How the Bengals are wasting Joe Burrow's prime, their Super Bowl window

Joe Burrow hasn't changed. He's still one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL.

He's still Joe Cool. Under pressure against the Ravens last week, he completed 7 of 9 passes for 104 yards and two touchdowns. In a fierce quarterback duel with Lamar Jackson, Burrow generated .51 EPA per play, the fifth-most of his career. 

But the Cincinnati Bengals lost.

And it's not just one game. The Bengals quarterback is logging a career-best in completion percentage (72.3), touchdown percentage (6.9) and interception percentage (1.2). We'll see where his production lands in counting stats. But he has been as efficient as ever.

And yet the Bengals are 1-4.

"I'm sick to my stomach for our guys in there," coach Zac Taylor said after their loss on Sunday. "They fought. I'm proud of them, but we've got to find a way to win. We can't keep coming up one play short, and that's really what the game came down to."

In a season in which Burrow might be playing his very best, the Bengals are a mess — and the numbers say they're likely to miss the playoffs.

The Washington Commanders made it to the playoffs in 2020 after a 1-4 start. But historically, it's quite rare. Since 1970, just 15 of the 253 teams have made the postseason after opening 1-4. That's 5.9%. Burrow is an outlier. The Bengals have that going for him. But the defense — oh, man, the defense. That's another outlier — and for all the wrong reasons.

The issues showed up in overtime on Sunday when Derrick Henry iced the game with a 51-yard run.

"I thought we did a tremendous job against the run until that last run of the game," Taylor said.

So … yeah, that's simply not accurate.

This season, the Bengals defense has allowed a successful run on 53% of designed runs. As Yahoo!'s Nate Tice noted, that's the equivalent of turning every rushing attack into the Ravens, whose offense has a success rate of 51%. In base defense — when the Bengals have plenty of linebackers on the field — they allow a 60% success rate for offenses, 32nd in the league. (The league average is 39%.)

This defense is in the basement.

It's by far the worst season for defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, who has been Cincinnati's DC since 2019. But it's not like he has been consistently brilliant: Cincinnati has allowed the 20th-most points per game or worse in four of Anarumo's six seasons. In those other two seasons, the Bengals finished 13th (2021) and fifth (2022).

It looks, at first, like that's where some of the fault lies: on Anarumo.

But then you take a look at what he's working with on defense. It's not exactly a star-studded cast. Past Trey Hendrickson, the Bengals don't have an elite player at any position.

So it's more systemic than blaming the defensive coordinator. 

Because we're talking about the Bengals, who are infamous for spending as little as possible.

Their total cash spending on players is currently 16th in the NFL. It was 12th last year, 30th in 2022 and 22nd in 2021. It's not like they're in any cap trouble going forward. They have the 21st-most cap allocation in 2025 ($215.4 million) and 20th in 2026 ($117.8 million).

They're making star receivers Ja'Marr Chase and Tee Higgins wait for contract extensions — if they pay Higgins at all. That's not even going to help them save money, because receivers are only going to get more expensive next year, given how the NFL raises the salary cap annually. The standoff with Chase, in particular, seems like a silly losing effort by the organization, given how important he is to the offense and how his absence from training camp seemed to impact the team at the start of the season.

But as I've noted, Burrow has played well through those issues. The defense, however, has not survived the thrifty approach to personnel. The Bengals have drafted aggressively on defense over the past five years, but they're not getting the quality of play from those picks — which is important for a team that doesn't spend a premium on free agents. That can work — saving money on free agents in favor of drafting and developing. But these meager draft classes haven't cut it. They haven't filled the holes of the departures from Cincinnati's elite defense in 2022. That falls on the scouting department.

Well, the Bengals don't like spending there either.

They were famous for their tiny scouting staff — just four staffers — when they made their Super Bowl run in 2022. That year, the Rams had 25 members on their scouting team. But now, the coin has flipped, and the Bengals might go back to being infamous for that bare-bones crew. 

There's other evidence for a lack of investment. In the NFLPA player survey this past offseason, the Bengals received an F- on food and cafeteria, F- on nutritionist and dietician, D+ on locker room, an F- on treatment of families and a C on team travel. They only provide three meals on one day of the week and they don't open the cafeteria on the players' off day, even though many players come in for work or workouts anyway. The team also doesn't employ a dietician, unlike almost every other team. 

These things are not directly linked to performance, but this paints a pretty clear picture of the other ways the organization is coming up short. The players told the NFLPA that half of the showers in their locker room don't function properly, lacking either warm water or sufficient water pressure. They have such prevalent plumbing issues that they had only five functioning toilets for the entire team. NFL rosters generally have more than 70 players — with 53 active players, 16 practice-squad players and a number of players on injured reserve and other inactive lists. 

This isn't about toilets, obviously. It's about investing in the players. It's about investing in Burrow.

The Bengals have not paid to retain Burrow's star receivers and settle the drama around their contracts. They have not built a defense that has competent players in its front seven — in part because they're clearly unwilling to spend in free agency and in part because their small scouting staff hasn't been effective in recent years. All these things add up to a 1-4 record.

And in the larger picture, the Bengals are wasting Burrow's championship window.

"We're not a championship level team right now," the QB said after Sunday's 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're not, and we have to get better."

Is it frustrating the team is still not at that level yet, five games in? 

"Yes," he said. 

Teams would kill to have a quarterback playing at Burrow's level. They'd kill to have Chase and even Higgins. But the Bengals seem content with getting by. And it's a shame, because that lack of aggressiveness could leave Burrow without a championship.

Prior to joining FOX Sports as an NFL reporter and columnist, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @henrycmckenna.