The Bengals Are the NFL’s Best Cinderella Story in Decades

Joe Burrow says he doesn’t want to labeled an underdog, but it’s been a long time since a team came back from nothing this quickly.

At the college football level, a small number of coaches control so much of the power that the idea of a Cinderella postseason tournament run is not only unrealistic, it’s essentially blocked out of the rule book like some kind of Nick Saban–led political redistricting.

In the NFL, a relatively small number of coaches and general managers are so much smarter than everyone else, running a timely offense that gouges the weaknesses of whatever en vogue defense is spread around the league at the moment. This makes the idea of a Cinderella postseason run highly unlikely, especially when the processes of those smart teams are carbon copied, leaving us with a kind of pleasant homogeneity within the upper crust of football organizations.

But at both levels of football, Joe Burrow has managed to truly stun and amaze us, to conjure a storybook run at a time when even believing that his teams would be contenders would get you labeled a fool. First, LSU in 2019, amid the sea of Clemsons, Georgias, Alabamas and Ohio States. Now, the Bengals in ’22, after finishing the previous season 4-11-1. One more improbable than the last.

Cincinnati Enquirer/USA TODAY Sports

It simply feels strange to write the words: The Cincinnati Bengals are going to the Super Bowl. While the current roster has nothing to do with the franchise’s history of playoff heartbreak and, before that, outright ineptitude, these are the kinds of ghosts that tend to linger. Just ask the Browns. Just ask the Lions. This is a team with the fewest number of tickets betting them to win the big game at the beginning of the season. More people thought the Texans, a club led by a freewheeling former chaplain who helped trade away all their best players for scrap metal, would win Super Bowl LVI than the Bengals, in a year in which Houston was clearly, actively tanking. At this stage in the game, so many coaches feel the need to create fake narratives around the locker room that not a single person outside their close-knit group believed they could do it. Bengals head coach Zac Taylor needs to make no such effort. No one believed the Bengals would make the Super Bowl this year.

When was the last time the NFL had a true, from-nowhere team of destiny? The kind of Loyola-Chicago or George Mason bracket-busting run that melts us all into a pile of fanboy pudding? The Joe Flacco run was aided by multiple established Hall of Famers on defense. Eli Manning’s first title included similar talents and pedigrees. The Eagles jumped out to a 112 record before Nick Foles had teammates breaking out the dog masks. The answer may be the Legion of Boom or Tom Brady’s first title team, though none of the choices above bottomed out as deeply or recovered as quickly as these Bengals.

Following two decades of Patriots dominance, the emergence of Andy Reid’s unstoppable Patrick Mahomes–run machine, the Sean McVay and Friends School that is still cranking out graduates and the era of the super quarterback (Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and Brady), there didn’t seem to be any room for someone else to come along and surprise us. A few behemoths arise each year to crash down on the rest of the league like the Banzai Pipeline. So much of the NFL feels predetermined once you get halfway through a season. It’s clear which teams had the vision, picked the right players, hired the right coaches and got lucky enough with injury to pedal onward.

That wasn’t Cincinnati, a team that stood 5–4 midway through the season, after losses to the Jets and Browns. And while it’s imperative to mention at this point that the Bengals are not a team without superstars—Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, Jessie Bates III and D.J. Reader are among the three best players at their position—it’s also fair to acknowledge that there are greater collections of talent elsewhere. In fact, there are those who could make an argument that two other teams in the Bengals’ own division probably have more individual talent from No. 2 to No. 52 on their roster.

The Bengals’ defensive coordinator, Lou Anarumo, was reportedly Taylor’s third choice for the job. A decade ago, he was finishing up a lengthy stretch coaching defensive backs at Purdue. Four years ago, he was a position coach on a flailing Giants staff under then coach Pat Shurmur. Offensive coordinator Brian Callahan started calling offensive plays … when he got to Cincinnati. Google “Zac Taylor hot seat” and see how many people were excited about the idea of the former Rams offensive coordinator entering Year 3 as head coach of the Bengals.

But behind Burrow, this patchwork quilt of a football team has become fearless. They entered the playoffs less grateful to be there and more eager to middle-finger anyone who told them they didn’t belong—a stunning turn of events when juxtaposed against the moments this season when they looked like the team we thought they might look like (young, for another day, still terrifyingly incapable of protecting their franchise quarterback). The latter may still be true, given that Burrow has been sacked 10 times over the last 15 days.

The NFL is better for this. Those of us dunderheaded NFL analysts who picked the team to win three games back in August will (hopefully) be better for this. Any moment when we can drop the cynicism about the direction this league is taking and watch something that makes us believe anything can happen is better than believing Cinderella doesn’t exist around here.