What should have been the best Thursday Night Football game of the season so far instead turned into a disaster. Joe Burrow left the game injured and is now out for the season, as the Bengals lost and fell to 5-5.
Burrow's absence means Jake Browning presumably takes over the reins at quarterback for the remaining seven games, and you're forgiven if you don't know much about Browning. He's an undrafted 27-year-old from the University of Washington who had thrown exactly one NFL pass before taking the field against the Ravens. Browning last played regular football in college in 2018.
So, is Cincinnati's season over without Burrow? What's the fallout for the Bengals this season and beyond? What's this mean for the rest of the AFC? For bettors? Let's dig in.
This is Disastrous for Cincinnati, Both Now and Beyond
There's no way to sugarcoat losing a consensus top-three quarterback.
This is a disaster for Cincinnati.
No position in sports is more important than quarterback, and arguably only one player in the sport is definitely more valuable to his team than Burrow. You might be able to handle a half or a game without your superstar franchise quarterback, but there's no coming back from losing him for the season.
Cincinnati's season is likely over.
Burrow started the season with a lingering calf injury, but was playing at an MVP level in recent weeks. He and the Bengals had dug an early hole, but suddenly looked every bit like the team they were supposed to be, a contender that could beat any team on any day. You're forgiven if you think the Bengals were going to get that win in Baltimore last night too — sure looked like it!
The drop from Burrow to the unknown, Browning, is staggering. I wrote earlier this week about the drop off from Deshaun Watson to Dorian Thompson-Robinson and P.J. Walker, as going something from like the No. 20 quarterback to around No. 50. This is an even more jaw-dropping fall, from the No. 3 quarterback to perhaps even lower than 50 with Browning so thoroughly unknown.
Heading into last season, our Sean Koerner made Burrow worth +5.5 points to the Bengals. Browning was worth -4. Some other quarterbacks by comparison: Bailey Zappe -2, Brett Rypien -2, Walker -2, Joshua Dobbs -2.5, Skylar Thompson -3.5. There's some hope seeing then-unknown Dobbs on the list, but it's telling that Browning is rated behind all of them and ahead of just a few players on the entire list.
(Editor's note: Koerner says he's updated Browning to closer to -1.5 and around a 6.5-point dropoff for the Bengals. Still pretty massive — like starting every game down a touchdown going forward!)
So how much does losing Burrow hurt Cincinnati's overall outlook? It's obviously devastating.
In my roster rankings matrix, the Bengals drop from third best to third worst at quarterback. The single change drops Cincinnati's offense from sixth all the way to 22nd, and it drops the Bengals as a team from ninth to 18th. The Bengals went from a serious contender like Dallas or Detroit, to a total pretender like Atlanta.
And that's just making the one change.
The cascading effect will likely be worse. No Burrow likely means even worse results from an already blah offensive line, and it puts the the struggling defense into an even bigger hole. It might mean not rushing injured players like Tee Higgins or Sam Hubbard back into the lineup and playing the long game instead.
The Bengals without Burrow are a mediocre team with a 5-5 record staring down the gauntlet of a brutal seven-game closing stretch without a single team below .500 on the schedule:
- Steelers
- at Jaguars
- Colts
- Vikings
- at Steelers
- at Chiefs
- Browns
The Bengals are 0-3 in the division. They're 1-5 in the AFC. Those are both important postseason tiebreakers and, after Thursday's loss, only two teams in the AFC have more losses than Cincinnati. In other words, the Bengals are tied for the 14-seed in the loss column.
The schedule is brutal. At 5-5 in the loaded AFC, the Bengals probably have to finish 5-2 to even have a shot at the postseason. And even then, they lose most tiebreakers. The Bengals will be significant underdogs in Jacksonville and Kansas City. They likely have to win one of those and sweep the rest.
Cincinnati was +275 to miss the playoffs before the season, my top Bengals preseason bet with the uncertainty surrounding Burrow's health. The Bengals were +240 to miss the playoffs just one week ago when I recommended them again. The path was always going to be so narrow with the early-season losses while Burrow was hurt, and the margin too thin. That margin, now, is gone.
At least 10 AFC teams have better, clearer playoff chances by my count. Odds have yet to reopen for Cincinnati, but they will undoubtedly be very long.
The Bengals aren't terrible, not with so many weapons and other good players, but they're now a subpar team facing a daunting closing schedule without their leader and best player. Invest at your own risk.
But it's not just this year at stake for Cincinnati.
This was an all-in season for the Bengals. It was the final year of Burrow's rookie deal at a measly $1 million base salary. Now a fat — and deserved — extension starts to kick in, and those extra tens of millions going to Burrow will have to be cut from somewhere else. This was the year the Bengals wanted to push for a Super Bowl ring. Now, they'll have to trim the fat.
