There was a play at the beginning of the second half of Sunday’s Bengals-49ers showdown that, for the rest of us, would probably be way down the list of Cincinnati highlights from what became a revival afternoon for the AFC juggernaut. It was a run-of-the-mill second-and-9 from the San Francisco 40, the third play of the third quarter, with the visitors to Santa Clara clinging to a 14–10 lead.
Joe Burrow took the snap and, almost immediately, a bullrush from his old college buddy, Nick Bosa, had left tackle Orlando Brown Jr. backing into the quarterback’s lap. Burrow saw it coming, and quickly flashed to Brown’s left—getting Bosa to disengage that way. He then exploded back inside Brown, eventually cutting the run all the way back across the grain, then darting down through the belly of a loaded defense for the first down. And then some.
By the time three Niners converged on him at the 40, Burrow had 20 yards. As he popped back to his feet, he grabbed his face mask and slapped his helmet twice.
Burrow was pretty excited. He had reason to be.
He’s back. And with each run like that one, he knew it.
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See, the Bengals’ quarterback is a much better all-around athlete than he gets credit for. He was once an all-state prep basketball player, a 1,400-point scorer and four-year varsity player in that sport; and a good enough baseball player to, despite not playing since middle school, have hit four homers while taking batting practice at a Reds game back in the spring. He also rushed for nearly 400 yards in both his years as a starter at LSU.
And so for all the frustrations the Bengals’ star harbored the last three months in dealing with a nagging calf strain, it might surprise you that his inability to put all that athletic ability on display was near the top of his list. Especially after the offseason he’d just had.
It was, in fact, the first thing he brought up when I asked whether he felt like himself again.
“I felt good today,” he said from the bowels of Levi’s Stadium after the Bengals’ 31–17 win. “I felt really good today. And that was really because all offseason I’ve worked on my athleticism and my running ability a lot. Just hasn’t been something that I’ve been able to showcase. So it’s nice seeing hard work pay off.”
If Sunday was any indication, a lot of things are starting to pay off for a Bengals team that’s had to endure a wobbly start to a season that brought astronomical expectations, both from the outside and from within. And with a lot of that now in the rearview mirror, Sunday sure had the look of a foot-in-the-ground-and-go moment for both Burrow and his team.
That every part of Burrow’s game is working again is a big part of it. That every part of the Bengals’ operation is starting to pull on all cylinders would be, too.
We have a little bit different of a setup for the column this week, with the trade deadline Tuesday, but still plenty coming for you, from me, over the course of the day. Here’s what you’ll find on the site Monday …
• A breakdown of Zach Wilson’s breakneck finish in the Battle of East Rutherford.
• A good, deep look at the Eagles, Seahawks and Panthers—and A.J. Brown, Geno Smith and Bryce Young—to kick off the Ten Takeaways.
• A roundup of all the latest on the trade market a little later in the day.
But we’re starting with the Bengals, and Burrow, and where a Cincinnati team that’s endured a lot already looks to be headed next.
Now that he’s (mostly) out of the woods and can speak a little more freely about it, Burrow won’t mince words about where he was coming out of the injury he suffered back in July.
“It was very frustrating,” he says. “Yeah, when you can’t do what you’re used to doing, it’s always frustrating.”
Early on, during camp, and in an effort to make the most of his time and be around his teammates as much as he could, he’d do his rehab and therapy work while the rest of the players were out on the practice field, so he could be a part of every other piece of the operation. He was trying, of course, to make up for what he couldn’t do physically, but that would take him only so far. And that carried over into the start of the season, too, in how the Bengals’ coaches were deploying him on the field.
The first couple of weeks of the season, they didn’t put Burrow under center and limited what they’d do in their keeper game, off which they’d typically be able to create explosive plays in the passing game.
Slowly, the staff started to work stuff back in. There was a big play to Joe Mixon off a keeper against the Ravens in Week 2 and another in Week 3 to Ja’Marr Chase against the Rams, on which Burrow faked a pitch left and, a bit gingerly, rolled to his right and hit his all-world receiver downfield. There was then a bit of an admitted setback, but then came some big runs against the Cardinals in Week 5 and a gutsy win over the Seahawks in Week 6.
And all along, amid cries for the Bengals to sit Burrow and get him right, there was absolutely zero regret from the quarterback about how all of it was being handled.
“I felt confident that I would be able to execute the offense well enough to win games,” he says. “And if I can walk, and I can drop and I can throw, I’m going to be out there. It’s gonna take a lot for me to not play.”
In other words, the threat of falling in the standings was more pressing to Burrow than the risk of reinjury—and so the quarterback kept answering the bell.
Perhaps the real turning point for Burrow and the team was the Seattle win, one in which the Bengals had to fight through a two-quarter slump and ride the defense to grind out a win in the fourth quarter. It got the team’s record back to .500. It also got Burrow to the bye, when he’d be able to give himself, and his calf, a natural break.
And how did Burrow spend his bye week?
“Thinking about football,” he says. “That’s about it.”
Coming out of the break, Burrow still had maintenance work to do on his calf, but it was taking up a lot less of his time than it had in September, and that allowed him to focus on getting all the way back, in every way possible.
We all saw what resulted from that Sunday.
Kelley L Cox/USA TODAY Sports
I asked Burrow a pretty dumb question after he’d told me how he’d worked to get more athletic in the offseason: Had he shaved some time off his 40?
