Brilliant but beaten: the historic, searing misfortune of Joe Burrow

It’s official: Joe Burrow of the Cincinnati Bengals is one of the unluckiest quarterbacks we’ve ever seen. The Bengals lost 41-38 to the Baltimore Ravens in overtime on Sunday, sending Cincinnati to 1-4 on the season. It certainly hasn’t been Burrow’s fault – through the first five games of the season, Burrow has completed 125 of 173 passes (a 72.3% completion rate) for 1,370 yards (7.9 yards per attempt), 12 touchdowns, two interceptions, and an outstanding passer rating of 113.6 (his QBR of 73.6 is the second-best in the league).

But that hasn’t been enough to stop the Bengals slipping out of the playoff race – “We’re not a championship-level team right now,” was Burrow’s brutal conclusion after Sunday’s loss. Most of Cincinnati’s issues center around a defense that has been especially awful against the run, and has forced Burrow to make as many big plays as possible just to keep his team in games – which he is certainly capable of doing.

On Sunday, Burrow completed 30 of 39 passes for 392 yards, five touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 137.0. It was one of the best quarterback performances of the season, and it helped the Bengals to leads of 24-14 in the third quarter, and 38-28 in the fourth. But the Bengals’ defense grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory once again, allowing Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry to do their collective things late in regulation and into overtime.

It also didn’t help that when Jackson fumbled the ball to the Bengals with 6:37 left in overtime, the decision was made to run the ball three straight times for a total of three yards, which led to a missed 53-yard field goal attempt – on a bad hold – by kicker Evan McPherson. One play later, the Ravens put the boot in (we’ll get to the specifics in just a minute), and once again, Burrow’s outstanding performance was for nothing. He became the 10th quarterback in NFL history with more than 390 passing yards, at least five touchdown passes, and a completion percentage higher than 75%, and none of it meant anything.

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Burrow isn’t perfect – he threw a killer interception with 3:05 left in the fourth quarter that allowed the Ravens to tie the game in regulation. But the Bengals’ four losses have been by a total margin of 15 points. All is not lost here, but it’s tough to tell anybody on the team that.

“It was just winning a lot of our one-on-one coverages,” Bengals receiver Tee Higgins said after the loss. “We knew that was going to be big for this game. We knew that was our mentality, to come in and win those one-on-ones. It just wasn’t enough.”

How rare is Burrow’s bad luck? If you extrapolate it out to a full season, it’s nearly impossible to have things go this dramatically against you when you’re playing this well. In pro football history, there’s been exactly one quarterback to start at least 10 games, have a passer rating of at least 100.0, and to be involved in four or fewer wins: Deshaun Watson of the 2020 Houston Texans. Believe it or not, Watson played at a MVP level for a 4-12 Texans team that fired head coach Bill O’Brien after an 0-4 start, and maintained mediocrity with interim head coach Romeo Crennel.

Of course, we do not expect things to fall apart for Burrow as they subsequently have for Watson, for all the obvious possible reasons.

MVP of the week

Derrick Henry, running back, Baltimore Ravens. It was quite a day for Mr Henry, who reached 10,000 career rushing yards and 100 career scrimmage touchdowns in the Ravens’ win. As to how Henry put the boot in, that happened one play after the Bengals’ three-ill-fated rushing attempts and missed field goal in overtime. Henry took the ball at the Baltimore 43-yard line, and rumbled 51 yards to the Cincinnati six-yard line. That set up Justin Tucker for the game-winning field goal.

When will we see another running back exceed 10,000 rushing yards and 100 rushing touchdowns? It may be quite a while. Most teams don’t lean on their running backs as the Tennessee Titans did with Henry when he was with them from 2016 to 2023, or as the Ravens do now.

Video of the week

What referee Clay Martin did in the first quarter of Sunday’s game between the Houston Texans and the Buffalo Bills had a lot of people shaking their heads. Martin was attempting to clarify a non-fumble, but he got his sports confused for a second.

To be fair, Martin has been quite accomplished as a basketball guy. From his Wikipedia:

Outside of his NFL duties, Martin works as a high school basketball coach at Jenks High School in Jenks, Oklahoma. He also attended Oklahoma Baptist University where he played basketball for the Bison. Not only is he in the OBU Hall of Fame for his basketball accomplishments, he is also in the Tulsa Public Schools Hall of Fame for the same reasons.

Stat of the week

Three minutes, 26 seconds. That’s how long the 5-0 Minnesota Vikings have trailed in the entire 2024 season. And that happened in the first quarter of their first game. Their opponent on Sunday, the New York Jets, did make it interesting by fighting back from a 17-0 second-quarter deficit – the second time in two games that Minnesota have allowed a bunch of points in the second half – but the Vikings still ran out 23-17 winners.

