What will it take for Burrow and Bengals to stay fantasy stars, return to Super Bowl?

The first Super Bowl appearance of the Joe Burrow Bengals era has come and gone.

There seemed to be quiet confidence around this Bengals team all throughout Super Bowl week that even if they didn’t get this one, they’d be back. That reportedly extended to the post-game locker room, as well.

Usually a scene of utter dejection and despair, the mood of the Bengals could best be described as complicated following a game they let slip away.

Some of that is a deserved appreciation for the stunning and magical run they just went on. Burrow specifically talked about the need to respect and celebrate the mere accomplishment of getting to the Super Bowl with a special group of guys, a lesson he said he learned from watching Hall of Famer Kurt Warner’s “A Football Life.”

That’s a good perspective and while I can’t speak for players, I certainly feel those of us in the media should do a better job of sharing that viewpoint. A mere appearance should go a long way in determining players’ legacies. Winning is the obvious goal but it is incredibly hard just to get to the Super Bowl.

But that brings us to a second point.

It’s easy to say, “Burrow will be back” because he has an awful lot in his favor. He’s young. The core of this Bengals’ team shares that youth. Whatever the “it factor” is … Burrow definitely has it. It’s understandable if Cincinnati still carries that quiet confidence that they’ll get another crack at a Super Bowl with Burrow.

Still, we return to the hard truth that it’s difficult to just get to a Super Bowl. You need only look at some of the NFL's legends to absorb this reality.

Peyton Manning is the most obvious example. He’s one of the most decorated passers in league history but he spent 18 years in the NFL and “only” went to four Super Bowls. Nine years and two franchises separated his two wins out of those four showings. In the “non-Tom Brady” division, four is actually quite a lot. Only Brady (10) and John Elway (five) have appeared in more Super Bowls than Manning.

There are even more striking examples. Aaron Rodgers is almost without debate one of the five most gifted throwers of the football to ever hit the field. When he won the Super Bowl after the 2010 season at just 27 years old, it was easy to say this was the start of a multi-title run.

He hasn’t been back since.

Russell Wilson has been to two Super Bowls in his career. Those came at the end of his second and third seasons. The Seahawks have been annual playoff contenders (up until this past season) but Wilson hasn’t returned to the big game since the 2014 season.

The only non-Brady quarterback — whose prime came in the modern era — to appear in more than two Super Bowls was Ben Roethlisberger and even he’s a bit of a cautionary tale. Roethlisberger started hot by winning championships in his second and fifth seasons. He returned to the Super Bowl for the third time in 2010 (seventh season) but lost to Rodgers. Despite playing 11 more seasons, he never got back to another.

Patrick Mahomes is off to a Brady-like start with two Super Bowl appearances in his first five NFL seasons. If anyone is currently set to buck historical trends, it would be him — but I doubt we’ll ever see anything like Brady again.

Mahomes’ presence is yet another complicating factor for Burrow and Co.'s push to get back to a Super Bowl. As alien-level passers, Mahomes and another Burrow obstacle, Josh Allen, look like they’re set up to dominate the AFC’s playoff picture for years to come. Burrow is going to be right there in that mix but it’ll be a dogfight between those three to represent the conference in the Super Bowl for the next eight to 10 years — if everyone is lucky.

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And let’s not forget 2021 was likely a rare year where both Justin Herbert and Lamar Jackson miss the playoffs. Those guys will give Burrow a run for his money to be that third-best quarterback in the AFC over the next few years.

Perhaps more guys will get more bites at the apple in a post-Tom Brady NFL. But the AFC is a stacked conference and the road to the Super Bowl is going to be daunting on an annual basis.

So while all that confidence flowing through the Bengals’ organization thanks to the culture-changing presence of Burrow is earned, history shows it’ll take a lot more than that to return to the big stage.

Cincinnati cannot afford to rest on their laurels on offense. They’ll need to follow a detailed plan to get better over the next few months. Here's mine.

Step 1: Improve the offensive line

You could argue this should be Steps 1, 2 and 3. The Bengals cannot afford to carry this dramatic of a team weakness one more game.

The Bengals offense largely succeeded all season despite their bad offensive line. The problem with a unit like this, however, is that at any given moment it can sink your team in a game. The Bengals line picked the worst time of the season to have their lowest moment. Their 14 percent pass-block win rate was the lowest of any team in the NFL last season. It was only a matter of time until something like their Super Bowl performance happened. We can see a nightmare comparison forming, as well.

Everyone associated with the Bengals operation should be horrified that the name “Andrew Luck” has been bandied about alongside Burrow following the Super Bowl.

Luck himself was, just like Burrow, the type of franchise-changing figure that any team would move mountains to acquire. And just like Burrow, he was hammered behind bad offensive lines for years to start his career to the point that injuries began to sap time away from the gifted quarterback. By the time the Colts turned over to a new general manager who actually went all-in to turn the offensive line from a debilitating weakness to team strength, it was too late.

The love of football and the will to carry on had been beaten out of Luck. We all know how that story ended.

Burrow is a long way from turning into another Luck. But the quarterback did suffer yet another knee injury while getting pulverized in the Super Bowl. While he won’t need surgery as he did after tearing his ACL during his rookie year, he’ll spend his second-straight offseason rehabbing. It’s understandable that the specter of Luck at least haunted the chorus of discussion following Sunday’s game.