We might very well have seen our last Burrow-to-Higgins connection, for example. It's hard enough to invest in one superstar receiver with a franchise quarterback — see also Patrick Mahomes and Tyreek Hill, Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams, etc. — but paying a second star at the position is likely out of the question. Higgins wants to be a go-to guy, and he'll be paid like one wearing some other team's colors next fall.
Other names on the roster will go too. This was an all-in roster, much like Buffalo, and sometimes when you go all-in, you bust. The Bengals just busted.
It could be the end of the era for not just this version of the roster, but also the coaching staff.
Lou Anarumo is one of the most respected defensive coordinators in the business and could get a chance elsewhere. Brian Callahan is a rising offensive coordinator. Either or both could get a head coaching call, especially now that they'll have a little extra time to take interviews instead of focusing on a playoff push.
There's no silver lining or sugarcoating it for Cincinnati. This is the end of the Bengals season and maybe the end of an era.
But if the Bengals lost so much, someone else must be a winner, right?
Who Wins with the Burrow Injury News?
So, who wins with the Burrow injury news?
It's a cold question, and let's first acknowledge that the answer is no one. We all lose here as fans of the game, as fans who don't get to see Burrow and the Bengals offense in great games down the stretch, going to Jacksonville and Kansas City, fighting and clawing for the playoffs.
Everybody loses.
But the big winners here, the very clear winners, are the Pittsburgh Steelers.
A live look at the AFC north pic.twitter.com/Bo9l4yJGJD
— Matt Light 🐐 (@MattLight) November 17, 2023
The Steelers are the luckiest team so far this season in our proprietary Luck Rankings, and the lucky just got luckier twice in the past few days. Pittsburgh was already one of the big beneficiaries of Watson's injury, and now the Steelers will luck into facing backup rookie quarterbacks in back-to-back weeks in huge road games against division rivals, with Cleveland and Cincinnati next on the schedule.
The Steelers have yet to face the Bengals, which means Pittsburgh gets two games against Browning instead of Burrow down the stretch. That's an advantage over the rest of the division and the rest of the league. The Steelers are 6-3 and play their next six games against Thompson-Robinson, Browning, the Cardinals and Patriots, Gardner Minshew (another backup) and Browning again.
Pittsburgh started the week +5 at Cleveland and +6 on the Week 12 Lookahead line in Cincinnati. The Steelers will likely close as close to a pick'em in both games. That's the difference.
In Tuesday's Power Rankings, I recommended the Steelers at +116 to make the playoffs, an implied 46% at FanDuel. That number rose one day later to -120 (implied 55%) with the Watson news, and now sits at -220, an implied 69%.
Pittsburgh's implied postseason chances have risen from 46% to 69% without it doing a single thing this week. Charmed life.
For what it's worth, Aaron Schatz and FTN have the Steelers at 77.4% to make the postseason after Thursday night's game, implying there's still some value on Pittsburgh. You could argue the Steelers are maybe the fourth-most likely playoff team in the AFC now.
The better swing might be a more aggressive one: Pittsburgh +470 to win the AFC North. That's implied 17.5% versus 22.3% per FTN, and it's a juicy payout considering the three teams competing just lost two quarterbacks for the season and saw the third one pick up a quarterback injury and lose its most reliable receiver in Mark Andrews.
(Don't overreact to Andrews, though. He's important, but his loss dropped Baltimore a whopping one spot in my offensive and overall rankings. Quarterbacks and tight ends aren't the same.)
Who else wins outside of Pittsburgh?
Pick another team on Cincinnati's schedule. This gives a little extra life to the Colts and Browns in the AFC playoff race. Cleveland ends its season in Cincinnati and that might be a win-and-in game. Even teams like the Jets and the Bills, teams on the fringe of the playoff race, get a little extra life with the Bengals slipping.
The Chiefs' path to the No. 1-seed gets a little easier, so too does a potential Super Bowl run without having to face the one guy who has gone toe-to-toe with Patrick Mahomes over the years.
The Vikings are another quiet winner.
Minnesota is the only team in the NFC that lucks into facing Browning instead of Burrow. The Vikings are 6-4, two games ahead of every other NFC wild card (the Buccaneers are technically 1.5 back) and still have games against the Broncos, Bears, Raiders, Packers and the Burrow-less Bengals. The only winning team left on the schedule is the Lions, and Detroit might be resting by a Week 18 matchup.
The Vikings are -200 to make the playoffs at DraftKings, implied 66.7% versus 80.6% at FTN. But depending on how you feel about the Lions, you can be more aggressive.
If you think Dobbs and Minnesota can come all the way back and sweep Detroit in Weeks 16 and 18 to steal the NFC North, the Vikings could be a value at +800 to win the division (PointsBet).
If you like the Lions and think they'll roll safely to the division title, then give up that portion of the pick and bet the Vikings to be an NFC wild-card team at -125 at DraftKings. That's implied 55.6% versus an even 70% implied at FTN and might be the best sneaky value on the board.
