He is The Cincinnati Kid, another dangerous young gun who does not fear Patrick Mahomes — or the stakes, or the stage. A proud father will be sitting with his wife in a sea of red Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium rooting for Joe Burrow to take the Bengals back to the Super Bowl for the first time in XXXIII long years.
“It’s the thing that I’ve always talked about — to be the best, you gotta beat the best, and he has a Super Bowl ring, Joe doesn’t,” Jimmy Burrow told The Post. “That would mean a lot to get to that next step versus Mahomes … in my mind.”
Joe Burrow, a son of Ohio, has looked like a modern-day Joe Cool while warming up to the challenge of carrying the hopes and dreams of a city and state on his 25-year-old shoulders into this “High Noon” of an AFC Championship game.
“It’s almost a recreation of 2019 at LSU,” Jimmy Burrow said. “Every week is almost a playoff game, and it’s just incredible to be able to watch and see the growth of Joe as a player and that whole team as a team. It’s just a great experience for Robin and I.”
Joe Burrow threw for 446 yards and four touchdowns in the Bengals’ 34-31 regular-season win over the Chiefs on Jan. 2, and Jimmy Burrow knows that as daunting as the task of keeping Mahomes from his third consecutive Super Bowl appearance will be, he also knows that his son will not blink.
“I believe in Joe, and I believe in the Bengals,” Jimmy said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it didn’t come down to the very end like all of ’em the other day. We’re excited to watch it happen.”
Joe Burrow, every bit as much as Josh Allen, is a clear and present danger for Mahomes and the Chiefs, because the bigger the moment, the bigger the game, the better.
“I think it’s his preparation,” Jimmy said. “Everybody has a great will to win in any game. But having the will to prepare to win, I think he takes that kind of to another level. He’s prepared, so when he gets in those situations, he’s prepared to do well, and the pressure has never seemed to bother him. I’ve even heard him say it before, his preparation during the course of the week puts him in a good frame of mind.”
These precocious Bengals are having the time of their lives, and will show up 60 minutes from the Super Bowl with blind faith in their quarterback (73.2 completion percentage in these playoffs) with the unmistakable “it” factor.
“It has something to do with leadership, and just able to maybe inspire and motivate others to reach that goal every week,” Jimmy said. “That to me is an ‘it’ factor, if you can get the people around you to raise their level of play in those situations and in big games.”
The Titans sacked Joe Burrow nine times in the divisional round, and he simply dusted himself off, and sprayed the ball around enough to Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins and C.J. Uzomah and to Joe Mixon out of the backfield. You don’t rattle The Cincinnati Kid.
“As far as just not throwing five interceptions or making just bonehead mental mistakes, I haven’t seen him do that over the course of his career,” Jimmy Burrow said.
A career that began innocently enough as a third-grade quarterback for Sam Smathers’ Athens (Ohio) Bulldogs at a time when Jimmy, who was a Packers defensive back in 1976, was defensive coordinator at Ohio University.
“I was coaching so I didn’t get to go to every game,” Jimmy said, “but my office overlooked the games on Sunday, we didn’t have meetings, we were just doing our own game preparation until we met as a staff on Monday, so I would get to just look out the window and watch games. I would always have one of our members of our video staff, I would pay him to videotape the game just like the Bobcats were playing, so that was pretty cool. Coach Sam was putting him in shotgun and stuff way back then.”
It wasn’t until the 10th grade that Joe, an All-Ohio basketball star, decided quarterback was his ticket. It didn’t matter that he had been Mr. Football as an Athens H.S. senior when he could not take the starting job at Ohio State from Dwayne Haskins. So Burrow transferred to LSU and won a national championship there.
“That was a tough time for Joe because he didn’t want to leave, he really had good friends and good teammates,” Jimmy said. “In his mind, he went there to win a national championship, so his thought process was he willing to move on and give up that chance? It took a while for him to make that decision. Once he did, the next step was a tough decision to decide where to go. We had discussions as a family about it, and eventually he made that decision to go to LSU.”
Joe Burrow won the 2019 Heisman Trophy at LSU, became the first-overall pick of the 2020 NFL Draft and looked like “The Natural” as a rookie … until he wrecked the ACL and MCL in his left knee and partially tore his PCL and meniscus on Nov. 22, 2020 against Washington.
“Once they called us from the locker room, Joe and the doctors — and we knew it was a significant injury — so we hopped in the car, 2 ¹/₂ hours from Cincinnati, so we were waiting for him in his house once he got there,” Jimmy said.
“He was just already focused on getting it fixed and rehabbing and being ready for the first game. A lot of people said, ‘Well, he might not even play this year, there’s no way he’s gonna be ready to play the first game.’’
Joe certainly took that as a challenge. It was a long, hard road though, a lot of support people had a hand in that whole thing.”
Just a kid from Southeast Ohio who has made the area so proud of him that his high school stadium is now Joe Burrow Stadium. … Gigi’s Country Kitchen in Plains offers a Burrow omelette.
“It’s like a western omelette, that’s what he used to get at Gigi’s all the time,” Jimmy Burrow said.
He expects it to be somewhat nerve-racking to be 60 minutes from the Super Bowl.
“I thought after all those years of coaching and watching Joe that it would kind of calm down, but I think it’s increased in the last month or two,” Jimmy said. “We never really thought about Joe getting injured until he got injured last year, so now it enters our mind a little more now than it ever used to.”
But not Joe Burrow’s mind. And in Cincinnati, they will be singing: “Who dey, who dey, who dey think gonna beat Joe Burrow?”
