor. Expressionless. Not-a-hair-out-of-place consistency of a grinder.

But his middle name could be Adversity. He lost his best player for the year when A.J. Green got injured in Taylor's first practice. The next year, Taylor broke in an overall No. 1 quarterback at the height of COVID, which erased the spring and a normal training camp. Last season, Burrow, that generational quarterback, and Trey Hendrickson, the Bengals' All-Pro sacker, combined to play just 15 games.

Wouldn't know it. Couldn't tell. Burks calls it "grace." Taylor calls it necessity.

"That's for every coach. And every team. If you're just going to sit here and complain about the problems … Half the time you don't even now half the problems that other teams are dealing with. I'm experienced to know I'm not the only one."

Grinder.

"A big win, a tough loss. He's the same at 6 a.m. on Monday," says Doug Rosfeld, the man who basically is his chief of staff and has seen them all. "So we're the same."

That consistency is what the Bengals felt they needed after Lewis' final season in 2018. At that point, Green and quarterback Andy Dalton had just finished their eighth season under their fourth different offensive coordinator.

The OCs who led them to the playoffs in their first five seasons, Jay Gruden and Hue Jackson, took their playbooks to head coaching jobs, and the Bengals wanted to get back to their lineage of offensive head coaches keeping the scheme and philosophy intact.

It's how Paul Brown led the ebbs-and-flows of an expansion team to three postseason berths in its first eight years and how Wyche and Forrest Gregg molded the franchise's first two Super Bowl teams despite early disappointments.

That steel-belted consistency is how Taylor became the winningest postseason head coach in Bengals' history while overcoming the program's tough. They believe that continuity is going to put them back in the playoffs.

Not only is Taylor the most tenured coach in the grizzled AFC North, the Bengals' Dan Pitcher is suddenly the NFL's third-longest tenured offensive coordinator. Since 2022, every team has replaced their offensive coordinator, and when the Bengals' Brian Callahan became the Titans head man after the 2023 season, he was the longest-tenured.

"I think that there's a great benefit in the continuity of an offensive system. But it's the system that evolves," Pitcher says.

Pitcher lived it. A few days after the Browns came to Paycor Stadium in the 10 hours following the Bengals' bitter-pill 2015 Wild Card to interview Jackson, Pitcher was hired as an offensive assistant and worked under two coordinators in his first three seasons.

"We're not doing the same things we did five years ago, three years ago, two years ago," Pitcher says. "But the language remains pretty much the same. The adjustments we're able to get to. The nuances. Those are things where it takes time to develop, and then once you have them, if you're constantly churning, every couple of years, you lose some of that stuff.

"It's not impossible, but it's not, certainly not ideal," Pitcher says of the flux in staff. "Especially when you found your quarterback, and at that point, I think there's a lot of case studies over the course of time in this league that show you that continuity, once you have that guy, makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of Super Bowl rings in New England and Kansas City that would back that up."

The consistency pours from the notes Taylor has seemingly been keeping since the days he was the Commissioner of Cynthia Circle, a Norman, Okla., teenager organizing pickup basketball round robins and automatic quarterback football games in cul-de-sac glory. If Rosfeld is Taylor's right-hand man, Joey Boese is his left as the Bengals head strength coach who has known him nearly 20 years.

Boese was in Taylor's office last spring as they plotted the changes to training camp. The morning practices. The afternoon walkthroughs. The ditching of what had become a summer staple at Paycor Stadium, the joint practices with preseason foes forever known as the Aaron Donald Helmet Toss Games, in favor of intensified team sessions.

"He takes copious notes. He'll pull up a note from 2021 on a Wednesday," Boese says. "What the temperature was. What he was thinking on that day. Smart. You think you're going to remember, but you never do.

"When there's a spike in soft tissue injuries, he looks up what was going on those days. How hard was the practice? What we were doing, and what did we actually do? I think Zac has a tremendous feel for when to push and when to pull back. He's a great feel for what the team needs and when the team needs it."

Taylor certainly won't blink when it comes to his philosophy. With Joe Burow, how can it not be pass first, he challenges. Only four teams have thrown more passes in the NFL than Taylor's Bengals from the time he took the job the day after the Rams lost to the Patriots in the Feb. 4, 2019 Super Bowl.

But Burks reminds you how Taylor has done it. In that 2019 season helping coach the Dolphins cornerbacks, Burks saw Dalton throw for the second-most yards in his career, falling just short of his best set in the first game Taylor coached.

Just this past year, Burks had a front-row seat for an old Super Bowl MVP, Joe Flacco, throwing for his career-best 470 yards during his 18^th year in the league in his fifth game under Taylor. He saw another backup, Jake Browning, complete 86.5% of his passes in a Monday night playoff push. He was still in Miami when Burrow had the NFL's biggest passing game of the decade with 525 yards.

"He's scored points with three different quarterbacks. You don't see that very often," Burks says. "I remember game-planning against him in 2019, 2020. If I were to go back and look at that offense and look at what he's doing now, it's completely different. The players have a lot to do with that. But there are some coaches in our league that won't change regardless of who they have. He's the type of coach that just year-to-year, he sees what he has, and he's been successful with whatever he has."

Burks is thinking through his time here, which doesn't even include the Ryan Finley game, the only win of his career in a Monday nighter vs. the Steelers.

"Who was our tight end in '22?" asks Burks of that season of the 10-game winning streak and second straight appearance in the AFC Championship.

