Joe Burrow Needs to Take the Next Step

Joe Burrow is a winner, but needs to improve for the Bengals to win a Super Bowl. Let me explain why.

Joe Burrow is a weird player.

He is simultaneously lauded as one of the NFL’s most consistent winners and performers, yet also a perpetual question mark. He is at the same time thought of as one of the game’s premier big-game players, yet over the last two seasons has consistently failed to play great in big games. He is the NFL’s highest paid player, yet in 2023 got outdone big time by Jake Browning.

Just how am I supposed to take Joe Burrow?

Let’s go back to the beginning.

In 2020, Joe Burrow came into the NFL as its first overall draft pick. Surely he would’ve preferred not to be selected by Cincinnati, but the Bengals did a lot of losing on purpose to make sure that they could get their guy. I normally heavily advocate against this (look at how much the Jets got out of their miserable 2020 season trying to tank for Trevor Lawrence), but in this case it’s turned out to be the right choice.

If not for fellow 2020 Draft class member Justin Herbert one-upping him, Joe would’ve come into the NFL as its best rookie QB in a while. 20th in EPA/Play and 15th in CPOE don’t seem great, but rookie QBs are normally awful, and whenever a rookie QB is not awful, it tends to be a very encouraging sign.

This is where it all begins.

Joe Burrow goes from very encouraging to an immediate question mark upon tearing his MCL and ACL in week 11 of the season, and many wonder if it’s already over. You may scoff looking back in hindsight at this, but it can really happen. Rookie Cody Kessler had a fantastic 237 plays in 2016, but with one injury it was over (more detail here). Granted, this was Cleveland. They will always find a way to ruin a QB, but there are examples elsewhere.

There is one example of a man who I think could’ve been an all-timer (if you know, you know) that I’ll save for the end of this article because it’s pertinent there, but here’s some fairly recent others of great young prospects getting injured and never truly getting back: Michael Vick (took eight years to be the same after the 2003 broken leg); Josh Freeman (rising star bedeviled by 2011 shoulder injuries); Robert Griffin III (never the same after his 2012 knee explosion); Carson Wentz (never the same after his 2017 ACL tear).

There are not many examples to cite, because there are few top QB prospects that actually look good in the first place, and fewer than that who get severely injured, but the key name to look at is Wentz. This happened just a few seasons before Joe entered the league, recent enough to be top of mind for those looking for a reason to be scared about their young QB’s injuries.

Luckily enough, Joe was okay to play for the 2021 season, and had the Joe Burrow season that you remember.

You remember that Joe Burrow generated 0.186 EPA/Play (8th) on a 6.7 CPOE (1st), and got the Bengals back to the playoffs for the first time in years. We will leave out for now what happened in those playoffs to talk about these results a little bit more.

It may have slipped past you at first, but how can a player generate just 0.186 EPA/Play on a 6.7 CPOE? Generally, being (by far) the most accurate QB in the NFL will yield much better results than this. In fact, among all seasons with a completion percentage at least six points higher than expected given their throw difficulty, this is one of the worst seasons on record.

There is a 2007 Chad Pennington season where he generated just 0.011 EPA/Play despite a 7.4 CPOE. That’s so ridiculous that it’s going to get an article of its own and won’t be discussed any further here. Beyond that, there are only three seasons where a QB is this accurate, yet puts up results this poor: 2010 Tony Romo, 2019 Russell Wilson, and 2020 Russell Wilson.

2010 Romo is a half season, so I’m going to leave that out too, and that leaves us with only one man to compare Joe with, and it’s an unlikely match. Russell Wilson is a scramble drill type who really likes to let plays develop in order to allow his unprecedented (1st all time in CPOE) arm talent to prevail. Joe Burrow has always been okay at getting the ball out quickly. He certainly doesn’t hold the ball forever in the way that Russell Wilson does. Nevertheless, they both had the same problem.

Neither met a sack they didn’t like. They were extremely prone to get sacked, which made both these players far more prone to negative plays than most people realized, which let down their results (given their arm talents) quite badly.

These players came to this outcome in different ways. Russell loved to keep plays going forever, causing very high pressure rates, avoid most tacklers that came his way, but put himself in position to be sacked so often that even while avoiding most, it’s still a ton of sacks. Joe on the other hand just had no ability to avoid tacklers.

Constantly faced with a high (but not top ten highest, as some will claim) pressure rate in 2021, Joe became one of the only really good QBs I’ve ever seen to allow more sacks than knockdowns. You see, on certain plays pressure will come before a QB can do anything about it. The good ones will get the ball out, and take a hit to do so, meaning that the defence records a knockdown (or ‘QB hit’ in some places), but not a sack, or make the first tackler miss, buying more time to either repeat the above or to end the play without a knockdown or a sack, but still with a QB pressure.