One year ago the Kansas City Chiefs watched their franchise quarterback get harassed for 60 minutes to the point that all his heroics couldn’t move the needle against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Brett Veach and Andy Reid vowed that would never happen again and aggressively went after fixing the line. The Chiefs traded a first-round pick for a veteran left tackle, signed the best guard on the market, spent a second-rounder on their new starting center and miraculously hit on their sixth-round pick in the form of their starting right guard.

It all worked. By the end of the 2021 season, the Chiefs’ line was a clear team strength after costing them a Super Bowl almost 12 months earlier. Pro Football Focus had them as the third-best run-blocking unit and sixth-best in pass protection.

Will the notoriously passive Bengals go all-in to fix this debilitating weakness? One source with intimate knowledge of the team threw cold water on this — former Bengals quarterback, Carson Palmer:

Now, Palmer obviously carries some bias here given his own clearly unsettled demons from his Cincy days. His words still matter in this case, however; his former reality as the last Bengals savior fighting against legends like Brady and Manning for AFC relevancy could look an awful lot like Burrow’s path warring with Mahomes and Allen over the next decade.

Just like Andrew Luck, we know how Palmer’s story ended and throwing a Palmer/Burrow comparison around is likely to draw even more fury from Bengals’ backers.

Duke Tobin, Zac Taylor and the entire Cincinnati Bengals’ brain trust can push away any of these way-too-hasty Luck or Palmer comparisons by doing what Kansas City did last year. Have some laser focus and vow to never put your franchise-changing player in the position you put him in on Sunday ever again.

Cincinnati can afford to make this the theme of their offseason because, while they have some other screws to tighten on the roster, they’re just about set from an offensive personnel standpoint. It doesn’t have to be major swings at the top of the market like Kansas City made in 2021 — that would be well out of character anyway — but it’s all about making sure they don’t carry any crippling weaknesses at one of the starting five spots.

No excuses. Get it done.

Step 2: Become less static

Samaje Perine’s whiff rush on 3rd and 1 on the final drive of the Super Bowl was a stunner for most casual observers. However, it helped highlight a strange reality that hung around Cincy all of 2021; Perine has been the team’s third-down/passing game back all season.

Giovani Bernard’s departure last offseason brought hope that Mixon’s receiving portfolio would expand. That didn’t happen, as he registered just 42 catches — the second-highest mark of his career. The 240-pound Perine and Chris Evans, to a degree, actually stepped into the Bernard role with 27 and 15 catches, respectively.

It’s a weird development considering Mixon and Perine actually split the same backfield back in college as well, but their roles were reversed. Perine was the early-down banger while Mixon was one of the more gifted passing-game backs in that year’s draft.

It’s fine if the Bengals want to give Mixon a break and Perine is far from the worst spell in the world. But their current deployment of these guys makes them too static and predictable.

If the Bengals sub out first-down Mixon runs with more targets to him in the passing game across all three downs, it can be part of the equation to boost this offense from its 11th in EPA per play ranking from last year up to a higher ceiling. They’re going to need that to consistently push for Super Bowl appearances in the AFC.

Step 3: Emphasize the quick game a bit more

Pulling off a Chiefs-style complete rebuild of an offensive line is going to be challenging. Even if they do it, Burrow and Co. might not reap the full rewards until later in the 2022 season when group chemistry and sync finally set in for the new line.

In the meantime, the best way to mask problematic pass protection is with the quick game.

Vertical shots and massive plays became the staple of the 2021 Bengals. Ja’Marr Chase led the NFL by a wide gap in 50-plus-yard plays. Burrow accumulated the fourth-most yards among quarterbacks on throws of 20-plus yards. No one is saying that needs to go away completely but it could be dialed back a bit in favor of a more low-risk, but still high reward, matriculating pass offense.

According to Next Gen Stats, Burrow threw into tight windows at the second-highest rate (19.2 percent) among relevant quarterbacks last year while sporting the ninth-highest air yards per attempt (8.3).

We can make his life a bit easier than this, Cincinnati.

We’ve already discussed involving Mixon more as a receiver but the other pass-catchers’ roles can evolve too. The Bengals started to move Chase around and get him more designed targets toward the close of the season following a mini-slump. More of that should be in order in his second season. Chase is a true, full-field No. 1 receiver but fellow young wideout Tee Higgins might, at worst, be a 1B-type. Higgins’ route tree can start growing more in-breaking branches over the middle, as this is an area where he’s quite deadly.

Chase and Higgins might become the new Mike Evans and Chris Godwin in fantasy football: Don’t waste precious earth seconds arguing over who is better. Just love and draft both of these guys. The Bengals can grow the appeal of both players by continuing to involve them as full-field route runners in the quick game.

Retaining C.J. Uzomah at tight end should also be a priority for this team. While he’ll never be some fantasy monster, he became an important blitz-beater for them throughout the season. The Bengals don’t need some Mark Andrews type at tight end with their wideout room set between their two stars and Tyler Boyd. Uzomah is more than good enough for this role.

Besides the overhaul of the offensive line, the Bengals don’t have a laundry list of offensive priorities this offseason. It’ll be more so about looking in the mirror and accurately self-assessing where some minor tweaks need to be made.

It’s all about realizing that, despite a superb run and a Super Bowl appearance that should be widely celebrated, the new-era Bengals can’t afford to rest on their laurels. History would suggest they can’t. The current stacked state of the AFC’s future confirms it.

It's time to get to work.

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