The Cincinnati Bengals are squandering the brilliant Joe Burrow’s prime

You could be forgiven for getting a sense of deja vu watching the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Chargers last Sunday. For the second week in a row, Joe Burrow torched a defense. He hit one eye-popping throw after another. In the final accounting, he threw for 356 yards, three touchdowns and did not turn over the ball. And yet the result was the same: the Bengals lost by one score.

What Burrow is doing this season is unprecedented. Never has a quarterback played at such a high level, with such a heavy workload, while being let down by almost everyone around him. Only Tony Romo in 2010 and Aaron Rodgers in 2018 have come close, but even that duo had the benefit of solid protection from their linemen. Burrow does not. Burrow is outpacing every quarterback in the league despite those around him flailing.

The defeat to the Chargers marked the third time this season that Cincy have lost in a game in which Burrow has thrown for more than 300 yards with three touchdowns and zero interceptions. According to NFL research, Burrow is the only quarterback since the league’s merger in 1970 to post those figures in three losses in a single year. With the latest effort, he became the first quarterback in league history to put up that kind of production in back-to-back games. To put that in context, Tom Brady only had two such games in his entire 23-year career, according to CBS Sports. Woof.

The Bengals are 1-6 in one-score games this season, a notoriously flaky measure of how good a team actually is, and 4-7 overall. A bounce of the ball, sloppy play call, officiating decision (or non-decision), or defensive stop can tip a one-score game either way. After the fact, we like to ascribe virtues to teams that close out one-score victories. They’re tougher – or smarter. They wanted it more. Their ‘culture’ got them over the line. Sometimes, those things are true – great teams limit penalties and execute the tiny details that can be the difference in a game decided by one or two plays. But sometimes we chase those cliches as comfort food to mask the obvious: it’s luck. One-score games are little more than a toss-up.

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In the case of the Bengals, both are true. They’ve dealt with bad luck and botched plays at crucial moments, or too often dug themselves into a hole that even Burrow has been unable to drag them out of. There have been missed field goals, decisive holding penalties, mangled coverages, and blows officiating calls on must-have-it downs that, had any of them gone the other way, would have been the difference between winning and losing. They’ve lost one-score games against AFC heavyweights: the Chiefs, Chargers and twice against the Ravens. In all four games, Burrow was close to flawless, throwing for 1,428 yards and 15 touchdowns with one interception.

Losing six close games with a quarterback playing this well is almost impressive. Burrow’s numbers this season are bonkers. He has thrown for 3,028 yards, 27 touchdowns and has only four interceptions so far. He’s on pace for the best rushing season of his career, scrambling around to make something happen. He tops the league in QBR and is third in the RBSDM composite, which measures the value of a play and how much the quarterback can be deemed responsible for the value. In a normal year, Burrow would top ballots for the league’s most prestigious hardware. Instead, he’s left scrapping for the final playoff spot in a lousy AFC wildcard race (NFL.com gives the Bengals a 12% chance of making the postseason). Most likely, the Bengals will be on the outside looking in by the time the postseason rolls around.

Asked after the defeat in LA whether it was the most frustrating season of his career, Burrow replied: “Yes.” Why? “It’s pretty self-explanatory,” Burrow said. “Our margin of error is slim … I got to make those plays. We all got to make those plays.”

It was only three season ago that Burrow led the Bengals on an improbable Super Bowl run. Back then, everything coalesced around the quarterback. Cincinnati had a solid run game, one of the most dynamic receiving corps in the league, a frisky defense and a clutch kicker. Save for his receivers, everything else has collapsed around the quarterback this season.

The team’s defense, once a calling card, has fallen off a cliff, coughing up 26.9 points a game, the fifth-worst total in the league. Only the Panthers – a franchise fielding a CFL roster on defense – have been worse against the run this year. The team’s pass-rush has vanished, too, with only Trey Hendrickson being a reliable threat. They have sunk to 28th in the league in sack rate through 11 weeks. And this is a unit that the Bengals have prioritized, spending more on their defensive line than all but three teams this season and drafting more defensive linemen than any other franchise since 2021. As investments go, there hasn’t been a worse return since the NFT bubble.

On offense, they are just as disheveled. Any attempts to diversify the offense have failed. The group still flows as Burrow and his receivers, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, flow. They have no run game, falling to 30th in the league in rush success rate (and that despite defenses fearing being clipped over the head by Burrow and Chase!). Is now a good time to mention they traded away Joe Mixon, back to his best in Houston, last offseason for a seventh-round pick?

To top it off, their kicking game has flat-lined. Evan McPherson, once viewed as the heir apparent to Justin Tucker as the league’s premier kicker, now looks like, well, 2024 Justin Tucker. McPherson has made just 50% of his kicks from 40-plus yards this season and has missed his last four kicks from 50-plus yards, including whiffs against the Ravens and Chargers in one-score defeats.

Beyond that, the Bengals continue to have protection woes. Burrow has been hit more than any quarterback since he entered the NFL. Part of that is due to him holding on to the ball and waiting to attempt deep throws. But most of it has been due to a sloppy offensive line. Despite chucking cash and draft picks at the problem, the Bengals still cannot put a functional line together. Since Week 5, the Bengals have conceded pressure on 40% of Burrow’s dropbacks, one of the worst rates in the league. And Burrow continues to get drilled. He has been hit 37 times this year, according to Pro Football Focus. That’s 12 more than the closest quarterback. They have not been soft touch, nice-to-meet-you hits, either; they’ve been bone-crushing shots, including a pair after the whistle. How much longer can he stand up to this physical toll? He’s already missed chunks of two seasons with serious injuries, tearing his ACL in 2020 and rupturing a ligament in his wrist last season.

When an offense is focused on a few pieces – in the Bengals’ case Burrow, Higgins and Chase – it becomes plodding and predictable. Yet Burrow, despite being under siege, has stood in and delivered, putting together the finest season of his career. He has not only kept the Bengals’ offense afloat, he has lifted it into the top 10 in all the dorkiest metrics. By points per game, they’re sixth in the NFL. Can you imagine what it would look like with merely a bad offensive line or running game rather than some of the worst in the league?

If the MVP award is truly about ‘value’, it’s hard to think of someone who has brought more to their unit than Burrow. Put a league-average quarterback – Russell Wilson or Baker Mayfield – in Burrow’s spot, and Cincinnati’s offense would crumble. Forget a potential late playoff push, without Burrow playing at his current level, the Bengals would not even be competitive.

Any hope that the Bengals can squeeze back into the playoff picture relies on the idea that the team’s defense can finally pull its head above water. But it would also require the run game to start chugging along and Burrow’s protection to improve.

At this point, they need a minor miracle. But, in some ways, the team has already had that miracle: Burrow playing at an MVP level despite the chaos around him. Asking a quarterback to maintain that standard throughout a full season is fanciful. At some point, surely, the odds will tilt against Burrow. A ball will be tipped. He will misread a defense – as he did late against the Chargers. When the margin of error is so small and the quarterback is under constant duress he will eventually make a mistake. And if the Bengals drop one game because Burrow falls back to Earth or takes one hit too many, then their playoff hopes will be over.

Plenty of teams have bungled how the careers of exceptional quarterbacks. But the Bengals are making a case to earn a carving on the Mt Rushmore. From the early career beatings, to failing to ink Burrow’s key weapons to long-term deals, to botching a defensive rebuild, they have hit all the checkmarks. They have so far squandered Burrow’s prime. Now, one of the greatest quarterback seasons on record will probably become an afterthought. As team building goes, it’s unforgivable.