It was all there for Joe Burrow, all there for the taking, a hostile stadium clad in red wracked with anxiety, all the momentum on his side, a chance to take the Bengals back to the Super Bowl for the first time in 33 years.
Patrick Mahomes had the ball first again in overtime when Bengals backup quarterback Brandon Allen called tails, but there would be no Mahomes Magic this time, and so all Burrow had to do was march his team into position for his kicker, Money McPherson, to finish off Mahomes and shock the world and turn a championship starved city into Euphoria, Ohio.
Which of course he did.
Because he is Joey Franchise.
Because that is what franchise quarterbacks do — even second-year franchise quarterbacks who are somehow able to laugh in the face of an 18-point deficit and engineer Bengals 27, Chiefs 24.
Only this one is a proud son of Ohio, who wanted to play for the Cincinnati Bengals and restore the Who Dey roar and the glory.
Which of course he did.
Jessie Bates III had deflected a Mahomes pass in OT intended for Tyreek Hill and Vonn Bell intercepted it at the Bengals’ 45, and here came Burrow.
“You just want to make sure that the game is in his hands in those critical moments,” head coach Zac Taylor said.
No moment has ever been too big for him, not at LSU where he won a national championship, not now following a wondrous comeback from his devastating knee injury.
Comebacks kids can come back from anything and everything.
Burrow (23-for-38, 250 yards, 2 TDs, 1 INT) hit Tee Higgins for 9 yards and Higgins again for 8 on a second-and-8 and Joe Mixon got McPherson closer just in case.
Taking what was a 4-11-1 Bengals team a year ago back to the Super Bowl seemed akin to child’s play for Joey Franchise. But shoutouts from Kid Cudi and a tweet from LeBron?
“The situation that I’m in socially doesn’t really feel real to me,” Joey Franchise said. “In my head, I’m just the same old guy. That part is surreal … the football part, not so much. That stuff is crazy.”
He was wearing a gold JB9 gold chain on the Zoom call. Someone wanted to know whether there were diamonds on it.
“They’re definitely real,” Burrow said. “Make too much money to have fake ones so … these are real (laugh).”
There were other heroes: defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, who throttled Mahomes in the second half with a three-man rush; former Giant B.J. Hill, with his interception that led to a field goal late in the third quarter; and Evan McPherson, as cold-blooded as Burrow, booting his 11th consecutive field goal, this one from 31 yards.
When Hill positioned him at the Mahomes 27, Burrow tied the game with a 5-yard TD pass to Ja’Marr Chase and the two-point conversion to Trent Taylor.
He had told Taylor on Saturday night that he would rush for 100 yards — he finished with 25 on five carries — but 18 of them came on a pair of scrambles on the go-ahead field-goal drive that followed an under-thrown interception.
“I kinda knew going into the game that I was gonna have to make some plays with my legs,” Burrow said.
And there was a goal-line stand at the end of the half when Mahomes got greedy first-and-goal from the 1 with nine seconds left and no desire for a field goal. And Eli Apple, on second down, denied Hill on a pass behind the line of scrimmage as the clock expired before intermission.
“I think that was really the turning point in the game,” Burrow said.
Burrow and the Bengals had been hit and hit good in the first half with Mahomes haymakers. It was Chiefs 21, Bengals 3 and the QB ratings looked like this:
Mahomes: 13-for-14 for 154 yards, 3 TDs and a 152.1 rating.
Burrow: 6-for-13 for 28 yards and a 53 rating.
Burrow never blinked.
“When the game’s on the line,” Taylor said, “he’s gonna figure it out.”
Burrow got it to 21-10 at the half on Samaje Perine’s 41-yard catch-and-run. He figured it out. Matthew Stafford and the Rams are next.
“I think if you would have told me coming into the league when I got drafted that we’d be here this year, obviously it would be a shock,” Burrow said. “Now it’s not.”