Joe Burrow's Bengals exude cool confidence, believe they belong

By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist

Throughout this week leading up to their appearance in the AFC Championship Game, each Cincinnati Bengals player, as well as coach Zac Taylor, exuded a quiet sense of confidence. 

They weren’t cocky, nor did they give off the kind of self-assurance that seems to mask insecurity. No, each interviewee sat down to field questions with a calm, gracious and firm understanding of the team’s potential.

The fact that these interviews all took place over Zoom only makes the Bengals' attitude more impressive — do you realize how difficult it is to come across as cool over Zoom? I don’t know if you’ve been in virtual meetings and birthday parties similar to the ones I've attended over the past two years, but talking into a screen without being awkward is a feat worthy of a Lombardi Trophy in and of itself.  

But Cincinnati is a team that doesn’t care how difficult something is. The Bengals don’t care about expectations. They don’t care about anything besides being a cohesive unit and playing great football. 

As cornerback Chidobe Awuzie put it Thursday, "Big-time plays and big-time players, they coincide."

What I’m trying to say is the Bengals are acting like they’ve been here before. 

And to be fair, they have been. But that "before" was more than three decades ago. 

The last time Cincinnati made it to the AFC Championship, the year was 1988, and Taylor was 5 years old. It would be a full eight years before quarterback Joe Burrow was born.

So when the Bengals came out this season with a rallying cry of "why not us?," it seemed fitting. They’re not supposed to be playing Sunday in Kansas City (3 p.m. ET on CBS), according to everyone who watched their 2020-21 season. 

Burrow is only a year out from a gruesome knee injury. And it usually takes more than one season for a young quarterback and wide receiver to develop the chemistry that Burrow has with JaMarr Chase, the standout wideout who is in the running for Offensive Rookie of the Year.

But Chase and Burrow played at LSU together. And while they might not have been to the highest level with the Bengals yet, they’ve been there with LSU, winning the national championship together in 2019. 

According to defensive end Sam Hubbard, both of them walked into the building with the same confidence they exhibited all season.  

"When someone walks in as a high draft pick and has a lot of eyes on him, how they carry themselves really goes a long way in what your team perceives them as," he said. "I’ve always told rookies, ‘Keep your mouth shut, and go to work,’ and that’s how you earn the respect of your teammates. And [Chase and Borrow] both do that very well. They grew up together and are doing things, making history."

Given that, it shouldn’t really be any surprise that Burrow doesn’t like asking the question, "Why not us?"

"I’m tired of the underdog narrative," he said at the beginning of this week. "We are a really, really good team. We are here to make noise. We are a really good team with good players and coaches."

Straight-out rejecting underdog status is extremely rare. Most teams seek it out. Even when the Patriots had already won five Super Bowls, they headed into the championship milking a narrative that "no one believed in them," even though most people very much did. 

Many great sports movies are based on a David vs. Goliath storyline, and players often say they are fueled by chips on their shoulders and an external lack of belief. Proving your doubters wrong is a very human impulse and a powerful driver of ambition — who wouldn't want to show anyone who ever said they couldn’t, shouldn’t or wouldn’t that they can, they should, and they will? 

Apparently, Joe Burrow. The man who transferred to LSU because Ohio State wasn’t playing him doesn’t dwell on anyone who didn’t start him. He keeps in touch with many people from his time at OSU. 

Perhaps when you believe in yourself to your very core, you don’t need to prove anything. 

"It never seemed like it was forced," Hubbard said of Burrow’s confidence. "It was always natural, just his leadership and the way he carries himself. So I think from day one, when he walked into the building, people could tell that this was our franchise quarterback."

I’ve written before about the image Burrow projects. He’s inherently cool. And by cool, I don’t mean trendy or aloof. I mean he presents as entirely unselfconscious while remaining self-aware.

Burrow moves through the world without fear — the Bengals made it this far even though their quarterback was sacked more than any other QB this season. He takes it upon himself to scramble and extend plays. 

