Jawaan Taylor and Matt Nagy weigh in on recent penalties

After five penalties on Sunday, Taylor remains confident in his ability to correct his issues.

The Kansas City Chiefs bounced back on with Sunday’s 17-9 victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Like in any victory, many positive storylines emerged from the game. However, a point of concern came from the performance of Chiefs right tackle Jawaan Taylor.

The newly signed right tackle was penalized five times for false starts, holding and illegal formation. This all came a week after a national broadcast highlighted Taylor’s early release from the line of scrimmage and his alignment.

While Taylor’s discipline was certainly concerning on Sunday, there are still many reasons to remain confident in him long term. Overall, the Chiefs’ offensive line has performed well, only yielding two sacks thus far and leading the league in ESPN’s pass block win rate.

On Thursday, Taylor spoke to the media about his most recent outing.

“A lot of highs and lows, definitely,” he said. “Overall, I felt like my performance wasn’t too bad, but the penalties need to be cleaned up.”

When asked if Taylor believes he can correct the penalties, he reaffirmed his belief.

“Definitely just been working on it this week to clean it up,” said Taylor. “Definitely know that’s a problem that needs to be fixed. [It’s a] good thing I have a great group of coaches around me to help me fix it. Just staying poised throughout the game, staying even-keeled not letting it get the best of me. [I’m] definitely working to fix it. That’s pretty much it.”

One of the more prominent themes of Taylor’s media availability was his confidence in the team’s coaching staff to help him correct these issues. Andy Heck is a top offensive line coach in the league and offensive coordinator Matt Nagy also has plenty of experience.

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When asked about his coaching strategies regarding the penalties, Nagy also shared his confidence in Taylor.

“We talked Week 1 about some of the drops with the wideouts, emphasizing it, but yet not making it such a huge deal to where it impacts him again this week,” said Nagy. “Jawaan is a really, really good football player, he’s a great person, he wants to be better. The only thing you can possibly do is just continue to just keep practicing with the cadence, whether it’s verbal or nonverbal, which we were more nonverbal there in Jacksonville.

“So, just keep working on it, and if there’s times in practice where it happens, why did it happen, and how do we fix it? We know that officials and other teams are looking for it; he knows that. We know that, so we just have to keep working at it. That’s the only thing you can do.”

When asked about Taylor’s time in Jacksonville and how it correlated to his issues now, Nagy shared more.

“Coach Heck has done a great job of being able to emphasize and just remind him at times,” explained Nagy. “When you mix the cadence up verbally too; it’s one thing you go on one on every play, it’s another thing when you change it up. When you go on two, three, et cetera, that’s even more of a challenge. Staying positive with it. For sure, Jawaan knows this: it wasn’t just him those false start penalties last week impacted us and put us in second-and-longs, but we had a lot of other penalties and errors that we have to be better at in all phases.”

Taylor has a golden opportunity to correct this issue as a struggling Chicago Bears team comes to town. The Bears only have one sack after two games and are facing a Chiefs offense still looking to find its spark.