Egger: Joe Burrow erases the Andy Dalton Face, but the Bengals still dont

June 02, 2024

What I like most about Joe Burrow is that if you ask me a question about him, I give you an answer without making a face.

I’ll tell you that I believe he’s very capable of fulfilling the tremendous obligation of being not only the Bengals’ franchise quarterback but also its savior.

I’ll tell you that the most enjoyable aspect of an otherwise mostly miserable 2020 Bengals season was watching Burrow grow into the role week to week, and sometimes series to series.

I’ll tell you how one of the worst things about his season-ending injury last year was being deprived of seeing that continued development pay off late in the season against lousy competition.

And I’ll tell you about how I’m as bullish on the idea that Burrow can soon play himself into the upper crust of NFL QBs, and as smitten with him as I was in the months before he was drafted.

Mainly though, I’ll tell you these things without doing much with my facial expression.

I used to talk often on my radio show about the Andy Dalton Face. No, not Andy Dalton’s face, but the Andy Dalton Face. It was the expression people would make when you would ask about whether Dalton would ever adequately possess the skills and intangibles required to lead the Bengals to a championship. Or whether he was worth giving a contract extension. Or whether he could simply raise his level of play from what it had been — which was often quite good — to something even better.

You’ve seen the face. It’s the one your boss has when you turn in work that both of you know is substandard. It’s the one my wife makes when I go clothes shopping and ask he how she feels about what I’ve bought. The one my editor makes when I pitch to him hair-brained column ideas. Sometimes it involves a wince. It usually involves a twisting of the lips. It sometimes resembles the expression a person might make when their coworker heats up some really stinky leftovers in the office microwave.

Even now, nearly two full years removed from when he last threw a pass in an orange and black-striped helmet, if you ask me how I feel about Dalton’s nine-season Cincinnati run, I’ll either have the look of someone who’s having a hard time swallowing or one struggling to remember a password to a subscription service they haven’t used in years.

I am not bringing up Dalton because I feel like taking a few cheap whacks at some low-hanging football fruit. I’m actually rooting for him to succeed in his next NFL chapter, bouncing around from team to team as a QB place keeper. Andy can spend a long time earning quite a lot of money being an interim stopgap/mentor, and I wouldn’t resent him at all if, in the process, he found his way onto a winning team with legitimate championship hopes.

But it wasn’t too long ago that we would spend the weeks leading up to a season trying to talk ourselves into the quarterback while otherwise having a pretty firm understanding of what he was surrounded by. For a while, certainly when the Bengals were at their mid-2010s best, you could look at a Bengals roster, see very few unknowns and, at times, very few weaknesses. You could absolutely try to talk yourself into the notion that with some bang-up quarterback play, the Bengals could go quite far.

Except that when you ran that notion past anyone, their face carried with it the same grimace of someone walking into a gas station restroom that hadn’t been cleaned.

The thing is, you can still find the Andy Dalton Face when you bring up the Bengals. Don’t believe me? Ask one of your buddies how they feel about the offensive line. Ask them about how they would have felt back in February if you had told them the Week 1 starters at guard would be Quinton Spain and Xavier Su’a-filo.

Find someone you know who follows the Bengals and see what their face does when you ask them what’s in store for a defense that might lead the NFL is casual viewers remarking, “Oh yeah, I remember that guy. He plays for the Bengals now?”

Hit up a tailgate this weekend and see if anyone will offer an expressionless vote of confidence in coach Zac Taylor and his staff giving this team a distinct advantage over their opponents.

Watching a franchise pile up a half-decade’s worth of dreck will allow for skepticism to accumulate. So when a team enters a season with as many unknowns as this year’s version of the Bengals, you can be excused for not assuming that everything that needs to go right will. Or that the way in which the people in charge of the roster have gone about building it will achieve results that have thus far been elusive.

Can the Bengals come close to winning more games than they lose in 2021? I can see the face you’re making.

Yet, I’d still rather be where are now versus where we were in the run-up to all those seasons when imagining the best for the Bengals required some self-convincing about the most important position on the team. Hopefully a year from now, we’ll be going into a season feeling great about the quality of play the Bengals will be getting from their quarterback and with optimism about nearly every other area on the team.

But we’re not there now, and yet presented with a chance to compare what it’s been like before going into a season and what it’s like now, I’ll take where we are.

Even if Burrow fell in their laps by being the league’s worst team in 2019, the Bengals have the sport’s most important piece in place, a cornerstone player at quarterback whose ascension hasn’t even really started, the foundational component around which everything should be built. If Burrow is as good as so many of us believe, the team itself will need to be very, very good, but it won’t need to be perfect.

And any unease surrounding the roster’s unknowns will be eased by having a known quantity where it matters most.

How you believe the Bengals will fare this season is likely a reflection of whether you’re pulled in one direction by the franchise’s history and a reluctance to assume positive outcomes where questions linger or yanked the other way because you believe that having a guy like Burrow can help them overcome whatever they may lack.

I can’t hot-take you and try to make you believe that the Bengals will make the playoffs this season. I’m not ready to claim that they’ll win more than they lose. I won’t even pretend that I’ve loved everything about the way the offseason unfolded or that I’m not at least slightly worried about Ja’Marr Chase’s drops and the team’s second-round pick, an offensive lineman, apparently not being anywhere close to contributing. I’ve never had less of a feel for what the Bengals might be on defense. And even if I really do think you can examine Taylor’s two and a half years on the job and see things that suggest he’s at least a competent coach, the truth is that none of us has any real grasp as to whether the front office got it right with him.

But I know how limiting it feels when you buy into your team but not your team’s quarterback and I’ve seen what it looks like when people’s faces recoil while trying to talk themselves into believing something different.

I don’t feel that way anymore. Ask me how I feel about the Bengals this season.

I’ll tell you with a straight face that I believe in their quarterback.

(Photo: Ian Johnson / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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