The hardest thing about modern NFL defenses is that they dare you to be uncool. I know this seems like an easy problem to solve—just don’t try to force the ball downfield—but consider the modern NFL offense: Quarterbacks are better than ever in dozens of measures; receivers are ludicrously talented from the moment they enter the league; and the rules more or less all favor that side of the ball. Plus, throwing the ball downfield is just badass. You try being boring.
The Cincinnati Bengals did a year ago. It worked.
In 2021, quarterback Joe Burrow led the NFL in deep touchdowns with 13—three more 20-plus-yard scores than any other quarterback. In 2022, defenses sold out to make sure Burrow didn’t do that again. They played an exaggerated version of two-high—a leaguewide trend that takes away the deep ball by dropping safeties back. And they succeeded. Burrow had just eight deep scores last season, and his completion percentage on those throws was 38 percent, 12th in the NFL. But Burrow was a great quarterback anyway.
The secret is simple: Burrow took what the defense gave him—short, boring, quick throws with plenty of room for yards after the catch. This is easier said than done in a league where going downfield has been tantalizingly easy. At training camp earlier this month, coach Zac Taylor said that Burrow is great at having no hesitation when a player—often a tight end or running back—is wide open with room to operate, even if there’s a chance for a deep connection with a star like Ja’Marr Chase or Tee Higgins. “He’s not going to wait on necessarily the primary part of the concept if he feels like there’s an opportunity to get the ball to somebody in space quickly,” Taylor explained. In 2022, Burrow’s air yards per attempt dropped by more than 1 yard compared to 2021. His number of throws to running backs went from 90 to 133. And the Bengals’ yards after the catch on those throws increased.
“There’s a patience part that is really difficult for quarterbacks who are talented,” offensive coordinator Brian Callahan said. “Joe is no different—it’s a personal growth, it’s a football maturity that happens when you decide you’re going to be a different style of player than you envision yourself. But it’s what you have to do to move the ball down the field.” This is the chess match of the NFL in 2023: NFL defenses are not allowing deep passes, and the teams that reckon with this quickly and efficiently will thrive. The Bengals are doing just that.
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Take last season’s playoff game against Buffalo, for instance. Callahan talks about a third-down play in the second half. Buffalo blitzed, and Burrow had to react. “We have all these cool concepts and in-cuts and high corners [down the field] and all of a sudden Hayden Hurst just stayed in the flat. It’s the easiest first down you could possibly have. It’s like, ‘Well, that was really easy. … Let’s just do that.’”
On that play, the Bills’ front-seven players in charge of dropping back into coverage messed up. Burrow “was so fast to it that no one had any time to rally fast enough to it, and that allowed Hayden the space to go get the first down,” Callahan said. “To have him do it that quickly—it was like he didn’t even look at the rest of the concept. He said, ‘Well, they’ve got a problem—there’s the ball and let the guy go get the first down.’”
“That’s really easy; let’s just do that” became a feature of the Bengals offense last year. Taylor runs through the plays he found emblematic of such a philosophy: a Tee Higgins checkdown against Buffalo on a play that was designed for Chase to go deep. A “choice” route against New Orleans, designed for Tyler Boyd, that ended up as a 9-yard Joe Mixon reception. “Whether you wanna call that patience or foresight, [we can] just say, ‘This is the best thing we’ve got going on,’” Taylor said. “And not even waiting to see what happened to TB on a choice, he might be wide open. I’m just gonna be efficient here and take what the defense is giving me and not mess around with what else might happen with the concept.”
The Bengals are among the most successful practitioners of this type of offense, but it’s one that, eventually, all teams will have to move toward. Defenses are putting a lid on the deep passing game, and offenses are struggling as a result. Last season was the first time the leaguewide yards per completion average dipped to 11 since at least the merger. That number had been almost 2 yards higher in previous seasons, and it was 12 in 2011, the start of the so-called passing boom that ushered in a new era of quarterback domination.
