20 hours ago
11
Here the Bengals go again. They have now had five cracks at building a championship roster around Joe Burrow since drafting him No 1 overall in 2020, and have fallen short all five times. Entering year six, it’s already starting to feel like Burrow is this generation’s Dan Marino or Philip Rivers, an all-time great quarterback let down by the franchise around him.
After going 4-12 in Burrow’s rookie season, Cincinnati made the Super Bowl, lost, returned to the AFC title game the next season, and then lost there. Burrow missed almost all of his fourth season with an injury, but put forth the best season of his career statistically last year … before the Bengals surrendered it, finding novel way to give up close leads early in the season and failing to reach the playoffs despite winning five straight games to close it. In a league where 44% of teams make the postseason, it was almost impressively bad.
After the unlikely Super Bowl run, the outlook in Cincinnati was rosy. In Burrow, they had the NFL’s most valuable building block: a franchise quarterback who could elevate average players into difference-makers. Behind Burrow, they had Ja’Marr Chase, one of the game’s best receivers, a young pool of offensive playmakers and a deep and talented defense. They even had the league’s most prolific young kicker – and had oodles of cap space and draft picks to build on their success.
But championship windows are finite. Rather than using the Super Bowl run as a launching pad, they instead committed countless team-building sins: wasting draft picks, misallocating free-agent dollars, continuing to leave Burrow vulnerable behind a porous offensive line, and sticking with a group of coaches who have proven not to be needle-movers.
This offseason, they doubled down on mistakes, retaining the core of last year’s roster and making only one significant change to their coaching staff, and retaining head coach Zac Taylor, who is now entering his sixth season alongside Burrow. No team has won its first Super Bowl with the same quarterback starting for the same coach for five years. The franchise had a chance to aggressively retool. Instead, it messed around on the margins. Now it feels increasingly like the window has shut on this version of Burrow’s Bengals.
Maybe that’s worrying too much. Burrow is at the apex of his powers. When he has been healthy, the Bengals’ offense has been a juggernaut; they could play blindfolded and finish with one of the league’s best passing attacks; Chase and Tee Higgins, the team’s dynamic receiver duo, are nowhere near 30; they have one of the game’s best pass-rushers in Trey Hendrickson; and they’ve gone toe-to-toe with the league’s best over multiple postseasons.
That’s the spin from Cincinnati, anyway. But multiple end-of-year losses can warp a team’s self-perception. They think they are closer than they truly are – especially in the AFC, where even getting to the Super Bowl requires climbing over teams quarterbacked by Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Justin Herbert, and CJ Stroud. This season, you can add Bo Nix and the Broncos, Trevor Lawrence and the Jags, and Aaron Rodgers and the Steelers’ 2020 All-Pro roster to that list.
The Bengals will no doubt point to their record in one-score games last season, a notoriously unreliable way to judge a team’s record. Curb the bone-headed mistakes, and a nine-win team suddenly looks like a division contender. The team’s under-the-hood figures painted them closer to a fringe contender rather than a playoff afterthought, but those figures were propped up by one player: Burrow.
Everywhere else, things were a mess. The offensive line remained a sieve. The run game was a non-factor. A once-ballyhooed defense fell off a cliff. Even the special teams unit, once a calling card, fell to the bottom of the league’s standings. There has been little to suggest things will turn around this season, because so little has changed.
The Bengals seem to be taking the rationalist’s view – that if they keep hammering away at the door, eventually they will break through. But the Bengals are not the only nearly men of the past half decade. They’re thinking the same thing in Buffalo … and Baltimore … and San Francisco. Compared to those other contenders, the Bengals’ offseason renovation was paltry. They failed to upgrade crucial positions and became bogged down, again, in contract disputes with their own players.
This year, owner Mike Brown managed a two-for-one. “They would rather win arguments than win games.” First-round pick Shemar Stewart said during his holdout. Despite settling Stewart’s contract, the team is still in another standoff with Hendrickson, who has requested a trade for the second successive offseason. Hendrickson, who led the league in sacks last season, is the team’s only difference-maker on defense. Yet the Bengals can still not come to terms with the edge-rusher on a pay increase with only one year left on his deal.
Brown is the kind of billionaire who might think that prices at Dollar General are a bit steep. He refuses to make wholesale changes to his coaching staff, wary of paying out existing contracts. He employs both the smallest coaching staff and scouting department in the league. That may sound trivial, but it adds up. Run by an old-school owner with an outdated mindset, the franchise has stuck, resolutely, to drafting players from college football’s powerhouses, refusing to mine the ground for slept-on gems in football’s outskirts. Only two of the team’s last 30 top-150 picks have played outside college football’s power-five (now power-four) conferences.
In fairness, that philosophy has led the Bengals to string together deep rosters in the past, particularly during Marvin Lewis’ tenure as head coach. But the team’s recent anemic draft record has left them lagging behind other contenders – and they’ve missed opportunities to select impact players, particularly along the offensive line, due to that small-school bias.
