Joe Burrow’s NFL playoff success with Bengals predicted by former Ohio State teammate
Joe Burrow has taken the NFL by storm during his second season and is now one win away from a Super Bowl berth, a moment predicted five years ago by former Ohio State teammate Mike Weber. The two shared the same backfield during the 2016 season prior to Burrow opting to finish his college career at LSU, where he won the Heisman in 2019 as an unbeaten national champion.
“Joe Burrow is the Next Tom Brady and y’all don’t even know it,” Weber tweeted Feb. 6, 2017, a year prior to Burrow leaving Ohio State for Baton Rouge.
Tom Brady, a seven-time Super Bowl champion and arguably the best quarterback of all-time, won his first world championship in 2002 after his second full season in the NFL. Burrow has a shot at doing the same if the Bengals are able to take out the Kansas City Chiefs next weekend in the AFC Championship Game.
Burrow threw for 348 yards against the top-seeded Tennessee Titans over the weekend despite being sacked nine times. Burrow said after the game that the Bengals took a giant leap as a team.
“Just got a lot of tough people within the locker room and I think guys that have gone through a lot of adversity in their careers,” Burrow said when asked about the reason for the team’s success. “Whether it’s in college or in the NFL, we have guys that are battle-tested.”
“I thought I played well,” Burrow said of his effort against the Titans. “Really well in the first half, but obviously there’s always room to improve, a couple throws I would have probably liked to have back, but I thought I made plays when I needed to.”
The Bengals did as a team, and now they find themselves just one win away from their first Super Bowl since the Boomer Esiason era.
“I think one, we brought in a lot of guys that have been in this kind of moment in this game,” Burrow said. “And two, we’re also a really young team that doesn’t really … we don’t know what we don’t know. So we’re out there playing football with our friends. And so that’s what it’s like.”
Burrow’s college and Bengals teammate Ja’Marr Chase said Burrow’s mentality helped set the stage.
“Joe’s mindset is unbelievable, man,” Chase said on SiriusXM NFL Radio following the game. “He’s always thinking ahead and thinking positive. That’s the type of quarterback we need on our type of team. He reads the defense perfectly. He sees stuff the defense throws at him when he’s really not supposed to see it. He’s just all around a great player with everything he does.”
Coming out of The Plains (Ohio) Athens, Burrow was rated a four-star prospect and the No. 8 dual-threat quarterback in the Class of 2015, according to the industry-generated 247Sports Composite Rankings.
His final season at LSU was one of the best ever for a quarterback after he threw for 5,671 yards and 60 touchdowns.
Kevin Flaherty contributed to this report.
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