Cincinnati Bengals

The Cincinnati Bengals are the franchise that spent decades as the NFL's punchline and then, almost overnight, became its most compelling story. For the better part of thirty years, the Bengals were synonymous with futility — a small-market team in a mid-tier stadium run by an ownership group whose commitment to winning was questioned so frequently and so loudly that it became background noise in the Ohio River Valley. The Bengals didn't just lose games; they lost them in ways that felt structural, as if the franchise had been assembled with a missing piece that nobody could identify. And then Joe Burrow walked through the door, and everything changed.

Before Burrow, the Bengals' history was a story told in two brief chapters of competence separated by vast expanses of disappointment. Paul Brown, the legendary coach who invented modern professional football in Cleveland, founded the Bengals in 1968 as an act of competitive revenge against the franchise that had fired him. Brown built the Bengals into a respectable team — they reached the Super Bowl in 1982, losing to the San Francisco 49ers in a game defined by a goal-line stand that still haunts Cincinnati. They returned to the Super Bowl after the 1988 season and lost to the 49ers again, this time on a Joe Montana-to-John Taylor touchdown with 34 seconds left, one of the most heartbreaking finishes in championship game history. Two Super Bowls, two losses to San Francisco, and then a drought that would stretch for decades.

The Mike Brown era — Paul Brown's son took over the franchise after his father's death in 1991 — became a case study in how not to run an NFL team. Brown operated the Bengals with a frugality that went beyond fiscal responsibility into something approaching neglect. The franchise didn't have a practice facility, didn't invest in scouting, and seemed philosophically opposed to spending money on free agents. From 1991 to 2020, the Bengals won a single playoff game. One. In thirty years. The Marvin Lewis era brought competence — seven playoff appearances in sixteen seasons — but no postseason wins, a stretch of futility that became its own kind of dark comedy. Carson Palmer demanded a trade. Chad Johnson changed his name. The Bengals were entertaining in the way that chaos is entertaining, but they were never truly competitive when it mattered.

Then came Joe Burrow. Selected first overall in 2020 out of LSU, where he had just completed perhaps the greatest individual season in college football history, Burrow brought something to Cincinnati that the franchise had never possessed: an aura of inevitability. Cool under pressure to the point of seeming almost bored, devastatingly accurate, and possessed of a swagger that the city immediately adopted as its own, Burrow led the Bengals to the Super Bowl in just his second season. They lost to the Rams, but the loss felt like a beginning, not an ending. Burrow, Ja'Marr Chase, Tee Higgins — the Bengals had assembled a core that could compete with anyone, and Cincinnati, a city that had long ago stopped expecting anything from its football team, suddenly couldn't stop believing. The knee injury that derailed Burrow's 2023 season was a gut punch, but the return to health has rekindled the championship ambition. In Cincinnati, they are no longer waiting for something to go wrong. They are, for the first time in a generation, expecting something to go right.