"Hayden Hurst? Exactly. Now there's Mike Gesicki. When Erick All was healthy, we looked a little different. I just think there are little subtleties depending on who he has, and he's always adapted to the players … I think Zac doesn't really get enough credit for his ability to surround his players with his ability to evolve, really, from year-to-year."

Burks believes how Vikings head coach Kevin O'Connell uses varying personnel is the comparison, not McVay in Los Angeles or LaFleur in Green Bay. It's the Animal Kingdom out here. Taylor says you have to adapt or die.

Even the Rams, the roots of his Bengals playbook, is no longer the Rams, says Taylor, with McVay's shift to shotgun and liberal use of triple tight ends

"There's still an identity everyone has, but everyone's done a good job shifting to who their current players are. You've got new players coming in, and you've got to shift to their strengths," Taylor says. "I think I've now been here long enough to see a shift in about every team that we've played against and how they've evolved their philosophy."'

It's that adaptability married to consistency that Pitcher took from Taylor when life came full circle after this past season. Ten years after Hue Jackson took the Cleveland job, Pitcher interviewed for it with Taylor top of mind.

After Pitcher stayed when Taylor got the Bengals job, Taylor immediately invested in him, giving him the game situational responsibilities and allowing him to speak in front of the entire team.

"There's power in authenticity and consistency," Pitcher says, "and finding the balance between comfort in your own skin, knowing who you are and what matters to you. But then not allowing that to lead to complacency, where you feel like you no longer need to grow, you no longer need to challenge yourself, and maybe the areas where you feel like you need to get better. I think Zac sits in a really good spot on that spectrum. That's something I try to emulate in my own professional life."

Taylor looks at his own playbook and sees evolution. The running game has morphed (not as much zone, more downhill with duos), as well as how they've re-thought putting Burrow in an empty backfield.

"We certainly went to a wave of empty years ago. Really successful defenses were really vanilla, and we were really successful," Taylor says. "Defenses were really vanilla to empty, and now that's really flipped. Defenses have become much more aggressive. They're going to attack the protections. They're going to make your quarterback hot, and so you've got to be willing to adapt."

Pitcher says not to get caught up in tracking the genealogy of various coaching trees because of that evolution factor. He says he could spend an hour alone discussing the Bengals' shift to multiple motions on many of their snaps the past two years or so.

And, he believes Burrow's enormous football IQ has allowed them to come up with unique pass protections. It was a passing system, Pitcher says, that started off emulating the drop-back passing game Callahan brought from Detroit and Denver before tailoring it to Burrow's traits. Plus, the Bengals aren't in three receivers nearly as much as they were. But as Pitcher says, "Our 12 (two tight ends) can be different than our own 12."

"One of Zach's greatest traits is just a willingness to be a problem solver and look at things with an open mind and not be beholden or married to a this-is-the-one way-to-do-it, and this is how we're always going to do it, and we don't have a lot of flexibility off of that," Pitcher says. "That's just not the world we operate in. And that's due in large part to his philosophy and how he really has just kind of set the whole thing up."

That's not to say Taylor hasn't taken anything away from the three guys in front of him on the risers.

"Sean and Shanahan have shared history,so they have unique things that they both do. They're linked, and obviously Zach spent time with them," Pitcher says. "And how we've existed on offense isn't all that dissimilar from how Kansas City has existed on offense. We're different. But they lean into the fact that they have one of the best in the world that play quarterback, and they've had really good pass catchers, and we've done the same."

If the playbooks of Taylor and McVay each have been heavily edited, Taylor has tried to stay true to how McVay's energy has transformed the Rams franchise for a decade now with a winning percentage of .617. McVay is one of those guys whose number is in Taylor's phone, and they can bounce some video clips off each other. As long as they're not playing in the near future.

"One of the greats. He had so much conviction on how he did everything," Taylor says. "Whether he believed it or not. But with such great energy and positivity that you wanted to follow him. He got everyone to believe, and that belief has taken the Rams to great heights over his nine years. A whole decade."

Taylor has replicated the McVay formula for how he treats his locker room, where he has always been praised for taking care of his people. The lunch-time staff shooting basketball games, the coaches' pickleball tournaments, crafting competitions for the players in and out of practice. McVay didn't give Taylor any sit-down advice when he got the job in Cincy. Taylor basically watched McVay for his first two years as a head man.

"I want to be competitive in every single thing I do all day long. That's what drives me. Just bouncy leg where I've got to be doing something competitive. Movement.

"I want to see the best in each situation. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to handle it sometimes with some negativity, some confrontation. But ultimately, I want to find the best in all situations to get the most out of people."

His staff doesn't divide up his career into eight-year blocks. Like Taylor, they go moment-to-moment.

"He's a gravity guy," Rosfeld says. "There are glue guys and the guys that actually pull people together and hold them together. He not only holds people together, but he puts people together."

Flacco got Taylor right away when he got traded here on a Tuesday and started that Sunday last year. Taylor was able to put his adaptability on full display for the guy who now has 201 starts in three decades and pretty much gets it all.

"I think Zac is really good at what he does. I loved being with him last year, just getting to kind of see behind the scenes and what he does for this offense," Flacco says. "I was super impressed. I think he's unbelievable at it. I think, ultimately, his strength is his ability to call a game on offense, that's his biggest thing. But I also think just the way he relates to guys, and how he feels certain situations out and kind of adjusts off of that."

Taylor has to pose for another picture this week at the same place. But he's not in the same spot.