Seven seasons, two playoff trips
Joe Burrow has spent his career in Cincinnati carrying an offense and waiting on a defense. Season seven begins with him arguing the wait is over.
He made the case on Ja’Marr Chase’s podcast, and the number to keep in mind while reading his words is two. Two postseason appearances in six years, both of them in 2021 and 2022, on either side of a stretch in which the Bengals scored plenty and stopped very little.
“I just want to win this year,” Burrow said. “I just want to win. The rest will take care of itself. I think we’ll break a bunch of records eventually, but I think we’re going to have a really good team that has a chance to win every game that we step foot on the field for.”
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A first-round pick spent in the trenches
The move behind the optimism was the trade that sent the No. 10 overall pick to the New York Giants for defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence. For a front office long reluctant to hand a first-rounder to another club for a veteran, that counted as a change of philosophy rather than a tweak at the margins.
Burrow reached for the same word four times when Lawrence came up. “I’m just excited to see Dexter out there. I’m excited to see big Dex out there. I’m excited to see Dex in uniform. I’m excited to see what he can do for us. That’s not something we’ve done in the past, trade a first-round pick for a player like that. I know the fans were excited, I’m just as excited.”
He credited the veterans signed around Lawrence as much as the trade itself, and traced the feeling back to spring work. “I could really feel it in my bones, in my soul in OTAs this year, different from years past. Where we brought in a lot of the right guys, a lot of the right people with the right mindsets.”
Chase reaches back to 2021
Chase named the comparison outright: the side that reached Super Bowl LVI and lost it to the Rams. “I can feel it too. The fact that our defense talks a little trash, I like that. That’s what we need. It feels like 2021 all over again, with the guys talking trash, because we had a lot of guys who talked on defense.”
Both know the other reading. Burrow turns 30 in December on a roster assembled to win immediately, and a fourth straight season outside the playoffs would move the questions from the quarterback to the people who built the team around him.
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