Callahan saw this movement start when Vic Fangio was the Bears defensive coordinator from 2015 to 2018. It’s not like Fangio’s scheme, based on limiting explosive plays, was new—coordinators started putting multiple defenders in the deep middle of the field the moment the forward pass was legalized—but it was the best system for trying to stop a generation of young quarterbacks who were moving the ball down the field with ease. Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Russell Wilson, for instance, all had an intended air yards per attempt over 9 yards per throw in 2018. Last season, Mahomes’s average was down to 7.5 yards and has fallen in nearly all of his NFL seasons. Mahomes told me his solution was equally simple as the Bengals’ after a rough start to 2021: “Whenever you get in kind of a slump like that, I guess you would say it’s about, ‘How can I go back and just make it easier?’ This position is already so hard, why make it even harder?” he said. “For me, I started being more patient, started taking the underneath stuff, and then started opening it up.”
This is the life cycle of an offense that has an elite quarterback, be it Burrow or Mahomes: pass deep and aggressively until defenses sell out to stop it, then change everything. “They gave us nothing deep,” Boyd said of the 2022 season. So the Bengals changed everything.
Through the first five weeks of the season—a string of games that included losses to the Steelers, Cowboys, and Ravens—Burrow was simply not himself. He threw nine touchdowns and five interceptions and he had a worse yards-per-attempt average against two-high coverage than Russell Wilson, Baker Mayfield, Marcus Mariota, Carson Wentz (!), and a Matt Patricia–coached Mac Jones. But at halftime of the Baltimore game in Week 5, coaches say, the team shifted toward easier options in both play-calling and on-field decision-making.
Burrow went on a tear the rest of the season, recording four more touchdowns than any other player against two-high, and the sixth-best completion percentage. Burrow ran 161 plays against the Cover 2 defense last year, by far the most in the NFL, and over 100 more than he ran in 2020. Among the 15 quarterbacks who faced that coverage the most, Burrow had the best completion percentage, the most first downs gained, and fourth-best yards per attempt behind Mahomes, Geno Smith, and Tua Tagovailoa. The emphasis, quarterbacks coach Dan Pitcher said, was finding the underneath players to put in conflict, to put the ball in a void in the defense and get yards after catch. Both Bengals running backs last year—Mixon and Samaje Perine—were among the top 15 players in yards after catch per reception. “We don’t think about doing five plays then think we’re gonna score,” Boyd said of the new philosophy. “We plan on 15 plays per drive because we know what to do to go score now since they aren’t going to give us the big play anymore, or give a chance to get 50-50 balls.”
Burrow had the same revelation, of course. He became the best quarterback in football last year at two routes: The “go” route—a straight-ahead route designed for a receiver to get up the field—and an “in” route, which moves horizontally. This combination is deadly because one opens up the other. And this is important for the offense going forward: It will keep taking the short routes until it’s able to go back to the vertical ones.
“I think we have the best offense in football, and with that being said, you have guys like me, Tee, and Chase who want the ball downfield, and Zac can’t get that done because of how defenses will change up overnight to defend us,” Boyd said. He said the team will watch tape and see a defense full of man coverage or Cover 3, and then on game day see a totally different team. There are two primary differences: The first, Boyd said, is that teams just want to play Cover 2 or quarters coverage, and the second is that they’ll show man coverage before the snap. Boyd said “playing with Joe’s mind” simply does not work. “He’ll go get us 10 yards and he’ll take that every time. That’s going to kill a defense. You have to give us that because you can’t play both.”
It is not normal for a team to swap out its defensive identity for just one Sunday, but it happens to the Bengals. “People play us differently. They play the Chiefs differently. You just don’t know until the game starts and you say, ‘OK, this is what they are doing. Where do we go now?’” Callahan said. Coaches point to a 2021 game against the Niners when, seemingly out of the blue, San Francisco and defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans unleashed a Tampa 2 scheme they hadn’t put on tape.
