During Monday’s Super Bowl Media Day, Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow played it cool.
Only it was not the usual cool that has come to be synonymous with Burrow. There were no rimless square-frame Cartiers, no Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson black turtleneck or heart-printed sherpa jacket. Gone from view was the (quite large and very real) chain bearing his initials.
Instead, the NFL’s ‘Tiger King’ donned an uncomplicated Super Bowl LIV branded white zip-up with his hair lightly coiffed and he passed on a question about who his celebrity crush is.
Instead, Burrow focused on Sunday, stating the importance of delivering an on-field product behind which fans could rally. Ultimately, the session was very blingless and meme-less.
It was all very un-Joe Burrow. That is, it wasn’t the Burrow that the world has come to associate with this rock-and-roll Bengals team: cocksure, rousing, borderline irreverent.
Those are the personality traits that have come to be expected, if not required, of this Midwestern Cinderella team who has not reached a Super Bowl, or come close to sniffing one, since ‘The Simpsons’ was in its second season and the World Wide Web was a sci-fi plot line.
It is a team spearheaded by a second-season quarterback whose entry into the league was disrupted by an ACL injury and a 21-year-old rookie wide receiver once told he’d be better suited as a cornerback.
Yet, according to the man who knew Burrow pre-chains and ice veins, Monday is exactly who Burrow is. At crunch time, the 25-year-old’s focus locks in, his senses sharpen. Anything unrelated to the task at hand (i.e. winning the football match) becomes a distraction and thus, extraneous.
“Joe’s intelligent. He knows when and when not to be flash,” says former Louisiana State University head coach Ed Orgeron who led the football-mad Southeastern Conference university to an undefeated championship season in 2019, eclipsing more than a decade of dour showings.
Burrow’s fingerprints are all over that season’s triumphs. The quarterback set the single-season touchdowns and passing yards record, out-duelled future Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence to clinch the title, won the Heisman Trophy and resurrected a 30-year-old New Orleans bounce track to soundtrack the whole affair.
“Joe, when it comes to football, every day now, he’s going to be the most focused guy you see," Orgeron added.
"He’s serious. That’s the Joe you’re going to get every day. But the times he chooses to smoke the cigar, put the chain on, the glasses, he knows what he’s doing. He knows the right time to do it. And that’s part of his persona.”
Orgeron considers himself amongst the lucky ones. As Tigers head coach from 2016 to 2021, Orgeron caught a front-row seat to the contagion that is Burrow’s now international persona – part singular footballer and part ‘pied piper’, according to Orgeron – along with rookie sensation and Bengals wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase.
This season, Burrow and Chase have transformed the NFL’s once infertile footballing mud pit into one of the NFL’s biggest Super Bowl shockwaves.
Or, a shockwave to everyone barring a small contingent that includes Orgeron. As the Bengals languished at a 21-3 halftime deficit to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship match two weeks ago, Orgeron could not help but indulge memories from two years prior when Burrow and Chase were performing another impossible footballing rescue act, only then it was in the humid bayous of southern Louisiana.
“[This season} brings me back,” says Orgeron, who has kept a diligent eye on his former players. “It shows me that those guys have continued to take their hard work, their character and they haven’t let the success get to their head.
"They’re hungry. Those guys are destined to be the very best.
“It looked like Kansas City was in control. But they kept on coming back, kept on coming back. And oh boy, here they come.”
According to Orgeron, that is this dynamic duo’s calling card: the ability to implausibly and instinctively bounce back, their efforts enshrined in a sort of cigar-smoked vengeance. But Burrow, Chase and the rest of this smack-talking, flag-planting young team, says Orgeron, did not materialise from the football cosmos to entertain. Their ascension is one built on a barrage of trials.
Orgeron recalls his first meeting with Burrow in his office in early 2018. Surrounded by three fellow coaches and Burrow’s father, Orgeron was fishing.
Burrow arrived at LSU as the jettisoned third-string quarterback in his final year of eligibility who could not get a look in at Ohio State University. He was now neck deep in a four-man quarterback competition at a school renowned as football's death valley but for over a decade had become better known as a quarterback graveyard with fans ravenous for a change.
Could Burrow command a room and more importantly, a title-challenger?
“And it took me five minutes to realise Joe was the smartest person in the room,” Orgeron says.
“When you meet him, you don’t know it. He has to prove it. Our players had some other quarterbacks that they believed in, but he won over that football team.
