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The reason why the 2021 success of Joe Burrow and the Bengals is 100% sustainable has been in plain sight all season. In the offseason, Cincinnati blew up its offensive line and started over with a new set of veterans (and one rookie) playing alongside left tackle Jonah Williams, while defenses across the league cooked up ways to deal with everything they brought to the table in their run to a conference title.
So maybe the bumps the Bengals endured in September were inevitable.
What wasn’t, and what isn’t, in the NFL is the matter-of-fact way in which Burrow and the franchise’s young core responded to dig its way out of an 0–2 hole.
“Yeah, I think every year, every team is trying to figure out who they are,” Burrow told me from the Bengals’ locker room Sunday. “It’s not going to be the same, even if you have the same guys. Defenses play different. Your guys are playing different. So it took us a little bit. But the last two and a half weeks we’re really finding our stride.”
The Bengals have evolved and, clearly, will keep evolving as long as Burrow’s in stripes.
The result has been four wins in five weeks—with the loss being the Sunday-night nailbiter in Baltimore—and on Sunday afternoon a lot of different things came together for the defending AFC champions. Joe Mixon led a run game that churned out tough yards. The defense held a difficult-to-deal-with Atlanta run game in check. And Burrow looked every bit the star he has been, throwing for 481 yards, three touchdown passes and a 138.2 rating.
And it happened, as Burrow said, because Cincinnati’s kept it moving on offense and tried to learn from what defenses are throwing at them: things that actually look a lot like what they would throw at Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs early last year, with a steady stream of two-deep looks to combat the Bengals’ ability to get the ball down the field to Ja’Marr Chase, Tyler Boyd and Tee Higgins.
“They’re playing us that same way, like you’re talking about, and the key is just starting fast so teams aren’t as confident doing that and they become more aggressive,” Burrow said. “And our running backs have done a great job turning check-downs into eight-, nine-yard gains that make defenses get a little more aggressive after that.”
Indeed, against the Falcons, Burrow hit two underneath throws and a run play before delivering a 60-yard touchdown strike to Boyd—who was running a deep post—for the game’s first score.
“They played their normal Tampa [scheme] that we’ve been seeing all year, and TB [Boyd] did a great job of getting over the Tampa Mike [middle linebacker],” Burrow said. “We held them with a play-fake, the line held up, did a great job and it was a big play for us to start it off.”
From there, Burrow went back to working the Falcons with his short game, piloting an 11-play, 71-yard touchdown drive to make it 14–0—and achieve that fast start he hoped would get the Atlanta coaches off their game—then chipping away some more to move the Bengals 43 yards in the final five plays of the first quarter to set up the next shot.
That one was the picturesque basket throw of a bomb to Chase down the right sideline, which was the result of more work Burrow had done on what he’s been facing.
“Safeties have been cheating over to him the whole year, and at the beginning of the year, I think I let that kind of dissuade me from throwing his way,” he said. “But I just have to take those chances sometimes and try to throw a safe ball and expect him to become a defensive back if the coverage ends up being too tight. He made a great play for us.”
That great play turned into a 32-yard touchdown and put the Bengals up 21–0 one play into the second quarter. And the two had a 41-yard touchdown coming on their next possession after Atlanta answered, to make it 28–7. (“The safety was really far off the hash on that one,” Burrow said. “We were able to get a big-time back-shoulder throw. That’s a throw we work all the time, something that we’re really comfortable with.”)
And from there, the Bengals cruised to a 35–17 win over a pretty tough Atlanta team.
That they got the big home win and are over .500 is obviously really good news. What might be better, though, is what this one could signify in getting the Bengals back to the level they were at last year—and beyond.
“We’re hitting our stride. We’re excited about where we’re at,” Burrow said. “We’ve had moments like that all year; it’s just about consistency and spreading that out over an entire game. And the last two weeks, we’ve been able to do that.”
With more, presumably, to come.
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