Joe Burrow, the Bengals quarterback who asked whether football was still fun

Joe Burrow

Photo: The White House from Washington, DC / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 10, 1996 Ames
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award · Heisman Trophy · Associated Press College Football Player of the Year

Last December, on his birthday, the holder of the NFL’s career record for completion percentage stood at a lectern in Cincinnati and said something franchise quarterbacks are trained never to say out loud. He had to enjoy football to keep playing it, he explained, and asked whether he was enjoying it right now, he admitted he was not. Joe Burrow was a few weeks back from another surgery, on a team already out of the playoff race, and the remarks set off weeks of speculation about his future. Eleven months later the same man is throwing touchdown passes at the Santiago Bernabéu and the Cincinnati Bengals are winning again.

What he was really asking is the question his whole career has been asking. What happens to a quarterback who reads a defence faster than almost anyone alive when his body keeps taking the decision away from him? A knee, a wrist and a toe have each ended or swallowed a season. Each time he has returned sharper, which is why he is only the second player ever to win Comeback Player of the Year twice. The comebacks made the reputation. The absences wrote the record.

Joseph Lee Burrow was born in Ames, Iowa, on December 10, 1996, while his father, Jim, was on the coaching staff at Iowa State. Jim’s career on the sidelines lasted more than forty years, and the family followed it through Nebraska and North Dakota before settling in Athens, in the Appalachian corner of southeast Ohio, when he became defensive coordinator at Ohio University. At Athens High School in The Plains, the son threw for 157 touchdowns, won Ohio’s Mr. Football award as a senior in 2014 and was also named first-team all-state as a basketball point guard.

Ohio State was supposed to be the obvious next step and became a three-year wait. Burrow redshirted, backed up J.T. Barrett, graduated in three years with a degree in consumer and family financial services, and in the spring of 2018 watched the starting job tilt towards Dwayne Haskins. “I didn’t come here to sit on the bench for four years,” he told reporters after the spring game. A few weeks later he was a graduate transfer at LSU.

The 2019 season at LSU is still the benchmark for college quarterbacks. Working with passing game coordinator Joe Brady, who treated him as something close to a co-author of the game plan, Burrow threw 60 touchdown passes, an FBS record, and won the Heisman Trophy by the largest margin in the award’s history. He threw seven touchdown passes in the first half of the Peach Bowl semifinal against Oklahoma and beat Clemson 42–25 for the national title. His Heisman speech, which mentioned the poverty and hunger around Athens, brought around $450,000 in donations to the Athens County food bank shortly afterwards.

The Bengals took him first overall in the 2020 draft, and he set an NFL rookie record with 37 completions in a single game before his left knee gave way at Washington’s stadium in Landover that November, with the ACL and MCL torn. He came back in 2021 and threw for a franchise-record 4,611 yards and 34 touchdowns. In January he won Cincinnati’s first playoff game since the 1990 season, ending the longest active drought in the four major North American sports, then led a comeback from 21–3 down at Kansas City to reach Super Bowl LVI. The Los Angeles Rams won it 23–20 after sacking him seven times; his 19 sacks across that postseason are still a record. A year later, with his LSU receiver Ja’Marr Chase beside him again, he took the Bengals back to the AFC Championship Game and lost to the Chiefs by the same score.

The flattering version of the story ends there, with a young quarterback already measured against Tom Brady and a franchise remade around him. The less comfortable version starts with the contract. In September 2023 Burrow signed a five-year, $275 million extension that briefly made him the highest-paid player in NFL history by annual average. Two months later he tore a ligament in his right wrist and the season ended in November. In 2024 he led the league in passing yards, with 4,918, and touchdown passes, with 43, and the Bengals still finished 9–8 and missed the playoffs. In 2025 a sack against Jacksonville in the second week left him with severe turf toe and ligament damage; he had surgery, returned on Thanksgiving to beat Baltimore 32–14, and watched a 6–11 season become the third straight without a playoff game. His best individual numbers have arrived in exactly the years his team went nowhere, and the December remarks were read in that light. A source close to him called the reaction dramatic and said the point was winning, not his mental health; he was neither seeking a trade nor considering retirement.

This season has been the answer he did not get to give in December. Healthy entering his seventh season, he threw four touchdown passes in a 35–13 win at Baltimore in October and was named AFC Offensive Player of the Week. On November 1 against Tennessee he threw for 462 yards and five touchdowns, survived three interceptions and ran in the winning score from nine yards out in overtime for a 43–36 win, the first time since Norm Van Brocklin in 1951 that a quarterback had passed for at least 450 yards and five touchdowns and also scored on the ground. A week later, in his first regular-season game outside the United States, he completed 24 of 29 passes for 271 yards and three touchdowns as the Bengals beat Atlanta 34–17 in Madrid to move to 6–2.

Away from the field he keeps a chessboard in his locker, listens to Kid Cudi before games and opened his 2024 season to Netflix cameras for the second season of Quarterback, released in July 2025 alongside Jared Goff and Kirk Cousins. In March 2026 he played in the Fanatics Flag Football Classic and said he would like to represent the United States in flag football at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The schedule now offers him a pointed pair of dates: Pittsburgh at home on Sunday night, November 15, against the team that beat Cincinnati in September, and eight days later a Monday night trip back to Landover, the stadium where he was carted off the field as a rookie and where the question of his body first got asked.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football players, Super Bowl LVI, Cincinnati Bengals, Joe Brady, Ja'Marr Chase, Joe Burrow, LSU Tigers