Because of this, Callahan said, the offense uses a trick he gleaned from his time coaching Peyton Manning in Denver: They deploy a massive play sheet with different coverage boxes and create an on-the-fly game plan once the team sees the defensive tactics it’s up against. “It’s ‘OK, bang, this is a Tampa 2 game. We’re right on that,’ and we say, ‘Joe, what are your three favorite ones, bang bang bang,’ and he usually executes them pretty well,” Callahan said. “It’s sort of this free-flowing [thing]: Here’s our initial plan, here are our backup plans, and then [asking] Joe what he sees and he’ll say, ‘Call this, it’s gonna be wide open.’ And usually it is. It’s about as much fun as you can have as a coach when you have a guy that can handle that.” The coverage boxes account for everything: Chase is often double-teamed, which opens up space for tight ends and running backs. Some teams will double-double, which means doubling Chase and another receiver. “There’s no reservation about what he’s seeing,” Callahan said of Burrow. “He’s never really come off the field and been wrong about what he’s seeing, which is unique. He’ll see a leverage or a landmark, and it’s, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s right.’”
Manning comes up a lot in conversations with Bengals coaches. Partly because, Taylor said, Callahan uses so many Manning concepts in the dropback passing game. “If you watch our dropback game, that’s really what it is,” Taylor said. “You can go back and find old Colts or old Broncos clips.” But there is another reason the comp floats around training camp. Two years ago I visited Cincinnati to talk about the Bengals’ goals for the offense. Burrow told me he likes to get as many players into routes as possible and let his vision do the rest. That strategy has proved remarkably successful in the two seasons since. But one thing that has stuck with me was Callahan’s comment that eventually, the coaching staff would like to see Burrow in “Peyton Manning mode,” a shorthand for having full control over the offense.
I asked three offensive coaches this summer how the plan is coming along. It’s right on time. “He has mastered our system,” Callahan said. The give-and-take is the reason the offense has evolved so much. And because all facets of the unit and staff are on the same page, Burrow is even able to run plays that haven’t been practiced in months. Coaches say that the flexibility is a sign that “there’s no ego there. We just want to win. The most important guy on Sundays is Joe,” said Pitcher.
Coaches also praise Taylor for his ability and willingness to adapt in all facets of the offense. The team ran a Sean McVay–style outside zone running scheme in 2019 and was terrible at it, so it stopped. Burrow wasn’t thriving on traditional dagger routes—deep, out-breaking routes—so they quit throwing them. Most teams fail because they try to fit square pegs in round holes, and the constantly evolving nature of the Bengals offense allows everything to work.
The setup, Taylor told me, looks like this: After practice on Wednesdays and Thursdays, Burrow sits down with the coaches to discuss tweaks. Then, on Saturday night, Burrow and the coaches go through the entire call sheet to rank plays. “He is brutally honest,” Taylor said. Coaches go through different coverages Burrow might see, and he gives his preferred sequencing based on how much confidence he has that each one will work. Even in games, Taylor said, the feedback is immediate and important. He’ll often give Burrow a choice of two plays to start the next drive on the sideline. If Burrow is on the field, Taylor will also give him a choice and Burrow will send back either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Because of the one-way communication in headsets, Taylor said, “he can’t talk back to me. He can only hear what I have to say, whether he likes it or not.” All of this, of course, means the Bengals have near-limitless possibilities on offense. The stability in coaching, playbooks, and receiver personnel means they can adjust and adapt during games far more easily.
So they always take the easy routes. But sometimes that becomes the deep routes. Against Atlanta last October, Boyd said, the Falcons were trying to take away the deep pass. Boyd was running through the seam, and Higgins was running an out-and-up. The safety, Boyd said, was in a bad predicament. “I was butt naked as well,” Higgins said, colorfully referring to how open he was. “But Joe saw TB.” The result was a 60-yard touchdown for Boyd, the type that defenses are supposed to prevent against the Bengals. “I think the safety fell not knowing who to play and it was basically a free play,” Boyd said. There are a lot of free plays going around Cincinnati these days.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this piece misstated how many interceptions Burrow threw through the first five weeks of the season.