Joe Burrow made NFL history in Bengals’ win over Falcons

The Cincinnati Bengals were led by their aerial attack Sunday to a win over the Atlanta Falcons. That attack was led by Joe Burrow in his 33rd start of his career, but the impressive part is how historic of a game that was for him for several reasons.

The first being that he was the first quarterback ever to do something.

Usually these things where a player is the first to do X, Y and Z all in one game it is a bit ungenuine. They usually require so many things like 300 yards passing while rushing for 25 yards and scoring three touchdowns and running in for another. The more qualifiers added, the less impressive it becomes.

This one is just two things. 500 yards of total offense and four total touchdowns. The fact we haven’t seen a player like Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady or even Peyton Manning pull something like this off during their career is pretty impressive.

That wasn’t the only thing Burrow pulled off Sunday, though.

This is an impressive list, but the most impressive thing on there is his five games with 400 yards passing in the first three seasons of a quarterback’s career being the most all-time. The NFL is very much a different place than it was even 10 years ago. Quarterbacks have been able to come in, and look impressive early in their careers and coaches have been willing to allow them to sling it.

What makes that more impressive is Burrow did this while going to a Bengals’ team that earned the first pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, missing six games in his rookie season, rehabbing extraordinarily quickly from his serious knee injury and being the most sacked player in the NFL. Oh, and he is only seven games into his third season.

Burrow had all of the excuses and reasons in the world for him not to be this successful this quickly. However, he already has a Super Bowl appearance going into his third season and has drastically changed expectations for a team that was just losing their minds over winning their first playoff game in close to 30 years. Burrow doesn’t focus on the numbers, but these stats are a good way of quantifying how lucky Cincinnati is to have him as their quarterback.