When Sean McVay looks across the field on Super Bowl Sunday, he’ll see a familiar face in Zac Taylor. For two seasons, Taylor worked on McVay’s coaching staff with the Rams. He started out as the team’s assistant wide receivers coach in 2017 before being promoted to quarterbacks coach the following year.
It was unlikely that these two would meet in a Super Bowl just three years into Taylor’s tenure with the Bengals, but both he and McVay did an excellent job with their teams this season. The result? A rare coaching matchup in the Super Bowl.
According to Evan Kaplan of ESPN, this is just the fifth Super Bowl where one head coach was previously an assistant on the other head coach’s staff. The most recent instance of this happening was in Super Bowl XLI 15 years ago.
 From @EpKap: Zac Taylor was an assistant coach under Sean McVay with the Rams in 2017 and 2018, and this is the fifth Super Bowl between one head coach who previously worked as an assistant under the other head coach. The most recent was Tony Dungy vs. Lovie Smith.
— Ed Werder (@WerderEdESPN) February 4, 2022
What also makes this a unique coaching matchup is the youth between both men. McVay is just 36 years old and Taylor is only two years older than him at 38.
Their combined age of 74 years makes this the youngest coaching matchup in Super Bowl history, and they just so happen to have worked on the same staff four years ago.
McVay beat Taylor’s Bengals in their only other meeting back in 2019, but Cincinnati is a completely different team now, as are the Rams.