Brown’s penny-pinching has exacerbated the issues caused by their draft record. The Bengals routinely carry the lowest dead money total in the league, a tactic teams use to push cap burdens into the future to improve the roster now. The Bengals’ championship window, with this core, is this season. If ever there was an offseason to put all the chips in, this was it. Brown dipped his toe in the water, but balked at major surgery.
On the coaching side, the only significant change was swapping out defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo for Al Golden, the team’s former linebackers coach. They’re banking on running the same squad back and a new coach inspiring an about-face. There is talk of “internal growth,” a neat verbal tick that typically means: “we’re unwilling to spend money, we’re capped out, or we’re unwilling to admit our draft failures”.
The Bengals were aggressive about retaining Burrow’s buddies, though. After beating the Cowboys last year, Burrow used his time at the podium to issue a thinly veiled threat to his front office. Bring back my guys or else. Burrow, pointedly, did not mention Hendrickson. The Bengals acquiesced, signing Higgins to a four-year contract worth $31m a year and re-upping Chase on a deal that made him the highest-paid non-quarterback in the sport. The signal was clear: they’re winning or going down on Burrow’s arm. In a vacuum, those decisions made sense; both Chase and Higgins are excellent players. But in context, the deals mean that roughly 35% of the team’s salary cap this season is tied up in the quarterback and two receivers, making it tough to upgrade other areas of the roster this offseason.
A smart franchise would have said no to Burrow. They would have let Higgins walk, taken the inevitable fire-storm on the chin, and reinforced their offensive line or improved their defense. The Bengals don’t need an electric second receiver to win. It’s a luxury. Burrow is good enough to turn so-so options into viable second bananas. But Cincy spent the offseason caving to Burrow’s demands. That’s great news for the fantasy crowd – not great for parade planners.
In summary: The Bengals’ offseason work boiled down to re-upping household names, throwing Anarumo under a bus, and hoping recent draft misfires would kickstart their careers under new leadership.
Some of that reasoning is sound. The Bengals’ defense was a disaster under Anarumo last year. They couldn’t rush the passer. They couldn’t cover. Anarumo’s greatest strength is creating distinctive, one-off gameplans that confuse opposing quarterbacks. But the foundations of last year’s group were so shaky that no amount of schematic voodoo could cover the holes. The Bengals finished in the bottom third in the league in pressure rate, pass-rush win-rate, and defensive run efficiency. Strip Hendrickson out of those metrics, and they fall to the bottom of the pile. Even the Panthers – the 2024 Panthers! – had a more effective four-man pass-rush than the Bengals.
The gameplan is to offset the pricey offensive stars by getting young or cheap players on defense. But the execution has been bungled. Cincy wound up fielding the most expensive defensive line in the league last season, pouring cash and draft picks into trying to engineer a four-man pass-rush that could complement Burrow’s bomb’s away offense. To do that, they cheaped out on the secondary. When that pass-rush fell on its face, the entire defense was exposed. Outside Hendrickson, only one player (BJ Hill) had more than 20 pressures last year. The Bears, Saints and Jets, all five-win teams, all had at least four players notch 20 pressures.
Other than ticking off Henderson, the Bengals have done little to improve their pass-rush for this year. They drafted Stewart in the first round, a developmental pass-rusher who missed the early part of training camp. Their only free-agent addition was TJ Slaton, an early-down run stuffer. They allocated more resources to fixing their linebacking corps than addressing the pass-rush needs.
And now, the team’s title hopes again rest on the right shoulder of their quarterback. That’s no bad thing. Burrow finished last season fourth in the RBSDM composite, which measures the value of a play and how much the quarterback can be deemed responsible for the value. No single quarterback was more valuable to their team last season. Last season, however, proved that won’t be enough. There isn’t another level for Burrow to ascend to. Even at his best, he couldn’t carry a lackluster roster to January by himself.
This will no doubt be the millionth consecutive year the Bengals preach diversifying the offense, and the millionth consecutive year in which they run one of the league’s three most predictable offenses. Throughout Burrow’s time, they have struggled to efficiently run the ball or tie the run game to play-action. When they put the ball in Burrow’s hands in the gun, they’re effective. Everything else is a risk. The Bengals were dead last with 3.7 yards per play and 29th with a minus 18.1% DVOA from under-center formations in 2024, according to FTN. Unless Burrow is playing point guard, the Bengals struggle to move the ball. In 2025, that’s no way to build a sustainable offense.
The hope is that they can squeeze one more season out of that offensive ideology while Golden patches something together on defense. If Hendrickson is traded away, the whole plan could cave in before the season even kicks off (though there is hope that won’t happen, with Hendrickson reporting to training camp on Wednesday even as he says he won’t participate fully until a deal is done)
“The [championship] window is my whole career,” Burrow said last year. He is not wrong. But championship windows are perilously short. Burrow may have more time, in Cincinnati or elsewhere. But the current Bengals corps is on to its last dance.
