Despite his very average 13-13 record as a starter the last two seasons, the NFL seems to be bringing back its Joe Burrow Agenda, something we commented on after the laughable playoffs of 2021 and 2022. Mostly because of his crooked college career at LSU, the NFL gets a lot of mileage from Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow himself—since the Cincy TV market is small and meaningless overall, really.

Burrow is beloved in SEC country as he couldn’t cut it at Ohio State and then somehow turned into Superman at LSU just in time for the College Football Playoffs in 2019—when the title game was coincidentally held in New Orleans. The guy has had every string seemingly pulled for him in the last handful of seasons, yet he is still just a .500 QB over the last two NFL seasons combined. Rough life, eh?

Just like Eli Manning, the NFL is determined to make an average talent into something “special” in the eyes of sucker fans. To wit, the Bengals started out 0-3 this season, and the league has done everything possible to get the team back into postseason contention, including yesterday’s overtime win against the Denver Broncos. Why not keep the foolish engaged in the chase? Cincinnati still has just a seven-percent chance.

A quick glance at his career stat sheet helps the Burrow cause, although we will remind everyone how mediocre he was in college at both Ohio State and LSU through 2018. Then he clearly made a deal with the devil to acquire needed skills, and this deal continues today, really: his career 68.4-percent completion rate is tops in NFL history, although the statistic is extremely biased/slanted toward present-day quarterbacks.

He does top the league this year, too, in a variety of counting statistics, but those are mostly because his team is so bad. His QB rating, currently 109.8 after yesterday’s game, trails the league leader (121.6) by quite a bit, even if Burrow’s mark is third in the league. His 7.7 yards-per-attempt mark, one of the demarcation points of QB quality in the NFL for years, is outside the Top 10 this year, currently. He’s all volume, really.

But hey, the Bengals have won their last four games in a row to stay alive: overall, Cincinnati is 8-8 now, despite going just 1-7 against probable playoff teams—the single win there being over the Broncos, which was somewhat suspect and came in overtime. Burrow still took seven sacks in the game, but with the officials calling more than twice as many penalties on Denver, the Bengals were able to overcome and win.

Uh huh.