"When he came to LSU, Joe kept his mouth shut. He worked hard. His first goal was to win over his teammates with hard work, and he showed them by his dedication.
"He won every sprint, he got after it, practised hard, and for him, to be able to capture that football team the way he did - he's like the pied piper.”
Burrow has fashioned a career out of winning over doubters, which helps explain the telegraphic chemistry between the quarterback and his go-to wide receiver Chase, who too knows the doubters’ drills well.
Chase was fully committed to the University of Florida before arriving at LSU in 2019, having been snubbed by former LSU head coach Les Miles who told Chase he did not have the makings of a collegiate wide receiver years earlier. Chase famously walked out of a session with Miles afterwards and, until 2019, did not look back.
“His momma did not want him to come to LSU, she was mad at LSU, and you know, mommas are the champion, you don’t mess with mommas,” Orgeron says.
“But we got him to come to camp, and he ran a sluggo slant against one of the best DBs [defensive backs] in camp. I looked at his dad and said he’s coming to LSU. And he said, look Coach, you gotta get the momma. And Mickey Jo [Mickey Joseph, wide receivers coach] did a great job of getting the momma.”
Simply having the two share a locker room, though, was no guarantee that such clairvoyant carnage would come out of it. Those seeds were sown in the bayou summertime as Burrow and Chase threw more than 10,000 balls between each other, according to Orgeron.
They ate together, timed classes together, talked out routes hypothetically and drew them up with whatever salt and pepper shakers sat on the canteen tables.
“They were close. They weren’t best friends, but they grew together, could feel each other. It was that chemistry, and whenever we had Chase one-on-one, Joe was going to go to him, especially on the right,” Orgeron says.
“I’m glad they drafted Ja’Marr to the Cincinnati Bengals because look at the difference it’s made.”
As much credit as Burrow deserves for the Bengals’ quick turnaround, Chase’s influence could be paid in gold.
Burrow’s slant-and-go routes in 2020 yielded just 7.1 YPA. In 2021 those same routes (the very ones that booked Chase a spot at LSU for the 2019 season) yielded 17.1 YPA. Chase is the first rookie in NFL history to have multiple 100-yard receiving games in a postseason, a feat that earned him the title of NFL Rookie of the Year. Chase's exploits are all the more impressive when pit against the countless pre-season critics who suggested the Bengals were foolish in selecting a receiver in last year's draft and not a linesman, particularly after Chase sat out his final season at LSU.
Come Sunday, the Burrow to Chase route will be in full flaunt as Cincinnati stare down an experienced but no less ravenous Los Angeles Rams in the LA team's backyard. Bengals critics will quickly look to file Burrow and co.’s champagne flair as naïve bravery, if not gaudy smoke screens. This is a team that has verbally admitted to wanting to win a Super Bowl for Harambe, the 2016 gorilla-turned-meme.
Such assertions won’t be unjustified. Being prematurely discounted comes with the territory of constantly making odds look silly.
Orgeron knows that territory better than most. When the thick Cajun-tongued gridiron giant took up the head coaching role at LSU following Miles’ dismissal in 2016, very few met the hiring with fear.
Instead, Orgeron was considered a caricature of Cajun culture: a big, growling fella hopped up on gumbo and ultimately not in possession of the chops required to handle the role of re-establishing L-S-U to its storied glory.
“I talk about internal motivation. I used to use all that negative talk, whatever it may be. I try to block out the noise as much as I can, but you hear that stuff, and I turn that in my gut and I use that as fuel," Orgeron says.
"That’s what I taught my team. Take all that stuff, put it inside and use it as motivation, and it looks like it works.”
The Bengals are the NFL’s young and unrecognised team whose trek to the league’s greatest stage makes no real logical sense. For the last five years, the Bengals endured unbroken losing seasons. They are two short years removed from a 2-14 season, tied for the worst in club history record-wise.
This season, head coach Zac Taylor was the favourite to be 2021’s first coach fired. Not one NFL pundit selected the Bengals in their preseason Super Bowl shortlists.
And they’ll be underdogs for a third straight game in the Super Bowl, with the Rams a 3 1/2-point pick at home.
But Orgeron can be sure that in the face of these facts, Burrow and Chase will play with their usual cool defiance. Such is the two's shared instinct. Thinking anything otherwise, he says, risks being a sloppy mistake.
“I gotta pull for my boys,” Orgeron says. “It’s going to be a contest but we know Ja’Marr can handle him [Jalen Ramsey]. And Joe can too. It’s going to be a great matchup.”
