On September 13th, 2020, with the NFL tepidly restarting play in the midst of COVID-19, Joe Burrow took his first snap as quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals. Without a preseason for building completely unrealistic expectations on a sample size of 15 passes, Burrow was thrown to the wolves weeks before his fellow rookie QBs would do the same, and the reviews were rave. Star receiver of the last mediocre era A.J. Green echoed an excited fan response, saying that “the way he handled himself on that last drive was unbelievable…We’ve got a special one in Joe.”
But Burrow’s own performance grade was a D. Discussing an off-target throw to Green that could have led to a win, Burrow, with the candor we’ve come to expect over his career, told reporters, “A high schooler can make that throw.”
The moment has never been too big for Joe Burrow. Fans of the Bengals and the NFL at-large are naturally gravitating in their comparisons toward other players who always seemed to be bigger than the moment: Burrow in a Namath-esque gaudy coat, Burrow with Brady’s steely gaze downfield, Burrow commanding an offense like Montana. But Burrow’s true gift to us in this moment is his candor, an innate comfort in thinking through what this moment means to a fan base and a region even in the ecstasy of winning an AFC Championship, even with how little this moment will likely mean to him if he isn’t puffing on a cigar in two weeks. Candor is appreciated as a fan, but it does little to explain how in the hell a 4-11-1 team from 2020 (2-6-1 with Burrow and 2-5 without him) has come together at this moment.
This season will, naturally, be Joe Burrow’s when all is said and done. The down moments will be remembered as times in which the coaching staff clipped his wings, and the magical run attributed to Letting Joe Cook (a phrase quickly fading into meaninglessness). Is it that simple? Some numbers, some musings, and the ultimate mystery of perhaps the most magical Super Bowl run in modern times.
Offense: That Offensive Line with Those Receivers
Analytics innovators at Pro Football Focus, headquartered just a few miles from Paul Brown Stadium, love to discuss the merits of an average offensive line. Their own grades over the last decade bear that out: the 2020 Buccaneers (9th best run blocking unit, 14th best in pass by their numbers), the 2019 Chiefs (13th and 7th), the 2018 Patriots (4th and 6th), the 2017 Eagles (2nd and 10th), and 2016 Patriots (5th and 11th) speak to a baseline of competence rather than a team strength. When considering that three of these teams were led by Tom Brady, one by Pat Mahomes, and one by Nick Foles after he presumably met the devil at a crossroad, the baseline competence notion is attributed more toward a star triggerman. The Bengals offensive line is awful, and their players chirping on Twitter should not mask that truth. The 2022 Bengals (22nd and 25th respectively) is a disaster by PFF metrics, and their failings have permeated through the offense as a whole. The Burrow-led Bengals finished the regular season 13th in total yardage, while managing 7th in points-per-game despite the line. In the postseason, they are 8th and 5th out of 14 teams, all but one of which (a Rams team at 3rd and 4th) played a game poorly enough to get whacked. And that line never got better, as 9 sacks last week and consistent first-half disruption in the Conference Championship demonstrated.
“We’ve got a special one in Joe.”
A.J. Green
But offensive lines can be accounted for in two ways, one protective and one otherworldly stupid. The first way, of course, is to throw quickly: rely on a screen game, a quick or powerful underneath receiver, and pray for efficiency so that your few shots downfield might connect. The other is to pretend that your offensive line doesn’t suck and prepare for a beating. Joe Burrow was sacked 63 times this year. 63. 15 more than the next passer, Noted Pocket Fool Ryan Tannehill. My knees hurt typing that. Despite the Cincinnati narrative that he can overcome such pressure, he often could not: his 10 turnover-worthy plays (as measured by PFF) ranked 15th compared to 13 big time throws, which ranked 5th, which suggests success in somewhat of a mixed bag. The point is not how Burrow handled the pressure, but what that determination to run the offense, pressure be damned, did to him when the pocket was clean. Burrow hit only 7 turnover-worthy plays to 25 big time throws when kept clean. When he took longer than 2.5 seconds to throw the ball (he had, on average, 2.65 seconds to throw with that offensive line), Burrow connected on 24 BTTs to 11 TWPs, numbers comparable only to one of the most electric runners in the game (Kyler Murray) and the only other QB in the league stubborn and arrogant enough to play the game as Burrow plays (Tom Brady). Burrow, incidentally, was pressured 75 more times than Brady this year.
