3 biggest winners and losers of Thursday Night Football: Bengals face Joe Burrow injury disaster (again)

We don’t need to mince words.

If Joe Burrow’s injury is significant enough for him to miss more games, then the Bengals’ dreams of winning Super Bowl 58 are over. Full stop. Right now, they are facing an utter disaster, and it’s just the worst luck.

Without Burrow, the Bengals cannot survive a season straddling around .500 as a member of the AFC North — the NFL’s most competitive division. As a legitimate top-five quarterback, Burrow is simply too important as the engine of the Bengals’ offense. With all due respect to Jake Browning (or any quarterback the Bengals might add in the coming weeks), this Cincinnati attack is not a “system” scheme with plug-and-play signal callers. It does not work without Burrow. It is completely broken without him. We already saw this demonstrated in the early season as Burrow struggled with a calf ailment, and we’ll probably see it again if he doesn’t play moving forward. Someone still has to capably get the ball to Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins. No one does it better than Burrow. He’s one of the only people that can.

I hate to tell residents of the Ohio River this, but it might be time to start looking at and recalibrating for 2024. The Bengals are probably done until next fall.