This is what people mean when they say ‘sacks are a QB stat.’ Pressure is not really a QB stat, but the ability to face pressure and not get sacked is a skill. No question about it.

It’s a skill that 2021 Joe Burrow did not have. 51 sacks compared to just 49 knockdowns means that if there was pressure on a play, Joe was likely not going to get the ball out, and he was going to get tackled by the first guy. Comparing this to 2021 Patrick Mahomes (28 sacks, 58 knockdowns) really highlights the severity of the issue here. That’s so many extra negative plays that Joe took, but somebody like Patrick did not.

This really shined through in the aforementioned 2021 playoffs, where Joe got sacked 19 times in just four games.

It’s not a crime to lack any skill at sack avoidance. It’s an issue a player can overcome, but I don’t really know if Joe ever did.

Something happened between the 2021 and 2022 seasons. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe it’s the mysterious knee injury suffered in the 2021 Super Bowl. Maybe Joe just heard all the talk over the winter about having to get better at not allowing so many of the hits he takes to be sacks, but for whatever reason in 2022 Joe came out playing entirely differently.

In 2020 and 2021, Joe had never been in the top ten quickest getting the ball out. He’d been okay, in the middle of the pack or so, perhaps slightly quicker. For 2022 all of a sudden this was second fastest. For 2023 it was fifth fastest. This shows in the pressure rates, as Joe now consistently faces some of the least pressure in the NFL (it’s hard to get pressure on such quick patterns), but it’s had some serious negative consequences as well.

First and foremost, Joe’s throw depth has taken a nosedive. In 2020 and 2021, Joe threw to targets that were on average 8.5 and 8.3 yards away, respectively. In 2022 and 2023, this has fallen to 6.9 and 6.5 yards. Losing almost two yards of average throw depth over a two season span may not sound like a lot, but I assure you that it is. It took Joe from the middle of the pack depth thrower that he’d been entering the league to one of the shortest throwers on average that he’s been for the last two years.

I used to be adamant that you cannot win this way, and if this contract had happened just last year I would’ve said that the Bengals can never win this way, but considering Patrick Mahomes and his 6.6 yard nickels and dimes (the only QB bottom five in throw depth ever to even get close to doing so) just won the Super Bowl, perhaps this is a new NFL in which you can win by consistently throwing the ball so short.

In general however, you can win throwing the ball quick (Tua Tagovailoa in 2023, Tom Brady for years). You apparently can win throwing the ball short (the aforementioned Patrick Mahomes). However, I have no belief you can win doing both at once. If you look at the shortest times to throw in the NFL, you will typically find really respectable throw depth there (among the good players). It’s only once you get to the people that take a bit more time to throw you consistently start finding short passes.

Nevertheless, here’s Joe Burrow, generally regarded as a good player, constantly throwing the ball quick and short. At the very least, he’s an extreme outlier. At the very worst, I have my doubts over whether this style can work, even with Joe’s arm talent.

That arm talent is the crux of the disconnect here. Why has a player with such ability chosen (or why have his coaches chosen for him) to adopt a style generally only used when teams are looking to minimize their QB’s lack of arm talent? When you look at the list of names that have thrown the ball both as quick and as short as Joe Burrow in the last two seasons, you see names like Mac Jones, Trevor Siemian, the 2022 version of Tom Brady, and Jimmy Garoppolo.

None of these are names you want to associate with, but Joe is the one good player thrown in with the list of undesirables, and I’ll tell you what.

It’s hurting his career.

2022 Joe Burrow was much more consistent, much less mistake prone, had worked on avoiding sacks, and was a better all around player than his 2021 self, but despite all this his results were worse. Much worse. In terms of points, 0.165 EPA/Play is not that much lower than 0.186, but over the course of 740 plays, that does mean Joe was 15.5 points worse in 2022 than 2021, and in terms of accuracy the plummet is stark, from 6.7 (among the greats of all time) to 2.7 (good but not life changing). Quite honestly Joe is lucky he was so great to begin with or more people would’ve noticed how big his step back was.

2023 continued this bad trend, with his CPOE falling all the way down to 1.2, worse than even his rookie season, and the results being legitimately bad (0.037 EPA/Play) for the first time in his career. I understand this is all confounded by the injury issues, and it was getting better before it all went bad, so I’m not here to take last season all too seriously, but it must’ve been a reality check to find that the best QB on the 2023 Bengals was not Joe Burrow but instead Jake Browning.

