Last season Joe Burrow played at a level that would have won him NFL MVP honors many previous years but the Cincinnati Bengals' postseason aspirations were undone by a porous defense. This created a situation where the start quarterback's performance became a bit of a Rorschach test for sports media pundits with some of them pointing out that he was awesome (led the league in completions, yards and touchdowns) and others putting the blame on his shoulders.
It felt like uncharted territory to have one of the more productive passing seasons of the last decade become something polarizing and shows got a lot of mileage out of the situation.
