The QB Cincy needed: Jake Browning making most of his unexpected chance

Jake Browning is authoring an impressive, out-of-nowhere success story. It took only five years for him to get here.

There’s a general career track for a certain kind of quarterback on the edges of the NFL. These cats were the absolute best talent their hometown ever produced, and they played their way into local-legend status at their university. One day they’ll run a profitable insurance agency or car dealership in their college town — but not before taking one last swing at an NFL career.

Most times, they’ll get a gig as a backup, wearing a baseball cap and watching from the sideline for a season or two. They’ll get in for a mop-up series or a spot start as an injury replacement, and they’ll be able to tell their golf buddies for the rest of their days the story of how Aaron Donald sacked them or Jalen Ramsey intercepted them. All things considered, it’s not a terrible way to close out a football career.

Jake Browning seemed locked into this path. A high school star in Folsom, California — he threw a record 91 touchdowns his senior year and 229 touchdowns in his career — he went on to a productive run at Washington. The 2016 Offensive Player of the Year for the Pac-12 (RIP), he signed with the Vikings as an undrafted free agent in 2019 and spent most of his two years with the team on the practice squad.

Minnesota cut Browning for good in September 2021, and he reckoned with the potential end of his career in a heartfelt Instagram post. “So now what?” he wrote. “Right now, my plan is to figure out somewhere to volunteer coaching and continue to stay in shape in case I get a call for a tryout somewhere. There is always the possibility of a comeback, but I do not want to let the chance of that keep me from living my life.”

A few days after that, Cincinnati gave Browning a lifeline, picking him up and signing him to another practice squad. He played his way onto the active roster earlier this preseason.

After four seasons on the outside looking in, Browning finally took a regular-season NFL snap earlier this year. He got in some garbage-time play in Cincinnati’s season-opening 24-3 loss to Cleveland, throwing an incomplete pass, handing off twice and kneeling down to end the game. Had Joe Burrow remained healthy, that probably would have been it for Browning’s 2023 output.

But when Burrow suffered a season-ending wrist injury, Browning’s career found another gear. He lost his first start, against Pittsburgh in late November, but ever since, he has been one of the hottest quarterbacks in the league.

Over the past three games, he has completed 79 passes for 953 yards, five touchdowns, two interceptions and — most importantly — three victories. He has kept Cincinnati in the middle of an extremely tight playoff race, keeping pace with the six other teams within one game of the Bengals.

Browning’s key moment of this run — hell, maybe one of the key moments of the entire season — came just last week, after he led the Bengals to an overtime win over the Vikings. Yes, the same Vikings that cut Browning without so much as a phone call.

“Should’ve never f***ing cut me!” Browning bellowed, slamming his helmet to the ground in exultation.

“You can’t say that the whole week and then go lose,” Browning said afterward. “You just wait until you win, and then you don’t look like an idiot.”

Browning is winning praise from his teammates and Bengals fans for his authenticity and openness. Burrow gifted Browning’s family the use of his suite. And he’s starting to get recognized, every now and then, when he’s out and about in Cincinnati.

“I can blend in pretty well,” he said last week. “I don’t stand out a ton. That’s probably part of why it took me so long to get on the field.”

His low-key nature has helped the Bengals on the field, too. “Jake's just so steady, you know? He really is,” Bengals head coach Zac Taylor said after the victory over the Vikings. “He doesn't get rattled by a negative play. He doesn't overreact to it.” Taylor noted, for instance, that Browning rebounded from an interception against Minnesota to engineer a crucial touchdown drive the next time he touched the ball.

At the moment, Cincinnati sits in the sixth playoff spot — which, right now, means a date with Kansas City — with head-to-head tiebreakers over Indianapolis and Buffalo. The Bengals close with road games against the Steelers and Chiefs, then finish the regular season at home against the same Browns that whomped them back in September.

Browning is playing the final games of his one-year, $750,000 contract with the Bengals. Another, much larger one likely awaits, whether in Cincinnati backing up Burrow or in another city running the show himself.

Looks like the after-football hometown job will have to wait a little longer.