The Joe Burrow Debacle
Tanking is a part of sports. It has been for a while now. For a long time however, the NFL remained absent of blatant tanking. The Lions and Browns were viewed as laughing stocks for decades. The losing they were doing came from inadvertent incompetence. That’s not the type of losing I care about right now. What I care about today is deliberate incompetence.
Tanking has been more highly focused on in the NBA in recent years. Teams like the New York Knicks attempting to lose all year long with awful roster decisions in an effort to get their hands on Zion Williamson. Tanking in the NBA has been around since the 80s, but until the Process struck the Philadelphia 76ers via Sam Heinke, the tanking was always somewhat thinly veiled. The 76ers blew the door wide open with their run from 2013 to 2016. The reason I bring all of this up is that in the NBA one player can completely change the outlook of a franchise. Every team is trying to get the number one pick for their chance at the next Kyrie Irving or the next LeBron James. These types of players take losing franchises and turn them into winning ones.
The NFL does not work this way. Say what you will about Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, these guys did not take awful franchises and single-handedly turn them into winners. Brady came into a Patriots team that had been to the Super Bowl just a few years prior, and the Colts had a great deal of young talent come in to propel them to contender status. In the NFL, there are too many moving parts on each individual franchise.
None of this is news. None of this is worth talking about let alone writing an article to be published on an up and coming journalism website. At least, it wasn’t until two weeks ago. The Cincinnati Bengals have spent the past five to seven years toiling in mediocrity. They tore their team apart piece by piece until finally in 2019 they were so bad they wound up with the number one overall pick in the 2020 NFL draft. The “Tank for Tua” narrative was gone, and in its place was now the cigar smoking bad-ass that is Joe Burrow. Joe Burrow set the college football world on fire that season and was the clear number one overall pick. The Bengals did not mess this one up. They selected Joe Burrow and he became the day one starter for a franchise that struggled to reach the two win mark the season prior.
Joe Burrow led the Bengals to a record of 2-6-1. This is a marked improvement on the season prior. Burrow was on pace to break every rookie passing record and he looked like he belonged behind center in the NFL. Then came week 11 where Joe Burrow would have a solid game until a sack would lead to Burrow tearing his ACL, MCL, Meniscus, and doing other structural damage as well. Joe Burrow was immediately shelved for the remainder of the season and may miss a significant portion of next season as well. Joe Burrow is already in his mid 20s. This kind of injury is not the type you just do some rehab for and it’s all good in the neighborhood after. Joe Burrow may legitimately never be the same after this. There is only one entity to blame for this travesty, the Cincinnati Bengals organization.
The organization has purged that team of talent. They have a few good young wide receivers, a fantastic running back in Joe Mixon, and nothing else. Joe Burrow had taken 32 sacks through eleven weeks. Burrow still currently ranks as third in sacks taken and has not played football for two weeks. Joe Burrow was only averaging 2.3 seconds per play of pocket time. That is a stunningly low number. In the off-season the Bengals signed two offensive linemen still currently on the team for a total of $12.5 million. They drafted one offensive linemen in the sixth round of the draft, and they traded Carlos Dunlap for a center, BJ Finney. Finney has not recorded a single snap for the Bengals this season.
The Bengals have actively harmed the career of one of the most promising young quarterbacks in this league since Andrew Luck. What the Bengals have managed to do for this team is be so startlingly incompetent as to genuinely jeopardize the future of their franchise when it looked like they had done exactly what they needed to in order to begin a path towards winning. The Bengals also currently possess over $10 million in unused cap space. The path for success for this team was to protect your most important asset, Joe Burrow, at any and all costs. They failed absolutely miserably at this. We may not see Joe Burrow until the 2022 season because of it. This superstar in the making may now never be the same because the organization failed to do its one damn job.
It makes me angry to see this. As a Chicago Bears fan I am stuck with a team that is rarely bad enough to have the shot at a great young QB and when we do have a chance we pick the worst one. The Bengals shat their way to a brilliantly talented quarterback and have done the literal most damage they could have to his promising career. Unfortunately this is not where the story is. The Joe Burrow rant is in itself an entertaining article, but the issue persists. Trevor Lawrence is the most can’t miss prospect entering an NFL draft since the aforementioned Andrew Luck. Even more unfortunately, the New Jersey Jets (they must earn the New York name back) sit at 0-12 and look primed for that number one draft spot. Adam Gase is an inept head coach, Dowell Loggains is an only somewhat more competent offensive coordinator, and Joe Douglas is a general manager that has managed to assemble a roster so lacking in NFL talent that a single win for this team would be genuinely shocking to most NFL experts.
Care to know what the Jets are giving up sack wise this season? They are allowing nearly three sacks per game which puts them as eighth worst in the league. However if we look at the percentage of sacks they are giving up they become the sixth worst team at nearly 8% of all pass plays ending in a sack. On top of this the New Jersey Jets have already ruined the career of one very talented quarterback in Sam Darnold.
The Jets are going to have the privilege of drafting Trevor Lawrence come next April. Frankly it is appalling. The NFL has no precedent to step in and stop them from being able to do it, nor should they be able to. These are the rules and the Jets are gaming them. It remains to be seen if the Jets will be as bad at this whole scenario as the Bengals were, but I doubt they will be much better. A staff overhaul and a considerable dump of assets into the free agency market in the form of wide receivers and offensive linemen is the one hope Lawrence has of this situation not being a complete bust, yet any Jets fan will tell you not to trust any of that to happen. If the Jets do not do anything about their various issues then we could be staring down the barrel of another immensely talented kid having his career ruined by a franchise that in no way deserves to be employing his services
Is there a solution? No. Unfortunately the only thing that could be done would be to shift towards the NBA’s system of a draft lottery and hope it dissuades a few teams from going fully into tank mode. It’s a genuinely unsatisfying conclusion. Quarterbacks are one of the few positions in sports that require a group of other players to prevent them from getting hurt and aid them in being productive. Part of the onus is on the front offices to provide the leader of the franchise with the protections he requires. NBA players get subjected to losing a lot and it's unfair but they can leave and the player empowerment era is real. NFL teams have the use of the franchise tag and can hold on to quarterbacks for two years longer then they would be able to otherwise. These factors make becoming the quarterback of a horrendously run franchise a definitively life altering proposition, and I only see one solution.
Players need to start pulling an Eli Manning. No longer can a guy like Trevor Lawrence go to the combine and talk about how he just wants to play ball and make the team that picks him better. If Trevor Lawrence is about to step into a dangerous situation, which he is, he needs to be empowered to say so. He needs to be able to influence the free agency actions of the teams ahead of him in an effort to protect his own safety. The NFL is a violent game and whether you like it or not the quarterbacks are its most precious resource. Except, until this point the resource has been treated like gold, to be mined and sold and used for whatever its purchaser sees fit. The quarterback position needs to be treated like a catastrophically endangered species of animal. Except these have voices that can be used to get their own respect from franchises. It’s time to see a form of the player empowerment movement in the NFL. If the franchises won’t step up and take care of the quarterbacks they draft, then it’s time the quarterbacks do it themselves.