The NFL at large hasn’t talked about Joe Burrow enough. While a lot of the conversation has rightly focused on the growth of Tua Tagovailoa or the emergence of the Minnesota Vikings and Kirk Cousins as a potentially elite quarterback, there hasn’t been much ink spilled over how well Burrow has performed over the past several weeks.
Pay Attention to Joe Burrow
Since Week 6, Burrow has generated a 120.0 passer rating, 8.58 yards per attempt, 8.19 adjusted net yards per attempt, and 0.303 in EPA per play, placing him second or third in every one of those categories in the last four weeks.
This has given him a 3-1 record over those games and helps put the Cincinnati Bengals in the driver’s seat for the playoffs.
His early-season struggles were chalked up in part due to the poor offensive line, but Burrow’s pressure rate hasn’t changed very much between the two splits. Instead, he’s made time in the pocket count for more.
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Since Week 6 and in a clean pocket, Burrow threw for 9.40 yards per attempt with a touchdown-interception ratio of 7:1. In Weeks 1-5, he threw for 7.1 yards per attempt in a clean pocket with a TD-INT ratio of 5:4.
Burrow is naturally a bit of a streaky quarterback, so some of these changes are just the product of variance and the type of quarterback he is. But a lot of it has to do with how much of a better job he’s been doing finding ways to get set against pressure and throw into intermediate windows.
Burrow Is Winning Intermediate Throws
Burrow’s intermediate performance has improved substantially, and his rate of off-target passes — non-spike, non-throwaway throws that hit his receiver’s hands — has dropped substantially intermediate throws, from 18.2% to 7.1%, per TruMedia.
Here, in Week 4 against Miami, we see an example of an intermediate throw under pressure where Burrow doesn’t set his feet, throwing it too far in front of his receiver with poor timing.
In Week 7, against the Falcons, Burrow did a much better job against pressure, placing the ball perfectly without any room to step up. His technical work as a thrower has always been top-notch. “Inaccurate” is a relative term for Burrow, who remains one of the most accurate quarterbacks in the NFL.
But here, we see the difference between consistently finding ways to rotate the hips and shoulders and taking on the entire throw with just arm movement. He’s found ways to improve his throwing motion without increasing his time to throw. In fact, Burrow’s time to throw has dropped from 2.52 seconds to 2.38.
Burrow Can Pull the Bengals Into the Division Lead
Burrow has had an odd career, with an injury-shortened rookie season that didn’t give us much in the way of evaluation, followed by a magnificent second year in the NFL. His third year has started off slow, but with the most recent games in the books, we might see him rise to the top of the quarterback ranks again, this time with a great defense backing him.
The Bengals are in the thick of the AFC North race, in part thanks to the stumbles of the Baltimore Ravens and Lamar Jackson in critical moments, along with quarterback uncertainty for his other two divisional rivals.
At 5-4, Cincinnati is only one game back from Baltimore, who they still have on the schedule. The Ravens currently have the head-to-head tiebreaker and will likely beat them out in the divisional record tiebreaker.
But when the two teams meet again, the Bengals can find a way not just to equalize the records and first tiebreaker, but put themselves in the driver’s seat to win the division outright.
With the way that Burrow is playing, this is more than possible.