In one embodiment, a receiver has an equalizer, a tap-averaging block, a delay buffer, and a filter. The equalizer receives an input signal from upstream processing and generates sets of filter coefficients. Each set of filter coefficients is adaptively generated by 1) filtering the received signal to generate an equalized signal, 2) calculating an error of the equalized signal, and 3) generating a new set of coefficients based on the error of the equalized signal. The sets of filter coefficients are output to the tap-averaging block, which averages groups of the sets of filter coefficients to generate sets of averaged filter coefficients, where each averaged set is output to the filter. The filter receives a time-delayed version of the input signal from the delay buffer and applies the current set of averaged filter coefficients to the time-delayed signal. The filtered signal is then output to downstream processing.