Elsewhere around the league

• For the most part, athletes are better conditioned than ever, allowing them to play well into their 30s … and sometimes beyond. So, when the Green Bay Packers traded Aaron Rodgers to the Jets in April 2023, despite the fact that he was 39, few people gave it a second thought. Rodgers in his prime may have been the best pure thrower in football history, and he was still more than adequate in his final season with the Green Bay Packers, so why shouldn’t the Jets try to end their decades-long quarterback drought?

It appears that we now know why not. On Sunday, Rodgers had three picks and a passer rating of 54.9 – his fifth-worst career passer rating in a game where he’s attempted at least 20 passes. Since the 2022 season, Rodgers has one game with three touchdown passes, and two games with three interceptions.

Not that it’s all Rodgers’s fault. The Jets are deficient almost everywhere, from offensive coaching to the offensive line to the skill position players, but there are NFL quarterbacks more than capable of transcending those negative factors, and Rodgers used to be one of them.

The only quarterback who has given Father Time a real run for his money is Tom Brady, who somehow threw more touchdown passes in his 40s (193) than he did in his 20s (147). Outside Brady, there are a lot of guys who should have gone into broadcasting or philanthropy sooner than they did. It may be that Rogers is one of them.

• Of course, if you’re Joe Flacco, you’re advancing on Father Time with an impish grin on your face. After his performance in a 37-34 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday – he completed 33 of 44 passes for 359 yards, three touchdowns, and no interceptions – the 39-year-old leads the NFL in passer rating at 115.6. Not bad for a guy who was signed up to be Anthony Richardson’s backup in Indianapolis. Which has come in handy, as the injury-prone Richardson has been out the last two games.

Flacco is also the oldest player in NFL history to record five consecutive starts with at least 300 passing yards and two touchdown passes. So, who knows? Maybe Flacco will be the next one to beat the age curse, and wouldn’t that be unexpected?

• Coming into Week 5, Trevor Lawrence and Caleb Williams were having very rough starts. Lawrence, selected with the first overall pick in the 2021 draft, had a passer rating of 78.9 (eighth-worst in the NFL), and a Passing EPA per dropback of -0.19 (seventh-worst in the league). Williams, selected first overall in the 2024 draft, had a passer rating of 72.0 (fourth-worst in the NFL), and a Passing EPA per dropback of -0.28 (tied for fourth-worst in the NFL).

But on Sunday, both men got a reprieve from their troubles. In the Jags’ win over the Colts, which took Jacksonville to their first win of the season, Lawrence completed 28 of 34 passes for 374 yards, two touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 119.5. Lawrence, whose throwing mechanics had been disastrous this season, looked far more composed and in control here.

And in a 36-10 thrashing of the Carolina Panthers, Williams completed 20 of 29 passes for 304 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 126.2. Williams was in command of the passing game, and far less frenetic in the pocket than he had been behind Chicago’s leaky offensive line.

The Bears game was so out of hand in Chicago’s favor that Panthers backup quarterback Bryce Young, selected with the first overall pick in the 2023 draft, actually got some garbage time to work on the issues that got him benched in favor of Andy Dalton three weeks ago.

A pretty good week for first overall picks then, except for Burrow.

• Coaching is a tough job, and even the most underqualified coach knows a great deal more about football than your average analyst, this one included. So, we are not generally in the habit of questioning (or outright bashing) decisions unless they’re particularly egregious, and cost teams games.

Which takes us to what Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott did late in the game against the Houston Texans. With the score tied 20-20, the Texans downed a punt at the Buffalo three-yard line. Houston had all three of their timeouts left, and the correct thing to do was to run the ball three times, force the Texans to use those timeouts, and punt the ball away. Especially with just 32 seconds remaining.

Instead, the Bills called three passes from Josh Allen, who had an unusually bad game, and appeared to suffer a head injury earlier in the fourth quarter. Allen, who completed just nine passes in 30 attempts in the game, threw three straight misses. With 16 seconds left, the Bills punted the ball away, and the Texans had time to run one play – a pass from CJ Stroud to running back Dare Ogunbowale, which put Ka’imi Fairbairn in position to kick the game-winning 59-yard field goal … which, of course, he did.

When you possess the ball for just 16 seconds when it’s crucial to put your opponent in a time crunch, you have committed coaching malpractice.

Scott Hanson, the outstanding host of the NFL’s indispensable Red Zone channel, spoke for most of us.

“It’s on me, the end of game situation on offense,” McDermott said. “They’re holding three timeouts, and they’ve got a good … kicker. We needed to run the clock and move the chains, and that’s on me. We didn’t do that there, and that’s my fault.”

No argument here, Coach.

• Finally, we saw pro football history on Sunday, when two different defensive players, each wearing the No 2 jersey, had touchdown returns of 100 or more yards on the same day. That had never happened before.

There was Seattle safety Rayshawn Jenkins recovering and returning this fumble for a 102-yard touchdown (the Seahawks later corrected their tweet regarding the yardage) …

… and there was Denver Broncos cornerback Patrick Surtain II returning this pass by Las Vegas’s Gardner Minshew 100 yards in the other direction.

That’s a lot of twos, and two very big plays on the day.