Not many teams that have missed the playoffs for three straight seasons are viewed as a team of destiny. That isn’t stopping Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow from attempting to speak a Super Bowl win into existence.
“I’ve never understood why people are scared to say it,” Burrow told Albert Breer of SI.com. “I guess people get scared of how the media will portray them or their team in a certain way. But you have to set expectations with yourself, your teammates, your organization. Everybody says they want to win the Super Bowl, you talk about it every day, you set that expectation every day, you go and work for it every single day. I mean, I don’t know the answer to that for everybody, but that’s what I want to do, that’s what I’m trying to do, that’s what I do this for.
“I won the championship in college, and there’s no freaking better feeling than that. And if you don’t talk about it, I don’t know how you can do it.”
He’s right about that. He’s also right about the other 31 teams having the same goal. Whether they talk about it or not, they enter each season at 0-0 and with high hopes.
For Burrow, he’s basing his belief on something tangible. He’s comparing the vibe at the 2026 Bengals to the sense he had at LSU, seven years ago.
“I don’t know, it just felt inevitable,” Burrow told Breer. “We finished stronger the year before. I knew how good Justin [Jefferson] was. I didn’t quite know how good Ja’Marr [Chase] was going to be yet because his superpower is after the catch, and in practice you can’t really see that. He was getting open and making plays. Obviously, that’s what he does, but what makes him one of one is after the catch. I realized that somewhere in the early 2019 season.
“But, yeah, I just knew how things felt around the building. I knew how practices were going. I knew that offense fit my skill set more so than any one I had been in. It just made sense to me. As I said, there was just a feeling around the building that it was inevitable.”
Burrow’s confidence in the Bengals is bolstered by the other side of the ball.
“The vibe of the defense is really good right now,” Burrow said. “Our defensive line is so deep this year. The depth of that unit was a weak point last year, [but] now we have nine or 10 guys that we feel good about putting out there in five-down sets. Obviously, Dexter [Lawrence II] plays a big role in that. Jonathan Allen plays a big role in that. And those guys have been vocal leaders for us to start this out, which is something that we needed.”
Whatever happens, the stakes are high. A fourth straight year with no postseason appearance will likely spark a coaching change. And it could make Burrow, after seven years in Cincinnati, look for a place where it will seem even more inevitable that he’ll be smoking a locker-room cigar in one or more of the remaining Februarys of his career.
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