Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, through here.
The advent of a 14-team playoff field in the NFL has forever neutered the possibility that a deserving team might not make it into the bracket. Not that you could make such arguments convincingly before; it’s not like I’m shedding tears for Matt Cassel and the 2008 Patriots. But a smaller field made the idea of bubble teams just plausible enough for Stephen A. Smith to make his best “Excuse me?!” face whenever a boring-ass 10-win team somehow got excluded. Any team that misses the playoffs now is one that indisputably deserves to, regardless of its preseason expectations or standout individual performances. You thought you could get in with style points, but you can’t. You are scum. Garbage. Dogshit. The Raiders by another name.
This brings us to the Cincinnati Bengals, who won’t be appearing on my television this weekend despite employing the league leaders in sacks (Trey Hendrickson), receiving yards/TDs/catches (Ja’Marr Chase), cool Tee Higgins shit (Tee Higgins), and passing yards (Joe Burrow). Would I have preferred to see this team in the Wild Card round over, say, the Houston Texans? I think we all would. But that’s not gonna happen, because they fucking blew it. The Bengals got off to a desultory 1-4 start, leaving them needing a handful of breaks to fall their way in Week 18 to snatch the No. 7 seed in the AFC and officially become the Team No One Wants To Play. [Dave McKenna voice] Now they’re just the Team No One Will Play, heading into the offseason in search of a new defensive coordinator and ways to keep their best player happy.
Let’s talk about that player for a moment. Joe Burrow won’t be winning MVP this season, but he threw for nearly 4,900 yards and 43 TDs despite being sacked more times than all but three other players. With no due respect to Boomer Esiason, Burrow is already the greatest passer in Bengals history. But he has nothing to show for it this season, and he may spend the following years with even less.
This is because the Bengals’ three other All Pro–level players are dying to get the fuck out. Higgins will be a free agent in March after playing under the franchise tag this season. Hendrickson is going into his final year of his deal, and requested a trade last spring (as did Higgins) because the Bengals refused to give him a new deal. As for Chase, he held in during training camp hoping to get a new deal of his own, only for Bengals owner and It’s A Wonderful Life villain Mike Brown to ultimately refuse. Cincinnati exercised the fifth-year option on Chase’s rookie deal to keep him around in 2025, but the odds of Chase reporting to the team without a proper extension, one that reflects his current status as the receiving Triple Crown winner, are virtually nonexistent.
Higgins and Burrow were drafted together. Chase and Hendrickson joined the team a year later, and an AFC title immediately followed. Taken together, these four men are their own Super Bowl window. They ARE the Bengals. Yet there remains a scenario where only Burrow takes the field for them in 2026. And while Aaron Rodgers was busy hogging all of the world’s oxygen to badmouth everyone and everything around him, Burrow was just about as pointed in his public admonishments toward his own organization. Here he was in October, saying the Bengals were “not a championship-level team right now.” And here he was just a week ago, not even bothering with passive aggression and just stating outright, “You don’t want to make a living out of letting great players leave the building. And I think that’s why you gotta do everything you can to get those deals done early.” Burrow is grousing like Rodgers, except A) He’s still good at football, and B) The people around Burrow actually HAVE.
Because these are the Bengals, and you know how they’ve made a living as long as you’ve known them. They don’t do everything they can to get these deals done early. They do let great players leave the building. Ask safety Jessie Bates, who was a vital part of Cincinnati’s 2021 Super Bowl run, but fled to Atlanta when the Bengals cheaped out on him. Better yet, ask Carson Palmer, who became so disgusted with Brown’s parsimony that he faked his own retirement to force a trade to Oakland. Palmer would spend two forgettable years with the Raiders before going to Arizona and making the NFC title game with Bruce Arians as his head coach. He had to move a lot of furniture around to get where he wanted to be, but he got there.
Burrow is gonna have to do likewise. His current deal keeps him imprisoned in Cincinnati until 2029, and I have no doubt that he’s already pondered a scenario where everyone leaves but him and he’s forced to spend the rest of this decade posting record numbers for a team that only gets worse. I also have no doubt that this prospect makes Burrow, who is insane in ways that all great athletes are insane, want to kill Mike Brown with his bare hands. Shit, I wanna help Burrow commit that murder. We all would. Hall of Fame quarterbacks are the most precious resource in all of sports. I can’t let the fucking Bengals piss one away over the course of four more agonizing years.
That’s why I have no choice but to tell Burrow, point blank, to force his way out of town. This isn’t the NBA, where any disgruntled player not named Jimmy Butler can name his preferred trade destination and make it a reality. The NFL is allergic to player empowerment, and the last big-name QB to successfully force his way out of town was Deshaun Watson, who had to sit out an entire year and sexually assault half of Texas to finally make it happen. Mike Brown is more than equal to Texans owner Cal McNair when it comes to acts of fuckery, and Burrow doesn’t appear to be a secret lech, so this will be an even trickier extraction process. But it needs to happen.
Free Joe Burrow. Under Brown’s stewardship, the Bengals have proven to be an organization that doesn’t deserve nice things. Ever. They got lucky when Burrow was free at the top of the 2020 draft, but you don’t win in the NFL on luck alone. You win by giving your best players everything they need—teammates, coaching, facilities—to succeed. In the case of Burrow, his franchise only exists to take those necessities away. It’s malpractice, it’s ugly, and it’s all public. We won’t see Joe Burrow playing for the Bengals this weekend. I hope we never see him play for them again.
The Games
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