Zac Taylor has attempted, at times, to help Burrow out by choosing Option One, and all that kindness has gotten him is angry tweets at his expense. Burrow seems to neither want, nor need, Taylor’s help delivered via Tyler Boyd, Joe Mixon, or some cute screen passes to complete. This bears out in the numbers and to the eyes. The receivers need credit too, of course, as Higgins and Chase themselves have delivered 31 contested catches to Burrow on a hysterical 75 targets (both Higgins and Chase are in the top 5 in the targeted category). That the Bengals don’t seem to give a shit about bad plays is obvious to any fan of the team, but their willingness to continue doing so despite how often the negative plays occur is remarkable. The choice is made easier by sound drafting two years in a row in Higgins, Burrow, and Chase; the nucleus of this passing game is mentally tough and ready to implement such an approach. No more page space needs to be wasted on how right the Bengals were to take the superstar Chase over a potential cornerstone left tackle, but the commitment to a player deemed better over a blank roster spot is commendable all the same. When one is in the business of taking chances, you draft the men that will take them and inspire others to take them: Chase over Sewell becomes a no-brainer under that philosophy, for reasons both on- and off-field.
Defense: Lou and The Joy of Mediocrity
The story of the defense feels more muddled to me. On the macro, they are simply average: 15th graded PFF defense in aggregate, 18th in total yardage, 26th against the pass, and 17th in PPG (wedging them between Expert Mediocrity in Miami and Philadelphia). Even their turnover luck is mediocre, with a firmly even turnover ratio at 21 each, both offense and defense right in the middle of the pack. They’re 12th in sacks, 14th in pressure rate, and 25th in blitz percentage: the defense is all about doing everything fine and nothing poorly. Against all odds, this has worked in the case of these last three playoff wins in different ways: stretches of clutch stops, coming while trailing or leading, and getting the benefit of some late-game interception heroics on tipped balls twice in a row.
Defense is, after all, random. Turnover luck rarely repeats, and the coffers of position groups run dry due to injuries year after year for great defenses, much to the chagrin of their coordinators who need some level of consistency for their own head coaching aspirations. Lou Anarumo is now a candidate interviewing for head coaching vacancies on the back of this surprising performance of perfectly-timed mediocrity. The Bengals are lucky, certainly, but their own evaluative work put into making this luck deserves examination.
In 2020, amidst the Joe Burrow hype, the team made decisions that have come to define this run, starting by actually spending money. D.J. Reader, Trae Waynes, and Vonn Bell were imported from playoff teams, and the Bengals committed $110 million in contracts to these three men, to varying degrees this postseason. Reader excelled in Tennessee last week, brutally pushing his way into the pocket to match their physicality, but struggled more in the other two playoff contests, looking lost against Kansas City’s trap game. Trae Waynes has yet to play a meaningful role over two seasons. Vonn Bell has been The Single Most Mediocre Player in the best possible way, excelling as a tackler and limiting the chances for other teams to get explosive plays while doing nothing spectacular most of the time. In 2020, Reader finished on IR with Waynes, while Vonn Bell spent most of the year getting cooked in coverage by teams avoiding Jessie Bates.
In similar situations, other teams see those three major moves and sense a mistake. The Dolphins, for instance, simply undid their 2020 spending spree, jettisoning many top contracts after one year of determining the pieces didn’t fit. The Bengals simply spent more. Keeping all three of their large acquisitions, the Bengals evaluated themselves and found cornerback and defensive line to still be a hole on the roster. They committed $112 million this offseason to Trey Hendrickson, Chidobe Awuzie, Mike Hilton, Larry Ogunjobi, and Eli Apple. They added B.J. Hill in a trade for their former first-round center Billy Price, a move that was fair to call an admission of defeat on two fronts with the Reader signing. Again, the record has been mostly mixed during this run. Hendrickson was beaten up by the run in all three games while providing good pressure work in two, Awuzie has been cooked up but tackled well, Hilton exploded as a rusher against Tennessee and played fine in the other two contests, Apple is a liability (but a physical one), Ogunjobi is a much-missed emotional presence if not missed for stellar play, and Hill secured the interception of the game on top of otherwise middling results up front.
