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Burrow Bummer Poses Late-Season Quandary for NFL Broadcasters

anthony crupi
·4 min read
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After tearing a ligament in his right wrist in a 34-20 loss to the Baltimore Ravens Thursday night, Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow will sit out the remainder of the 2023 NFL season. The loss of the league’s highest-paid player effectively sidelines any hope the Bengals might have had for another shot at a deep playoff run, and leaves a few TV networks scrambling to make some changes in their late-season broadcast schedules.

Burrow appeared to sustain the injury after connecting with Joe Mixon on a short touchdown pass late in the second quarter. After returning from the medical tent, Burrow couldn’t get a proper grip on the ball as he attempted a practice toss on the sidelines. He left the game shortly thereafter; in a press scrum held earlier Friday afternoon, Burrow said he’d “just felt a pop in the middle of the throw.”

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While Burrow said the Bengals would “keep fighting, get wins [and] make the playoffs” in his absence, the sudden end to his season is the worst-case scenario for a team that won the AFC Championship just two years ago. Despite spending much of his night fleeing from the Ravens’ pass rush, QB Jake Browning managed to keep his head about him, connecting on eight of 14 passes for 68 yards and a touchdown. He also gained 40 yards on the ground on four carries.

If Browning exemplified the NFL’s next-man-up mentality, the loss of Burrow makes the Bengals a tough late-season draw for the league’s TV partners. Thanks to a new set of flexible scheduling rules that kicked in ahead of this year’s campaign, ESPN/ABC should be able to swap out the slated Bengals-Jaguars game on Dec. 4, pending NFL approval. (The revised procedures allow for changes to be made in the Monday Night Football schedule in Weeks 12-17, an option that may be used “at the NFL’s discretion.”)

Things get a bit more complicated in late December, with NBC set to air an afternoon Week 16 Bengals-Steelers scrum on Saturday the 23rd, while CBS has the Bengals and Chiefs penciled in for its national broadcast window on New Year’s Eve. Any Sunday Night Football flex in Weeks 15-17 must be approved by the NFL, but it stands to reason that the league would not have an issue should NBC decided to replace the AFC North game with the primetime Bills-Chargers showdown that’s slated to stream on Peacock. NBC did not respond to a query about the matter.

CBS, for its part, may lobby the NFL to bump up the 1 p.m. ET Dolphins-Ravens game to the 4:20 p.m. ET national window, thereby giving the network a shot at a far larger audience just before denizens of the Eastern Time Zone start heading out for their New Year’s parties. (As 48% of all U.S. TV homes are situated in this area of the country, there’s little reason to believe that the NFL wouldn’t approve such a relatively minor shift.)

CBS did not offer any insight into whether it might be looking to make alternate plans for Amateur Night, although shifting the Miami-Baltimore game into the coast-to-coast slot would go a long way toward insuring its advertisers’ investments. According to media buyers, 30-second ad units in the much-anticipated Bengals-Chiefs broadcast sold for north of $900,000 a pop.

Burrow’s injury takes a lot of the savor out of the Bengals-Chiefs pairing, as his air battles with Patrick Mahomes have helped fashion one of the NFL’s most compelling rivalries. The two teams have battled it out in the last two AFC Championship Games, with K.C. taking the upper hand earlier this year in front of an audience of 53.1 million CBS viewers, while Cincy punched its ticket to the Super Bowl in 2022 with a 27-24 victory.

As a resigned Burrow acknowledged during Friday’s presser, “It is what it is.” Teams that have lost their starting QBs to injury this season include the Jets (Aaron Rodgers, Achilles), Colts (Anthony Richardson, shoulder), Vikings (Kirk Cousins, Achilles), Giants (Daniel Jones, ACL) and Browns (Deshaun Watson, shoulder). Burrow and the Bengals may not be alone in their disappointment, but there’s little comfort to be gained in being a member of this season’s sidelined quarterback club.

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