Now they are hoping Burrow can push them over the hump they’ve been struggling to clear for the better part of the last 10 weeks. Despite a valiant effort by Joe Flacco, they’ve won just one of the nine games he missed, in addition to Jake Browning completing a comeback against the Jaguars after Burrow got hurt in the second quarter.
Cincinnati sits at 3-8 and almost certainly has to win out to even have a slim chance at making the playoffs, though a 9-8 record wasn’t good enough the last two years.
“I think we’ve just got to take it one game at a time,” Burrow said. “Yeah, we pretty much have to win every game at this point. The only way you’re going to do that is by attacking each week. You have to be 1-0 that week and move on to the next.”
Burrow was expected to be out longer than this, but said he got creative finding ways to push his timeline a bit to get back sooner than the 12-week period he was supposed to need for his recovery.
With help from his physical therapist and the Bengals training and medical staff, Burrow was able to get back to practice Nov. 10 and was close to playing Sunday against New England. Burrow said it was key having people working with him who “really understood the stress, the repair, what we could and couldn’t do in certain time periods.”
“We pushed it within the limits of what we could do, and kind of just based it on how I was feeling, how I was recovering, how it looked the next day after we pushed it, and just went from there,” Burrow said.
Burrow wanted to play Sunday, but after going back-to-back full practices for the first time last week, his body – not the toe – was feeling a little sore, so Bengals coach Zac Taylor decided two games in five days would be too risky.
Going through a full week of practice thinking he would be playing was mentally good for him coming into this short week with lighter practices. Burrow said he felt good throwing and getting reps in, and now he will be trying to carry that into a game, hoping it goes as smoothly.
“I’ve been in that spot before, and trust the decision-makers, and trust the medical people and everybody that was involved in the decision-making,” Burrow said. “And you know, I thought we made a good decision, and now this week, we’ll be ready to go.”
Burrow had always wanted to play on Thanksgiving after years of watching those games on TV as part of the tradition of the holiday. This one had been circled on his calendar since the NFL finally gave him his wish and scheduled the Bengals for a Thanksgiving night game.
Being against a division rival, a Ravens team on a five-game winning streak, this is a big one for him.
Burrow said he doesn’t have anything to prove, though. He just wants to play football, do the job he is paid handsomely for and win games, but he also understands the outside concerns about him risking injury with no guarantee Cincinnati can even make the playoffs.
“I understand why people feel that way, but you look at it from my perspective, I’m a football player and if I get hurt, I’m going to go through the rehab process and then I’m going to let everyone know when I feel like I can go out there and play,” Burrow said. “I don’t really know what else to say about that. I’m not ever going to go to somebody and say, ‘Yeah, I’m healthy, but I don’t think I should go out there and play.’ That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’m not going to live my life and play this game scared of something happening.
“I’ve had injuries, there’s not a lot I can do about that. I worked really hard to have that not happen, but what I can do is when it does happen, I can control how I’m attacking my rehab and attacking practice and doing everything in my power to get back as quickly as possible and that’s what I did.”
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