He played college football for the Prairie View A&M Panthers and was selected by the Kansas City Chiefs in the fourth round of the 1965 AFL draft.
He was also selected in the 15th round of the 1965 NFL draft by the Philadelphia Eagles, but he chose to play in the AFL for the Chiefs where he would spend his entire career.
Taylor attended Evan E. Worthing High School, where he was the football team's quarterback, played basketball, and ran track.
[2][3] Taylor attended Prairie View A&M University on a basketball scholarship, but became a star receiver on its football team, which was runner up in the 1963 National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) championship game.
[1][3][4][5] He originally was the team's quarterback until his sophomore year, when he was replaced by Jim Kearney, who would go on to play safety in the NFL and AFL as Taylor's teammate in Kansas City.
In college basketball, he once faced future NBA great Willis Reed (who attended Grambling State University),[7] and played him even.
[19] However, Taylor's most memorable highlight from that season came in the fourth and final AFL-NFL World Championship Game on January 11, 1970, Super Bowl IV.
[20][1] The Chiefs won a 23–7 upset over the NFL champion Minnesota Vikings which, prior to Super Bowl IV, had been dubbed by some as "the greatest team in pro football history".
[citation needed] "Otis made my job easy," Chiefs quarterback and Hall of Famer Len Dawson said.
[9] Taylor served on Boards and commissions throughout the Greater Kansas City area, and as a community ambassador for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
In 1990, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease dementia, which eroded his health over the following decades, until he was bedbound and largely incommunicative in his last years.
His family filed a lawsuit against the NFL in 2012, believing that his medical conditions were caused by injuries he received during his playing career.