Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor Praises Shemar Stewart

Transcript

00:00I think it's the hope when he got here.

00:02So to say I'm surprised, it's hard to just measure how quickly someone's going to get acclimated

00:07and be able to make an impact, but these are all the things that we saw on the tape

00:11in terms of being able to position different spots and make an impact immediately and disrupt.

00:15So I can't say that I would use the word surprised.

00:18Everyone just has a different speed on how quickly they can get up to speed,

00:21and I think he and Jerry have done a great job together working through it

00:25and making sure he can make an immediate impact.

00:27What element of what he's doing have you been most happy to see?

00:32The power, the disruptiveness.

00:38There's a lot of words you can use.

00:40I mean, you feel his impact.

00:41I stand back there and call the plays, and so you get an evaluation of people very quickly

00:45when you're trying to have success as an offense, drive the ball down the field in practice.

00:49You form opinions and evaluations of the guys very quickly,

00:54and he's a guy that's made an impact on me.

00:57I know that.

00:58I know you're not going to sit here and, like, declare opening day starters,

01:00but in an ideal world, is he your starter on opening day?

01:03I think we're a long ways from having to declare any of that stuff.

01:06So guys just need to keep working hard and keep improving,

01:09and especially with rookies, show consistency.

01:12By no means has anyone arrived after one to four weeks of training camp practice.

01:16I think we've now got enough experience to know, you know, we drafted Shamar in the first round.

01:25We have high expectations for him.

01:26He's going to be a tremendous player for us.

01:28Let's see all this play out in the season as guys continue to go,

01:31but there's nothing right now showing that he's slowing down.

01:35You know, he's made a good impression on us.

01:37You wanted to see him pick up a lot of the nuance, the communication, especially with Jerry.

01:43Yeah.

01:43How has he done in that regard?

01:44I thought yesterday, you know, yesterday was a good day.

01:47I saw a lot of really, really positive things from our defense.

01:50I think that's where the communication is really setting in,

01:53higher level of communication, higher level of learning,

01:56higher level of detail in terms of the things that we want to be able to do.

01:58So I think overall, I thought yesterday was a really good step in that direction.