Only after all of this does the contract kick in that makes Joe Burrow the highest paid player in football.

Only after the Super Bowl appearance. Only after completely changing his style. Only after seeing his results decline for now two seasons in a row. Only after a wrist ligament injury.

That’s the big one.

Wrist ligament injuries are never taken all that seriously, but they spook me badly, and I’m going to tell you why.

If you knew you knew. It’s 2002 Pennington.

Chad Pennington was the best QB in the NFL in 2002 (read the His Year article if you don’t believe me) in his very first season of being the Jets’ starter. In fact, Chad’s 0.269 EPA/Play in 2002 is the best season from any QB between the Greatest Show on Turf in 1999 and all the rule changes to make passing easier in 2004. He was not just the best young QB but the best QB the NFL had seen in years, and it took one wrist injury to kill it all.

Chad would never be the same again after 2002. In truth, he never so much as got close again, and that injury was to his non-throwing wrist. Joe’s hurt ligaments are in his throwing arm. I’m not saying that Joe can’t bounce back just because Chad didn’t bounce back, but it is scary.

So this is the man the Bengals are paying all of their money to. A man who accomplished almost all of his damage in the 2021 season, but who since then has endured injuries and playstyle changes, who since then has played three playoff games, and been a significant factor in only one of them, who since then has never been able to be the same player he was back then.

I want to say this in a sentence so I’m absolutely clear: 2021 Joe Burrow is a player who is absolutely worthy of giving all your money, but there are doubts about the 2022 and 2023 version.

What if Joe recovers to his 2022 form but no further? The Bengals will be stuck with a man liable for about 0.15 EPA/Play on a CPOE between one and three every year. Those are 2023 Jordan Love numbers, but are even less conducive to winning than Jordan’s because of Joe’s style of play.

This is not the worst case scenario (he could not recover at all like all the other QBs so far), but it’s a very very bad one. If this were to be the case, the highest paid player in the league would be a severe overpay, and I suspect the Bengals would win nothing from here on as the remainder of the team buckles under the weight of paying a great QB top of the line money.

There is a real difference between great and top of the line.

Therefore, the Bengals and their fans are banking on Joe recovering all the way back to 2021 form, and likely beyond. Keep in mind that even in Joe’s best season he ranked 8th in EPA/Play. To justify top of the league money I suspect he’d have to play better than this. You can make the Super Bowl on a rookie deal with results like these, but it’s been a long time since a QB on a big boy contract without the benefit of a spectacular defence made the Super Bowl with such results. You have to go all the way back to 2011 Eli Manning and his 0.166 EPA/Play to find such an example.

I understand that the QB market always and only goes upwards, so top of the league money will not remain there for long, but Philadelphia never made Jalen Hurts the highest paid player in the game, and 2022 Hurts is leaps and bounds better (in terms of both QB stats and winning) than any season Joe Burrow has ever had.

This is where we finally reach the title of the article. Joe Burrow has to take a step up.

This is the final year of his rookie deal, and once the big contract applies on the salary cap the Bengals will no longer be able to get away with Joe underperforming like he has ever since (and even in) 2021. He’s never had a season of 0.200 EPA/Play or better. That will have to change. He’s now gone years without truly showing off his arm talent. That will also have to change. He’s had great receivers forever, which is likely going to change, and it’s tough to improve an offensive line on the fly through salary cap issues, so he may be stuck with what he’s got.

To pre-empt any comments, I am not trying to claim that Joe Burrow is a bad player. Joe Burrow is a very good player. Going forward I would put him in that 5-8 range in the QB hierarchy, in the 2023 Jared Goff-Jordan Love range, if he can recover from all his injuries. That’s no insult, and also means that I believe Joe can win some more playoff games (like Jared and Jordan both did last year). Maybe lots more if he wins one or two every year, but it also means that I am down on Joe compared to most.

Quite frankly, I’m skeptical that a player coming off a season ending injury needing to change his playstyle with in all likelihood a lesser offence around him than in the past can improve (not simply make it back to where he was, but improve) as much as he needs to in order to be a championship level QB, and this Steeler fan in all honesty hopes he doesn’t. I hope the Bengals have just committed $219M guaranteed to 2023 Jordan Love. I hope he never puts up an elite CPOE ever again. Now that Joe has gotten his money, I can hope for all these things with a clear conscience.

There’s always a chance however that this all can turn on me, and the Bengals win some Super Bowls in the next decade, and I’m sitting here in the future with egg all over my face, but until that happens…

Joe Burrow needs to take the next step.

Thanks so much for reading.