Nobody Wastes Their QBs Like the Bengals 🐅
Joe Burrow's 2024 is just the latest example of Cincinnati squandering an elite passing season.
If it weren’t for the perpetually hapless division rival Cleveland Browns, the Cincinnati Bengals might have a case as the NFL’s biggest sad-sack franchise. Since coming into existence in 1968, only the Cardinals, Lions, Jets, Falcons and Browns have lost more games than the Bengals; they’re also one of only two franchises that old — along with the Falcons — who never won a single championship in any pro league.1
And unlike fellow Super Bowl-less club members Detroit, Buffalo, Minnesota and the L.A. Chargers, that’s not likely to change this season. According to the Elo ratings, Cincy only has a 12 percent chance to make the playoffs, with a miniscule 0.2 percent Super Bowl probability. Barring a Bengals win and losses by both Miami and Denver, another year will have passed without a title in Cincinnati.
“Passed” is kind of the operative word there. The Bengals have been one of the NFL’s best teams at passing, the sport’s most valuable activity: Cincy ranks fifth in adjusted net YPA and fourth in Expected Points Added, while starter Joe Burrow is No. 2 in Total QBR and third in EPA over replacement. Burrow’s performance has even garnered some MVP buzz, a reflection of how the QB’s stellar production — throwing to his BFF WR Ja'Marr Chase, who leads the league in catches, receiving yards and receiving TDs — has kept Cincinnati’s playoff chances alive at all.
But as is often the case with the Bengals, other factors have conspired to probably squander Burrow’s remarkable season. As strong as they are on offense, Cincy ranks fourth-worst in points allowed and fifth-worst in EPA defense. Gone is the team that ranked sixth-best in scoring defense in 2022, narrowly missing a second consecutive Super Bowl appearance in the AFC title game. Now Burrow is putting the finishing touches on the best season of his NFL career, and Cincinnati likely will have nothing to show for it.
This is the Bengals’ way, though. In fact, Burrow is far from the first quarterback to don the tiger stripes and put up elite numbers, despite the franchise’s otherwise non-storied history. Since the Bengals’ very inception, Cincinnati has enjoyed some of the best QB play of any NFL team — and they’ve almost always gotten above-average production from the position. When you scan through which QBs they’ve had, and how well they’ve tended to play, it’s mind-blowing that this franchise has never won a championship.
Let’s go back to the AFL merger and the 1970 Bengals, who employed Virgil Carter under center. Though Carter was accurate and had been the earliest prototype for BYU as a “QB U” in college, Cincy had planned for him to back up rifle-armed Greg Cook — but an injury to Cook pressed Carter into action, and forced a young offensive coach named Bill Walsh to find a scheme that would accentuate his strengths.
With a focus on short, well-timed passing, Carter became the first QB to direct Walsh’s attack that would later come to be known as the West Coast Offense. And by his second season as the team’s primary starter, Carter ranked fourth in the league in adjusted net YPA and third in passer rating. The cerebral Carter went on to become a football-analytics pioneer,2 but he also set the tone for Cincinnati as a passing hub — a tradition elevated even further by his successor, Ken Anderson.
Unlike Carter, whose physical limitations lowered his ceiling as an NFL QB, Anderson represented a Hall of Fame talent at the helm of Walsh’s groundbreaking offense. He led the league in completion percentage and passing yards (multiple times) under Walsh’s tutelage, then continued to thrive even after the coach had a falling out with Paul Brown and moved on to Stanford — and then the 49ers.
Anderson’s 1981 season was a masterpiece; he had the 10th-most yards and 16th-highest passer rating ever (through that season), and narrowly missed one of the rare 30-TD pass campaigns in history at the time. He also led the Bengals to the Super Bowl — surviving the coldest game in NFL history (by wind chill) for the AFC title — before falling short after a failed comeback against his former boss, Walsh.
In 1985, an aging Anderson handed the reins to lefty Boomer Esiason, who continued to uphold Cincinnati’s passing standard into its third decade. Esiason had his version of Anderson’s 1981 season in 1988, leading the league in adjusted net YPA and passer rating, winning MVP and taking the Bengals to another Super Bowl against Walsh and the 49ers. All Cincy needed to do was keep Joe Montana from driving down the field in the game’s final minutes… but we all know how that went.
After Esiason declined in the next few seasons and the Bengals took run-and-shoot QB bust David Klingler out of Houston in the 1992 draft, it looked like Cincinnati’s passing well might be drying up. But with a struggling Klingler injured, the team turned to former sixth-round pick Jeff Blake, whose elite deep-throwing skills immediately meshed with WR weapons Carl Pickens and Darnay Scott. Blake made the 1995 Pro Bowl and was one of the more underrated QBs of the mid-1990s before falling off and being replaced by free agent Neil O'Donnell and another draft bust, Akili Smith.
