Joe Burrow tried to take his ACL tear in 2020, as a Bengals rookie, in stride, as the kind of thing most NFL players will have to deal with at some point. His wrist injury of 2023 was worse, the kind of hit that, for a quarterback, leads to existential questions, because it came at the expense of his ability, at least in short-term, to throw the ball.
So you can imagine what was running through the sixth-year star’s head when another freak injury—a severe case of turf toe necessitating surgery—hit in September.
“This one happened,” Burrow told me, over the phone from a raucous locker room in Baltimore on Thanksgiving night, “and I was like, Man, I just can’t really catch a break.”
How did handle that? You saw it, in full color, against the Ravens.
The version of Burrow that John Harbaugh’s crew was dealt on Thursday looked eerily similar to the one we’ve all seen going back to his last year at LSU. He completed 24 of 46 throws for 261 yards and two scores as you were dozing off on your couch—average numbers, by his standards, that wouldn’t catch your attention once you woke up.
But if you actually watched, what you saw was a difference-maker returning, and delivering a 32–15 rout of a really good Ravens team. Even better, Burrow felt like one, finally again, after enduring a really rough couple months.
Just that he was back on the field two months, a week and six days after the injury (and two months, a week and a day after surgery) was an incredible triumph for Burrow—initially, the prognosis was for three months recovery, minimum, with a possibility that the injury would be season-ending. That he played as well as he did? Even more remarkable.
Once Burrow was done giving himself a couple days, post-op, to mope, the work started.
From there, a plan came together.
“Once I actually started to learn about the injury and research it and figure out what I really had to avoid, I started to think critically about it,” Burrow says. “That was after about two weeks. Doctors, they're going to give everybody the general timeline, so the doctor gives you the general timeline, and then the whole key is just keeping all your muscles strong around the injury. So as it heals, you can start to push it more and more.”
At that early stage, Bengals coach Zac Taylor was telling Burrow not to worry about being around the team, and just focus on himself, and his rehab. Part of that was logistical—the Bengals’ meeting rooms are on the second floor of the stadium, and that made getting up there a challenge, while Burrow was first riding a scooter, then in a protective boot.
Then, Burrow started checking boxes.
He was out of the boot “quickly, before maybe I was supposed to.” He managed to do that, as he said, by supporting his injured foot through training and keeping everything around it strong. He kept researching. He kept asking questions. He stayed after it.
“I've certainly been through enough of these where I can think critically and have the right conversations with the right people to push these things a little harder,” he says. “And I know things I need to do outside the training room to recover as quickly as possible. And I do the right stuff nutritionally and recovery-wise. And then you just take it with how it feels. All you can do is push it and come back and see the next day, How does it respond?
“And if it responds well, you keep pushing it.”
The first signs that Burrow might not only beat his timeline, but bludgeon it, came during a short week leading into the team’s first game against the Steelers, with new acquisition Joe Flacco readying to make his first start as a Bengal. After only popping in on team meetings, and smaller unit and position-group sessions, Burrow rejoined meetings more regularly that week. And while everyone knew what that meant, no one pressed the issue with him.
By then, less than a month after the injury, he’d begun throwing again, too, which was another piece of the gradual ramp-up.
So the timeline adjusted. The idea of a late December return or his season being over was out the window, with the hope that the team could get him back in early December, if it could just get through a stretch of three games in 11 days, coming off a Week 10 bye. He returned to practice before the Bengals’ Week 11 game in Pittsburgh.
“The plan all along was Buffalo,” Burrow says, with that Bills game set for Dec. 7. “And then as we got closer to these games, it was feeling pretty dang good. And so then it moved up to tonight. And that would allow me to get two full weeks of practice in before this game. And those [practices] felt pretty good. And then we made the decision to think about it last week [against the Patriots]. And at the end of the day, I didn't, but I was prepared to.”
When I asked bluntly if it sucked seeing a winnable New England game slip away last Sunday, knowing how close he was to playing, he answered quickly, “Yeah, it certainly did.”
But he knew, as much as it sucked, everyone was trying to balance his desire to play against what was right long-term—one Bengals staffer said to me last week that the idea of putting Burrow through another offseason of rehab was a conclusion everyone wanted to avoid. On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, he looked good enough for the coaches to think, What else does he need to show? Then, he came back a little sore Friday morning, and the staff sat down with Burrow and decided to give him another few days.
They knew once they put him back in, there’d be no turning back, and having to play a second game four days after the New England game ended up being the determining factor.
Then, the Bengals lost to New England, and a lot of folks asked if it was worth bringing Burrow back, with the team at 3–8 and slipping to the very fringes of playoff contention. But those people might not have been clear enough on what was motivating the quarterback.
Before Thursday night’s game, my old colleague Melissa Stark interviewed Burrow on the field and asked him about coming back on to a 3–8 team. He told her how much he loved playing a kid’s game, and he just wanted to be out there with his teammates, and perform for the fans, and let the chips fall where they may.
After the fact, I wanted to dive into that a little more with him, and this approach that comes off as so antithetical in the “load management” era of professional sports.
“Yeah, I'm just trying to find the fun in it again,” he says. “These last three years have been pretty brutal with two injuries, and then the season we had last year. It's been a while since I was able to have fun doing this. And so I'm just trying to find that again. And the only way I can do that is by playing. You're not going to have any fun by watching everybody else play. That's for sure.
“And it's no secret what the narrative around my career is—I'm great when I'm out there, but I haven't been out there as much as everybody else. So one thing I can control with that is when I feel like I'm ready to go, get back out there and keep doing it.”
He then affirmed that, yes, Thanksgiving night was fun.
