A few years ago, the club of ascendant young quarterbacks in the AFC had a membership of four. Patrick Mahomes, of course, plus Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Joe Burrow. If you thought about the players who had the conference set for years of competitive, high-stakes football, most likely you pictured that quartet.
Outside of Mahomes, Burrow was the most accomplished. He took the Bengals to the Super Bowl in the 2021 season, and he is still the only one of that group to beat Mahomes in the postseason. If you’re the kind of football fan who believes the record books don’t lie, then Burrow and the Bengals should still be the best active rival to the Chiefs in the AFC.
And yet, Burrow has begun to feel like an afterthought in that conversation. Though not for any clear diminishment of his skills, the Bengals haven’t made the playoffs since the 2022 season, soured by slow starts and, above all else, serious injuries to their quarterback. And now once again, Burrow is expected to miss at least the next three months while recovering from surgery to fix a bad turf toe injury suffered in Week 2. Cincinnati’s season feels at a standstill while the rest of the league moves on, and its $275 million quarterback seems in increasing danger of missing the prime years of his career.
This is the fifth substantial injury Burrow has dealt with—and the third to sideline him for significant time—since the Bengals drafted him in 2020.
That year, his season ended after 10 games because of a torn ACL/MCL/PCL and meniscus that led to surgery and a lengthy rehab process. In 2021, after coming back, he played through a dislocated pinky on his throwing hand on the way to the Super Bowl. In the beginning of 2022, he managed some knee pain after aggravating a previous injury. He sprained his MCL in that Super Bowl loss, and he missed most of training camp in 2022 after suffering a ruptured appendix. In 2023, he missed time in the preseason after suffering a strained calf, and in Week 10, he tore a ligament in his right wrist—another season-ending injury. Burrow still has a chance to come back this year if the Bengals remain competitive, but even on the shortest possible recovery timeline, he’ll play fewer games this season than ever before.
As of right now, Burrow has played in 71 out of a possible 85 games in his NFL career, meaning he’s been available 84 percent of the time. That doesn’t seem so bad, but it is meaningfully lower than Jackson, who has played in 89 percent (105 of 118) of his possible games, and especially iron men Allen and Mahomes, both of whom have played in 96 percent (113 of 118) of their possible games as starters.
The chasm obviously stands to widen. If Burrow misses the next 12 games but comes back in Week 15, he’ll finish the regular season having played in 74 of a possible 100 games, or 74 percent. When former Colts quarterback Andrew Luck chose to retire after seven seasons in the NFL, exhausted by multiple serious injuries, surgeries, and long rehab processes, he’d played in 77 percent of his possible games (86 of 112). Being sidelined more than Luck is not a benchmark any quarterback is aiming for.
Also like Luck, it’s impossible to separate Burrow’s injury history from the Bengals’ roster-building strategies and their failure to protect him. Just like his knee injury in 2020, Burrow’s injury on Sunday occurred on a play where he took a big hit. In Burrow’s 15 dropbacks before leaving the game, he was sacked twice and hit five times.
“It’s a little sickening,” left tackle Orlando Brown Jr. told reporters after the game.
This is not a new problem. The Bengals’ offensive line has never finished better than 26th in ESPN’s pass block win rate since the team drafted Burrow. Last year, it ranked dead last. Their best finish in Pro Football Focus’s offensive line rankings in the last five years is 20th, and their average finish is 27th.
The result of a pass-heavy offense like the one Cincinnati runs is a ton of hits to the quarterback. Since 2020, Burrow has been the second-most sacked quarterback in the NFL, behind only Russell Wilson, who has taken 218 sacks to Burrow’s 200, in two more games played. But while Wilson typically has one of the longest times to throw in the entire NFL, Burrow has one of the shortest, meaning he’s taking all those hits while getting rid of the ball expeditiously.
Wilson has also gotten to that sack total while playing for four different teams—and while he’s complained about his protection, particularly in his later years in Seattle, his playing style is as much to blame for his high sack numbers as the offensive lines he’s played behind. Burrow has been in Cincinnati the whole time, getting hit way too much, year after year. Burrow didn’t come to the NFL with a major injury history—he broke a bone in his hand as a redshirt sophomore at Ohio State when he was a backup and tore cartilage in his ribs playing for LSU during the College Football Playoff national championship in 2020 but finished the game—and most of his injuries have been the direct result of getting hit. Burrow’s season-ending injury his rookie year happened after he’d already been sacked 32 times in 10 games, and in the five years since, the Bengals haven’t found a way to meaningfully change the situation in front of him.
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Some of that is due to a simple lack of investment. In a league where the two top spenders on offensive linemen are the two Super Bowl teams from last season, the Bengals are 27th in money spent on offensive line contracts in 2025, according to Spotrac. Offensive line was an obvious need this past offseason, but the Bengals’ efforts to address that in free agency were a pair of modest additions: They brought in interior lineman Lucas Patrick on a $2 million, one-year deal and, just recently, added former Broncos and Vikings guard Dalton Risner on a $1.3 million, one-year deal. Risner, who signed less than a month ago, is now starting at right guard to replace Patrick, who is on injured reserve. Even in the rare moments when the Bengals have spent on linemen, the results have been middling. Brown, who signed a four-year, $64 million contract to play left tackle in 2023, was hampered by a fractured fibula last season and hasn’t been able to raise the level of play for the line as a whole.
Instead of shelling out in free agency, Cincinnati has seemed determined to build an offensive line through the draft, with dreadful results. The Bengals have drafted 22 offensive linemen since 2011, and the only one to sign a second contract with the team was their 2011 fourth-round selection, guard Clint Boling, who retired in 2019. First- and second-round picks like Billy Price (2018), Jonah Williams (2019), and Jackson Carman (2021) didn’t pan out, and last year’s first-round pick, tackle Amarius Mims, hasn’t looked likely to live up to his billing so far. And while I don’t think many fans in Cincinnati regret the Ja’Marr Chase pick, it does kind of feel like the Bengals and Burrow are cursed to live in option B of the famous meme.
Cincinnati is still trying to get better in modest ways. The Bengals are currently hoping that this year’s third-round pick, left guard Dylan Fairchild, will be the player to break the streak of bad picks. New offensive line coach Scott Peters spent much of the offseason on fundamentals like posture, with drills that were designed less to get his players to dominate one-on-one matchups and more to improve their technique in hopes of closing down the turnstile. It feels too soon to write off this group’s chances for improvement entirely, though the results so far have been pretty costly. The organization’s incremental approach to improving the line feels increasingly out of whack with a franchise quarterback who has had three major injuries in six seasons.
The Bengals could manage to get through the season. They’ve shown in the past that they can get by with backup quarterback Jake Browning, who went 4-3 after replacing Burrow as a starter in 2023. And unlike in seasons past, the Bengals don’t have an early-season hole to dig themselves out of. Coming into this year, they’d won just one single game in Weeks 1 and 2 in the past six seasons combined, so a 2-0 start is a major boost.
But even if the Bengals can keep themselves afloat, and even if Burrow does manage to come back in December, the majority of this season is already set to be spent treading water, just trying to get to the point where they can really start competing. Burrow’s career is starting to feel a bit like that, too. It’s not that he’s faltered as a player. But his peers are playing in big games, having milestone wins and crushing playoff defeats, while he’s building a strong case to become the first three-time Comeback Player of the Year because his team can’t find a group of five linemen capable of keeping him off the ground.
