The Cincinnati Bengals are somehow 1-4 with QB Joe Burrow fully healthy—I’m guessing it’s because of that stupid hair. I can’t feel it, but I do feel strongly about it; you simply can’t win football games that way. And Burrow knows it. Well, okay, maybe not that exactly, but he knows the Bengals are falling well short of their expectations.
“We’re not a championship-level team right now”, Ben Baby of ESPN quotes Burrow as saying after their latest loss. “We’re not. I like to think that we’ll come back and improve throughout the season to get to that point, but right now we are not, and we have to get better”.
Joe Burrow’s use of the “we” here does carry a lot of weight here because he is the least of their problems. On Sunday, he went 30-of-39 for 392 yards and five touchdowns with one interception. The Bengals put up 38 points in regulation, but the defense gave up a 10-point lead—twice.
Outside of the season opener, Burrow actually is playing championship-level football this year, but his teammates aren’t keeping pace. He leads the league with 12 touchdown passes while throwing for 1,370 yards with a 72.3 completion percentage and only two interceptions.
Put another way, the offense is good to very good, but the defense sucks. On Burrow’s side of the ball, they have the fifth-ranked scoring offense. But the Bengals also rank 31st in scoring defense, and you really need this context to understand. The Bengals are scoring 28 points per game, which is excellent. Yet their defense is somehow allowing even more than that at 29 points per game.
Imagine having an offense that can score 28 points per game only to have your defense allow 29. No wonder Joe Burrow and the rest of the offensive players are so frustrated. You can tell by their comments, even though they don’t say it directly.
“I know exactly how we are 1-4”, Burrow said, according to Baby. “We’re not making plays at the end of the game to go and win it. Definitely not in disbelief. I know exactly what’s happening”.
The only team the Bengals have beaten this year is the lowly Carolina Panthers, who already benched their first-overall pick. They even managed to lose to the New England Patriots, though otherwise they have had a tough schedule. Their other three losses were to the Chiefs, Commanders, and Ravens. But Burrow and the offense scored 25, 33, and 38 in those games, so generally, they did their job.
At 1-4, the Bengals will have an uphill battle to claw back into relevance. They are already in a two-game hole and tied for fourth place in their own division. But Burrow has been down roads like this before. The Bengals started 1-3 last year and nearly came back. They were even 1-2, and 2-3, in 2022 when they made a deep title run. This is a deeper hole, but there are still plenty of division games left.
