A Meeting With Chip Kelly Brought Press Taylor to Eagles

This is a story about how Chip Kelly helped the Eagles win the Super Bowl. 

Really. 

So in the summer of 2012, when Kelly was still the head coach at the University of Oregon, he was in Miami visiting some friends on the Dolphins' coaching staff. He was hanging around the facility waiting for one of those friends to get out of a meeting, when he stopped in the office of the Dolphins' new quarterbacks coach Zac Taylor. 

On that exact day, Taylor had a visitor of his own. His younger brother Press, then a graduate assistant at Tulsa, happened to be on his summer break and was visiting Miami. 

So the three - Zac, Press and Chip - sat in a room at Miami and talked football for a couple of hours. Then they went their separate ways. 

Until Kelly was hired as the Eagles' head coach and was looking for a quality control coach. 

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That's when another tie came into play. Greg Austin, who was Kelly's graduate assistant at Oregon and became the Eagles' assistant offensive line coach on that original staff, happened to be a college teammate of Zac's at Nebraska. In fact, Austin was a part of the offensive line that protected Zac, the quarterback. So Austin suggested the name Press Taylor and Kelly remembered that long chat in Miami. 

"So when they got here, they had an idea for what the position looked like and they called me," Press Taylor said last week. "It didn't take much longer for me to say yes and show up here." 

Five years later, Taylor is still just 30 years old, but he's risen to the level of quarterbacks coach, replacing John DeFilippo, who is now the Vikings' offensive coordinator. Last year, Taylor was responsible for mining the "Philly Special" from a Bears-Vikings game in 2016. He then watched that play help the Eagles win Super Bowl LII (see story)

And it all wouldn't have happened without that chance meeting in Miami. 

Taylor never expected that day in Miami to lead to all of this. 

"No, I did not," Taylor said. "At the time, Coach Kelly is at the University of Oregon, I'm at the University of Tulsa. I was just grateful to sit and talk football with anybody. It was just fun. I didn't anticipate it being this." 

Kelly brought Taylor to Philly, but Doug Pederson had just the right amount of missing ego to keep him. Taylor was one of several coaches Pederson kept on his original staff. Not only did Pederson keep Taylor, but he promoted him to assistant quarterbacks coach, a title he held until getting promoted this spring. 

During the 2016 offseason, after Kelly was fired and while the Eagles were looking for a replacement, Taylor was back at home in Oklahoma with his wife, mining information about possible new bosses with the same zeal with which he mined the "Philly Special."

"Trying to find connections I had with that person because, ideally, I wanted to stay," Taylor remembered. "I really liked my time here in Philadelphia for the first three years, knew what kind of talent we had on our roster and really enjoyed coaching in the NFL. I was hoping to stay and really followed it all throughout that."

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