"We never take him for granted," Taylor said. "But there’s a lot of really impressive things he does that maybe aren’t as impressive to us anymore because we’re just used to it, and it’s kind of his standard, his greatness. But again, we need to step back and always take a moment to appreciate what we’ve got there at that quarterback position."

It might seem silly to mention this, but Burrow dresses without fear, too. He wore pink-tinted, tiny, square sunglasses at his postgame news conference a few weeks ago. When asked why, he said that he just thought they were cool (and he’s not the only one with fashion flair; Awuzie has put together some incredible fits this season). 

If you scroll far back on Burrow’s Instagram, you’ll find out that he has bleached his hair and rocked a mullet before. This man is not afraid to appear foolish because he simply doesn’t care, which means he doesn’t seem foolish at all. He remains unflappable in the public eye. 

On Wednesday, NFL Network’s Aditi Kinkhabwala asked Burrow if he was always this cool. 

"I try to be," Burrow said. "As a quarterback in this league, you can’t have these highs and lows. You aren’t going to be successful. The season is too long, you’re gonna have losses, and if you get down on yourself, you’re not going to be able to perform next week. And you’re going to have really big highs, and if you ride those highs, you’re going to come crashing down. You really have to stay level-headed, and games are just a microcosm of the entire year."

Burrow isn’t the only Cincinnati player to believe in the importance of staying level and confident. He gets support from the players around him; Chase wore a T-shirt with Burrow’s face on it before Cincinnati beat the Raiders in the wild-card round. 

When asked why, Chase simply said, "We believe in him. We’re making sure his confidence is always high." 

For most teams, success breeds confidence, but it seems like for the Bengals, confidence breeds success.

Before kicker Evan McPherson went out to kick the field goal that could either end Cincinnati’s season or send the team to the conference championship, he looked at backup quarterback Brandon Allen and said, "Looks like we’re going to the AFC Championship."

Before he even kicked! The beautiful audacity!

Burrow, Chase and McPherson might have walked into that locker room believing in themselves. There's no doubt that they and many other players turned the team around with their athletic and leadership abilities. But the athletes aren’t the only ones who’ve built this culture of confidence in Cincinnati. Taylor has played an integral part. 

"Coach Zac is an unbelievable person first and foremost," Awuzie said. "You don’t feel like there’s a power struggle [or like] you have to bow your head or anything. He really has that type of inviting personality and coaching style … and he gives the players a chance to lead.

"There’s been a lot of times where players maybe don’t have a voice on certain teams. You hear about that around the league. People aren’t able to speak. But on [Taylor’s] team, the players are able to speak and meet with him and go up to his office at any time. And you start to see the results."

Great results included the AFC divisional-round win over the Titans. In that game, Burrow’s headset went out, and he had to call three or four of his own plays — all of which worked. 

In his news conference this week, Taylor seemed thrilled by this autonomy. The coach said there would be more opportunities for Burrow to call plays as he progressed. Great leaders don't micromanage. They delight in trusting their people. 

But for all of their assurance, the Bengals are not guaranteed a win this weekend. Sure, they beat the Chiefs in Week 17, but Kansas City has been to the past two Super Bowls, won one of them and will enjoy home-field advantage on Sunday for the fourth year in a row. K.C. is favored by a touchdown. 

But no one expected the Bengals to be here at all. 

Perhaps it’s easier to exceed expectations when they’re low. If the bar is on the floor, stepping over it isn’t too impressive. But the Bengals haven’t merely stepped — they’ve leaped. 

And it seems like this is the rare team for which expectations really didn’t matter. Cincinnati could have been favored to win the Super Bowl at the start of the season, and I doubt much would have been different.

Because when teammates lift one another up and don’t believe there’s any reason it shouldn’t be them, that’s a powerful indicator that it just might be.

Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and cohost of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.