The joy of watching Joe Burrow and the Bengals succeed

By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist

The last two minutes of the Bengals-Chiefs game on Sunday in Cincinnati were so chaotic that Netflix could've picked it up as a new reality series. 

It was the sort of football that messy, drama-loving fans crave. The kind filled with mistakes, with second, third, fourth and fifth chances, with cliff-hangers and, ultimately, a happy ending. 

Well, for Cincinnati fans at least. Chiefs fans had to reckon with the snap of their team’s eight-game winning streak, which they blamed on bad officiating. 

But this column is about the Bengals, who clinched the AFC North with their win Sunday and are headed to the playoffs for the first time since 2015. The team lost in that wild-card round and hasn’t won a playoff game since 1990, when QB Joe Burrow wouldn’t be born for six more years.

But now, largely thanks to Burrow, it’s finally a joy to watch the Bengals find some success. 

Trust me, that was not a sentence I expected to write. Given that I have no connection to or rooting interest in Cincinnati, the Bengals were a team I mostly forgot about over the past six years, used either as a quick punchline or another train wreck to gawk at. 

It seemed that fortunes might turn around after Cincinnati took Joe Burrow as the No. 1 pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, but that season ended up being a lesson in what not to do with a new star. 

The offensive line was about as sturdy as the relationships on a reality show, and Burrow was sacked 32 times. He attempted 61 passes in Week 2 alone, which was more than Jimmy Garoppolo tried to throw in the entirety of San Francisco's 2019 playoff run. Miraculously, Burrow’s arm didn’t fall off, but the poor protection caught up with the team when he was sacked and blew out his knee at the end of November.

This year, however, has actually brought about change. The team added Ja’Marr Chase, a favorite target of Burrow’s when the two were at LSU together, and the duo have been fantastic. In only 16 games this season, Chase broke the record for receiving yards by a rookie, which Justin Jefferson set last year. In Sunday’s game, the rookie wide receiver racked up 266 yards and three touchdowns. He set the record for receiving yards by a rookie in a single game and grabbed the mantle of most receiving yards in one game in Bengals history. 

Chase’s fellow receiver Tee Higgins is also crushing the game this fall. Both players have more than 1000 yards receiving, and in Week 15, Higgins caught 194 yards and two touchdowns. And it’s not only offensive prowess. While the defense has looked shaky at times this season, the Bengals' D stepped up to allow the Chiefs only three points and 112 yards in the second half Sunday.

As for Burrow, he leads the league in completion percentage (70.4%), yards per pass completion (12.6) and several other statistics that sound too much like math for me to include here. 

The point is that both Burrow and Chase upped their odds for awards this season after their team clinched the AFC North. Burrow is now in the MVP conversation, and Chase is the favorite to win rookie of the year. 

Granted, the Cincinnati offensive line still has lots of room for improvement. Burrow leads the league in the number of times he has been sacked, and the already shaky O-line took a big hit when leading blocker Quinton Spain sprained his ankle Sunday. Coach Zac Taylor, however, said Spain shouldn’t be out longer than a week and will hopefully be back in time for the playoffs. 

Part of what makes the Bengals legitimately fun is that their explosive offense is easy to root for and sets a tone that, from the outside, is delightful. Burrow’s style of play is electric; it’s easiest to measure greatness in sports using numbers and stats, but there’s an intangible quality to success, too. Burrow, Chase, Higgins — they all have it, and they play with a physical grace and accuracy that are visually satisfying.

And as a leader, Burrow — as noted Ohioan LeBron James tweeted last year — has the "it" factor.

But there’s another "it" factor to Burrow, too. 

(I don’t know him personally, so this is an observation based purely on optics, on the image he projects. The Bengals declined to make Burrow available for an interview, probably because he’s extremely busy but also probably because he thinks I’m too wacky after I gave him an embroidered Coach O saying at the 2020 Super Bowl. It was a joke.)

Sports should be fun, and Burrow seems to understand that from a branding perspective. He knows what it means to project an inherently cool image. Look, he gave his entire O-line (13 guys, including the practice squad players) diamond-encrusted G-Shock watches for Christmas.

Remember G-Shocks? I’m pretty sure I had one in eighth grade. That's the kind of gift that says, "I’m not cheap, but I’m also not boring."

Burrow also doesn’t post often on social media, so we don’t know more than we want to about him. I could be jaded from a career spent online, but I think everyone (myself included) should reveal far less on the internet, because the more you know about someone, the more there is to dislike. We should all keep some mystery.

Burrow does. He doesn’t tell us much, but what he does share is joyful. Take, for example, the fact that he broke out a cigar after the win against the Chiefs. He became famous for his cigar celebrations after a picture of him smoking in the locker room after LSU won the 2019 national championship went viral. Burrow knows how to give fans a good callback and present a good, old-fashioned Easter egg.

What's more, it’s exciting to watch someone deeply talented and clearly dedicated to his craft assume a leadership role on a team. Burrow was captivating at LSU (the school I fell in love with this fall), and it's rare for a star to be just as dynamic at the professional level — just look at how college phenom Trevor Lawrence is faring with the Jaguars (don’t look, actually, it’s very sad and bad).

We're at a changing-of-the-guard moment in the NFL, with many of the greats — from Drew Brees to Ben Roethlisberger — hanging up their cleats over the past few years. And it’s rewarding for NFL fans to watch the development of players who have the potential to one day loom that large in the sport.

Especially for a fan base such as Cincinnati, which, for a generation, hasn’t known what it feels like to win.

And hey, if Burrow helps bring back G-Shock watches while he’s at it, that’s one more W for humankind. 

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.