His coaches saw it in a few different spots. One was before the game, as he sat with a couple of them and showed no heaviness or anxiety or fear—just excitement over getting to play this kid’s game again. Later, as he talked through plays with Taylor, he conceded that he’d missed a few, and indicated that he’d work through it.
It came gradually, and in spots. One was on the first play of the second quarter, on third-and-11. At the snap, Ja’Marr Chase was doubled. But Burrow was patient, scrambled, wound breaking contain, and found his superstar target breaking toward the sideline for a 13-yard gain that extended a drive that ended in a field goal. Another was on Burrow’s 14-yard scoring strike to Tanner Hudson on the first possession of the third quarter, where he scrambled to get the angle he needed to put the ball in a razor-thin back-shoulder window.
There was also a play five snaps before that one, where he recognized a corner blitz that generated the Ravens’ only snap of the game, Baltimore linebacker Roquan Smith seemed to check out of the blitz, and then Burrow scrambled into the area vacated to that side, to help generate a chain-moving pass interference call on T.J. Tampa on third-and-4.
But the real one, for Burrow, was a little later in the third quarter, with the Bengals trying to extend a five-point lead, and the offense in third-and-8 from the Ravens 29.
“The touchdown to Yoshi,” Burrow says, referencing receiver Andrei Iosavis. “They sent that pressure at us a lot over the years. And that was a different coverage that they played behind it. And fortunately, we were ready for it. We had the right protection call. And we were able to get it picked up and make them pay.”
On the play, Burrow made a very specific adjustment to the protection to pick the pressure up, with the Ravens having bluffed with that pressure earlier. The line then stoned the Ravens. That gave Burrow time to see the change in coverage—which had Smith popping out into coverage, and chasing Iosavis, and the safety deeper than he’d normally be. The quarterback threw it into the void between Smith and that safety, Malaki Starks.
Iosavis—who wasn’t the primary receiver on the route but was open coming across the field with Smith chasing him out then following him back in—easily cashed it in, helping his quarterback, too, in seeing the rookie Starks in more of a cover-2 type of safety spot than in the normal quarters-coverage posture.
That made it 26-14. Finally, that fun that Burrow was looking for had been found.
“Yeah, after that touchdown to Yoshi, I felt a lot better about how things were going out there,” he says. “And then after the game, obviously, you reflect on all the hard work that you've done and all the adversity you've been through over the last however many years. So you take a moment and then go and enjoy this one for the weekend, and get back at it.”
There were other things Burrow will remember about this one. One will be changing out of the cleat with a metal plate in it into a white Alo sneaker, in an effort to try and keep his surgically-fixed foot from stiffening up—an effort that got short-circuited a few times.
“Well, it was certainly difficult with getting five turnovers, having to throw that thing on and get back out there so fast,” he jokes. “But we made it work.”
They made a lot of other things work, too. Good as Flacco was, and great as Jake Browning has been through all of it (putting his own disappointment aside to help Flacco prepare), the tangible difference having Burrow out there was, for the Bengals, totally undeniable.
The coaches used the term “operational urgency” the last two weeks, as they prepared Burrow for the chance he’d play against New England, and then the reality that he’d return against Baltimore. It’s enabled by Burrow, who has special processing speed, even when compared to what the veteran Flacco or the whip-smart Browning bring to the table. It’s felt in how fast plays coming, how often adjustments are and how the Bengals can win on the details with their franchise quarterback in there. In many ways, it gave the team a new gear.
Burrow, of course, knows that gear well, having hit it plenty as a pro. The trick, for him, this week, was understanding it might take a minute to find it.
“The first half, I certainly had to knock some of that rust off and get comfortable in the pocket and get my feet calm and all that,” he says. “So, yeah, I was talking to myself in those moments. But the second half, I settled in.”
All love for our Madden Thanksgiving MVP 🧡#ProBowlVote + Joe Burrow pic.twitter.com/7PXhxgKVuX
— Cincinnati Bengals (@Bengals) November 28, 2025
As a result, the entire Bengals team punched the gas, and outscored a Ravens team riding a five-game winning streak, 20–6, in the second half.
And just how is it possible that he’d pull this off coming back almost a month earlier than even the most optimistic estimates. Mostly, as he sees it, by taking the injury as it came, and not making it out to be more than it was.
“I work really hard to keep my body in shape and be strong enough to play this game,” he says. “So when it happens, you wanna take a look, and try to make wholesale changes. But there's just not any real changes to be made. I'm working really hard. I got the right people around me to do it. And every time it happens, you just feel sorry for yourself for a little bit, and then you get back to work, and I'm not sure what else there is to say about it. Obviously, it's been unfortunate, and a lot of things have happened, but, you know, it is what it is.”
What it is, now, for the Bengals is a sliver of a scintilla of a chance.
They’ll likely have to win out. If they do, they’ll have dealt the Ravens a seventh loss, and will need Baltimore to lose another game on top of that. Then, they’ll need Pittsburgh to lose three of its final six games. That would generate a three-way tie, with the Bengals winning the tiebreaker—and the division.
But after last year, when the Bengals actually did win five straight to get to 9–8 and were eliminated on the final day of the season, and the beginning of this year, too, Burrow’s not going to get caught in the math. He’s just going to take advantage of what’s in front of him.
“Let's just go and try to win the next one and then go from there,” he said. “And we'll do that every week and see where we're at at the end.”
Fair to say, just getting to be a part of that after all he’s been through, is something that Burrow’s going to appreciate. And also fair to say it’s cool for the rest of us to get to see where he takes that.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside Bengals QB Joe Burrow’s Remarkable Road to Recovery.
