Bengals head coach Zac Taylor keeps adding to an intriguing and eclectic brain trust.

During the course of an already brisk offseason at Paycor Stadium, Taylor has hired a defensive coordinator voted the assistant coach of the year in college football and an offensive line coach who has won jiu-jitsu world titles and trained UFC champions.

Now he's completed his coaching staff for the upcoming season with the appointment of Dr. Sean Desai as senior defensive assistant. His age of 41 belies his title but not his experience under such NFL defensive gurus as Vic Fangio and Pete Carroll and last year's stint on both sides of the ball with Rams head coach Sean McVay, currently foreman of the league's most fertile coaching factory.

If not for that new Bengals defensive coordinator, Al Golden, Desai may have been using this week to grade midterms instead of free agents.

"I could have a nice little life right now. Might be on the tenure track," says Desai as he moves into his fifth NFL office. "That was the idea. Teach, then become president of a university."

Fifteen years ago, when Golden was the head coach at Temple, he had watched Desai pull double duty as a volunteer coach and graduate assistant for academics. Then a GA on defense and special teams, all the while getting his doctorate in education as an adjunct professor.

Along the way, he took the hours of the notoriously early bird Golden. Desai would get up at 3 a.m. and do his homework before going into the football office.

When George Washington University offered Desai a professorship, Golden had to tell him he didn't have anything full-time but urged him to be patient for one more GA year and he'd promote him if he could the next year. Golden did, making Desai the outside linebackers coach and the youngest coordinator in the country when he put him in charge of the kicking game at 27.

"You just don't realize it's a viable profession for someone like me to enter into it," Desai says. "It was always a passion. Like a pipe dream. Passion. This would be awesome if I'd be able to do it. But you better have a Plan A and B set before I tried this thing."

Plan A was pre-med and sports medicine. He was a safety/wide receiver on the Shelton High School team that Dan Orlovsky led to a Connecticut state title at Shelton High School nestled in the Naugatuck Valley on the way to New York City. That's where he got the urge to coach when he helped his brother's team the summer before he went into orthopedics instead of offense at Boston University, a school that had dropped football the decade before.

Then came Plan B. A master's in education at Columbia. The itch to teach matched the urge to coach. Opting to pursue his Ph. D at Temple, fate came on a blitz. Mike Siravo, his contact on the Columbia staff when he shadowed the football program for a class project, surfaced with Golden at Temple.

One email and years later, Desai is teaming with Golden and another new staff plotting a defense to get Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow’s NFL No. 1 pass offense back to the Super Bowl and win it.

Passion won.

So did the kids. Along the way, the first-generation American became the NFL's first Indian-American coordinator. He once recalled for Bears.com how he gets emails from kids of all ages looking for advice and how he'll call them on his drive home.

"I think it's important," Desai said back in 2021. "It's always been something that I've always looked for. I've always leaned on mentors. Unfortunately for me, there weren't a lot of Indian people for me to reach out to."

From 2013 to this week, it's been both a fast track and long climb.

Eight years and three head coaches with the Bears culminating in a one-year stint as a coordinator on Matt Nagy's last staff. Then a year in Seattle on Carroll's staff as an associate head coach and defensive assistant led to another one-year run as the Eagles coordinator ending with his mentor Fangio replacing him. But Desai still drew accolades in Philly as he grappled with the loss of five starters and started 10-1.

"An ascending coach," observed Sports Illustrated's John McMullen.

Desai is still ascending, especially after a year in Los Angeles where McVay let him go into the quarterbacks room, as well as work with his specialty, the defensive backs. Like Golden, he has moved freely on both sides of the ball in the league. There were other calls from around the league, but he and his Jersey wife wanted to get closer to home. Plus, the Bengals offered full-time on defense and Golden talked up Taylor, a coach Desai already respected because he had to prepare for him.

"I think (McVay is) one of the best in the league. He's proven it over time," Desai says. "I would help in different ways on both sides of game planning. It was a really cool experience and opportunity with him.

"Every experience is great. I wouldn't trade any of them for anything. Obviously, the last one didn't go like we wanted, but it was great in many regards. You learn and grow from those. And you learn what's really important, what's not, what you really want to do, what you don't, what you need to focus on and all those things. So I know I'm getting better with all those experiences. And this is another steppingstone."

He steps into a bit of the unknown as everyone waits to see how much of Notre Dame's runner-up national championship defense Golden brings with him and how much he keeps of predecessor Lou Anarumo's scheme that includes two seasons of Golden's contributions as linebackers coach.

Along with the Golden influence, Desai says his four years under Fangio in Chicago were formative ones with that stubborn Cover Three designed to make offenses beat themselves by taking away the big play.

(Just ask Burrow. Desai's first win as a DC came in the second game of the 2021 season when the Bears picked him off three times, twice on back-to-back throws. "But you saw then what you see now," Desai says. "One of the best.")

"(Fangio's) been one of the better guys I've been around in terms of calling a game," says Desai, who says it's not so much scheme but scheming.

"It's really the philosophy of how to teach it. How to get the players to play in the defense and within the defense, and controlling who's got the hard down and moving that around."

Which was already the plan so long ago.

"That was always the passion. To teach and develop and give back in some way," says Desai, working on his latest syllabus. "Nobody's ever going to be able to take that doctorate away from me. I can always go do that. But this, you can't always go do."