Zac Taylor won’t overload Bengals at this week’s minicamp

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Bengals head coach Zac Taylor will spend the days leading up to the draft doing his first on-field work with the team.

Teams that hire new coaches are permitted to hold a three-day minicamp in the first phase of the offseason and the Bengals will hold theirs from Tuesday to Thursday this week. Taylor said he will be minimizing the parts of the playbook they’ll work on because “you won’t see the player at his fastest, at his best and thinking sharply” if they’re overloaded with information all at once.

While the portion may be small, Taylor expects it will be positive for the team. They will be doing full team work that they can’t do in the second phase of the offseason and Taylor expects the tape to be an effective teaching tool as they move deeper into the offseason.

“It’s nice from that standpoint that we get this three extra days to practice against a defense and go full-speed and be able to use the three weeks following it to make those corrections,” Taylor said, via the team’s website. “The guys will have a better understanding of what we’re taking about, because they’ve done it in a competitive environment. That’s as opposed to sometimes when you’re on the field in eleven on zero [during the next phase] and you’re talking through it and get them to understand blocking schemes, but they wouldn’t have seen it because no one is lined up across from them. It’s a benefit.”

With new players getting drafted right after minicamp ends, there will be plenty of moving pieces for Taylor to keep tabs on as they work toward building their first team in Cincinnati.