“I don’t know about that one,” he said, laughing. “But I’ve definitely gotten more explosive and athletic.”
Finally, on Sunday, everyone got to see that, too.
There was the aforementioned 20-yard run down the pipe. There was a scramble early in the second quarter where he exploded away from the rush and avoided Bosa for a sack to pick up a yard on his own. There was a third-and-9, on which Burrow saw an empty box, checked to a quarterback draw, darted up the middle, then shook Talanoa Hufanga to pick up 10 yards and a first down. There was another 10-yard scramble with 4:40 left in the third quarter and another three yards on a sneak in the fourth.
All of it energized the Bengals—and Burrow himself, on what sure seemed like his first day all the way back.
“They were all [in] big spots,” Burrow says of the runs. “And that’s always something that gets me going and gets me feeling comfortable, me using my legs and extending plays. It was nice to see that today.”
What we also got to see was the assassin the Bengals’ quarterback has been in the passing game over the last couple of years, with a virtuoso 28-of-32, 283-yard, three-touchdown evisceration of one of pro football’s best defenses. Even better, the three touchdowns came in different ways, showing how the quarterback finally has his sea legs back.
The first capped a tone-setting first possession for the Bengals, with Burrow finding old reliable Tyler Boyd on a slot fade run to perfection and delivering a flat-footed dime from the pocket.
“That was a complement off of a route that we’ve shown over the last couple of weeks,” Burrow says. “TB made a great play, and it was exactly how we worked it in practice. So that was a big play to start it off.”
The second touchdown came as the first quarter ended, on a weird one. There was confusion over whether the play was snapped dead. Not hearing a whistle, Burrow took the snap and scrambled away from the pocket, and the rush, to his right.
There, he found one of his newest targets—the rookie and former Princeton heptathlete Andrei Iosivas for the two-yard score on a throw that showed trust in a guy who Burrow hasn’t gotten a ton of time to work with and one who’s now scored touchdowns in two straight weeks in very big spots.
“Andrei is a guy that has a lot of potential, and everybody can see it,” Burrow says. “He is a smart, hard-working player that doesn’t get a lot of opportunities, but he has had opportunities. He’s really made the most out of them, and those are the players that you’d like to reward and the more plays that they make, the more trusted they are.”
And finally, there was the fourth-quarter dagger coming a play after Logan Wilson picked off Brock Purdy and took it back 16 yards to the Niners’ 17.
This one, with 13:08 left, really showed everything coming together at once, again, for the Bengals. During the week, Cincinnati coach Zac Taylor, offensive coordinator Brian Callahan and the staff had picked up on something from the Niners’ game against the Vikings—where San Francisco played overly aggressive toward a bubble-screen action. So the coaches figured they could show that action and sneak one past the defense.
Which is, pretty much, exactly how that played out. The Niners played a different coverage than they had against the Vikings but were overly aggressive with this one, too, and just like that Chase was running free behind the defense and Burrow was hitting him for an easy touchdown.
“We like to get the ball in Ja’Marr’s hands quickly on some perimeter screens like that,” Burrow says. “So you have to have some plays that complement that, and that was one of those. Great call by Zac—Ja’Marr was the one that noticed that on the field and then brought that up.”
And fittingly, too, through what was an all-hands-on-deck kind of day for the Bengals.
Burrow’s favorite moments of this particular Sunday—other than those chances to show his new wheels, of course—would come after the Niners answered that Chase score with a 10-play, 75-yard touchdown drive to cut the Bengals’ lead down to 24–17. There was 8:12 left. If the Bengals were becoming the team they’ve been the last two years again, this was a shot for the offense to show it, the same way the defense had against the Seahawks.
“We all just looked at each other and said, We gotta go down and ice it,” Burrow says. “It was just really a complete drive. We ran it well. We threw it well. It’s a big-time drive.”
The drive, indeed, had a little bit of everything. Burrow’s first two throws were to Trenton Irwin, showing the depth of weapons Cincinnati has. There was a big 20-yard chunk to Chase. There was the aforementioned Burrow scramble and sneak, and some tough running from Mixon to top it off.
By the time it was over, Cincinnati had covered 78 yards in 10 plays, and left the Niners with just 2:54 to work with and a 14-point deficit to navigate.
It was, simply, what the best teams do at the end of games.
“That’s when you have to go down and score if you want to be a great team that’s going to be competing for a championship,” Burrow says. “And we showed that today. Now, you got to keep building on it.”
And the Bengals don’t have much time to revel in the win, either.
Coming back off a cross-country trip, they’ll get the Bills next Sunday night at home, with Buffalo coming off its mini-bye and also bringing three losses into the showdown.
Everyone knows the stakes, of course. The outcome could determine where a game in January is played. It’ll be an emotional night, too, for everyone involved, 10 months after the Damar Hamlin situation played out on the same field between the same teams in prime time. And Cincinnati will come in carrying about as much momentum as it has all year.
These looked like the old Bengals on Sunday, and next Sunday will give those guys another chance to show that the old Bengals are back for good.
“We’re excited about how we played, but it doesn’t mean anything unless we continue to stack these kinds of days. So we’re gonna go from there,” Burrow says. “I said going into the season it’s the deepest team that we’ve had. So, yeah, I’m excited about the team we have. Now, we just got to keep getting better.”
And after the tests of the last two months, being able to focus on that, and that alone, is all Burrow and the Bengals could ask for.
Which might be bad news for the rest of the AFC.