What’s the lesson here? As Vonn Bell secured his remarkable interception off a tipped deep ball to Tyreek Hill, I think the only possible lesson is that shooters shoot, and stacking players you believe may occasionally peak can account for so many lapses in other areas. In this case, inconsistency among players is allowable in the consistency of this defense. The top 5 PFF grades for defensive players in the playoffs can encapsulate the entire season: in the Wild Card round, Hendrickson, Bell, and Hilton make the list. Against Tennessee, Reader and Hilton appear with previously-unmentioned FA acquisition Tre Flowers. This week, Hendrickson and Bell again. Other drafted pieces, often in lower rounds after the Bengals’ desperate desire in the draft to make a modern offense, flash as well in Sam Hubbard and Logan Wilson. This defense is made to let different players emerge and account for the valleys in their high-paid players, seemingly without organizational concern about efficiency and worth. It’s mediocrity, but performed to excellence.
Mysteries
So all of that is 1,500 words that actually make no fucking sense in my brain. There will be time to dissect the analytical structure of the Bengals offense moving forward, like Joe Mixon staying successful on first down, infuriating fans when opposing teams key into those plays. The Bengals maintain the 5th highest explosive pass play rate according to Sharp Analytics despite hovering at 27th in run explosiveness (including the highest 4th quarter and overtime explosive pass rate in the league). There will be lessons for 2022, both catalysts for change and areas to double down. But football is also a game of fundamental principles, and there is no analytical number that can possibly quantify the variables of 11 different players interacting on 150 different plays. The Bengals are ultimately a mystery, an example of the culmination of the hopes and dreams for every fan base stuck somewhere between mediocrity and terrible, but always, perpetually irrelevant.
Burrow has not done this alone, but he is the face of it, and it all began with an ironclad refusal to accept annointment as firmly as he refused to accept defeat. This ethos has permeated through the organization, as a front office that avoided spending money and licked wounds for decades over draft picks and missed opportunities suddenly doubled down when initial results looked bleak. Burrow’s knee injury, like Brady’s 13 years ago, is now a footnote, another negative play that the Bengals were willing to risk for this very moment. What makes Joe Burrow and these Bengals special, to me, isn’t an instance of rising to the occasion despite the heart-attack-inducing heroics of these playoffs; it is staying the mental and physical course come hell or high water, fearlessly accepting the clear risks and drawbacks that come with this plan. Burrow’s success under pressure is marginal if above average, but his willingness to endure it has informed how uniquely special he has become in the clean pockets. In his mind, it seems, every play should work, and if it doesn’t, it will next time.
The Bengals deserve this moment, but deliverance is not ensured by Purity of Spirit, Soundness of Process, and Determination of Mind. The unraveling, if it happens, will feel obvious: the offensive line finally blew up, no one was equipped to cover Cooper Kupp, the Rams have a physical advantage, Defensive Stars defeat No Name Defense etc. etc. in the same manner that *of course* that offensive line was going to cost Mahomes a Super Bowl in 2020. The alternative, that the Bengals outran thirty years of demons and a year of peaks and valleys to hoist a Lombardi and share viral videos of Joe Burrow getting the gat, will be much harder to parse, all the more because this was never supposed to happen, and cannot possibly be happening right now if we’re all honest with ourselves.
The ultimate cliche in this sentimental sport is to believe any of this goes beyond football. Because football is football, there’s no part of it that is not ultimately itself: a bunch of big dudes running fast, hitting hard, and getting yelled at by fans and coaches who either pray or firmly believe that Jesus is that second set of cleatmarks. But as Joe Burrow talks about Athens, Ohio, as he grades his games a D and ranks himself below teenagers, the joy and surrealness of this moment cannot be disentangled from the fundamental agony, the long-standing suffering. The point of all this isn’t that there is a Providence toward which we all naturally move or can shrewdly manipulate in our favor, but that we possess in these moments the capacity to convince ourselves that Providence is out there, perhaps years, months, days ahead. The opportunity to believe at all is the gift that Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals went through 63 regular season sacks to deliver to us and, more than even the faint possibility that this might actually happen, is what should be savored here at the end.