This was another moment when the Bengals’ QB factory could have shut down business for the foreseeable future. But once again, Cincinnati was able to scrounge around for underrated talent — this time in the form of journeyman Jon Kitna, who’d been discarded by Seattle. While Kitna struggled badly in 2001, his first season as a Bengal, he rebounded to post good numbers over the next two years, winning Comeback Player of the Year in 2003.
Ahead of that same year, Cincinnati drafted yet another QB: USC’s Carson Palmer. And Palmer was no bust. In 2004, he was ready to be the Bengals’ starter, and after some growing pains that year, by 2005 he was leading the league in completion percentage and TD passes. If not for Kimo von Oelhoffen diving onto his left knee, tearing Palmer’s ACL and MCL, who knows how far he might have led the Bengals that postseason.
Palmer would rehab the injury and lead Cincy back to the postseason again in 2009, before having an ugly separation from the franchise in 2011. By then, the Bengals had drafted another QB for the future: TCU’s Andy Dalton.
A whole book could be written about the complex Bengals-Dalton dynamic, from his place as the franchise’s all-time TD pass and completion leader to the way he epitomized the trap teams increasingly find themselves in after paying franchise QBs who may not be good enough to win Super Bowls. But for our purposes here, Dalton was a reliably solid-to-above-average QB who took Cincinnati to five straight playoff appearances in the early/mid-2010s.
Which brings us to Joe Burrow, who has been one of the NFL’s top QBs ever since his second season of 2021, which culminated in that Super Bowl run. According to EPA value over replacement per 17 games,3 Burrow’s 2024 campaign is the sixth-best by a Bengal QB since the merger, trailing only four Anderson years and Palmer’s 2005. He has more than upheld the now more than fifty-year (!) history of mostly good-to-great QB play from Cincinnati signal-callers. Here’s a plot of EPA over average per 17 team games for the Bengals’ primary starter by season from 1970-2024:
In terms of total value over average from primary QBs over that span, only the Niners, Cowboys, Vikings, Packers, Saints and Colts have been better — teams that, with the exception of Minnesota (more on them later), have also won Super Bowls during that period.
In fact, given the increasing importance of passing the ball since the dawn of the post-merger NFL, it would be somewhat difficult to be a consistently well-quarterbacked team and not win at least a title or two. In the spirit of my old Rivers Index stat — so named for Philip Rivers, the patron saint of productive quarterbacks whose teams could not get it done in the playoffs — we can use the data above on primary QB performance to create a logistic regression estimating how many Super Bowls each team “should” have won since the merger based solely on its production from behind center.
In terms of winning fewer Super Bowls than we would expect from their QBs’ performances, not even legendarily cursed franchises like the Vikings and Chargers can quite match the Bengals’ history of not converting passing excellence into championships since the merger.
Burrow has a chance to chip away at that trend this year if he and the Bengals can pull off their long-shot parlay and make the playoffs. (Many a talking head has called Cincy a team nobody wants to face in the playoffs, after all.) But more likely, Burrow’s 2024 season will go down in franchise history as another missed opportunity to throw onto the Bengals’ pile.
Someday, you have to figure this franchise will find a way to convert these elite passing performances into championships — whether with Burrow or the next successor to Anderson, Boomer, and company. But until then, the Bengals will remain synonymous with wasted QB greatness.
Filed under: NFL
The rest of the Super Bowl-less club is either younger (Jaguars, Panthers, Texans) or won pre-merger NFL titles or AFL titles, although the Vikings might qualify with Atlanta and Cincinnati; Minnesota’s lone pre-merger NFL crown came in 1969, which was in the Super Bowl era (thus leading to their loss to the Chiefs in Super Bowl IV).
He literally helped invent Expected Points Added!
Estimated for earlier seasons using boxscore passing/QB rushing stats.
Why do the Bengals have more "Expected SB Won" if the Vikings have more QB PAA?
Love this, although you gotta draw the injury-shortened career of Greg Cook into the equation. Virgil Carter came in after Cook's rookie season when he was instantly awesome, Burrow-like. Cook had rotator issues, something that might have been cleared up with surgery three or four decades later with technical advances but pretty much a career-killer in 1970. Shop and compare Cook's performances as a rook with Burrows's etc. I was a fan of the newbie team. Kinda broke my teenage heart when he had to hang'em up.