Joe Burrow is Ryan Tannehill/Tony Romo

I read a Tweet yesterday that's been stuck in my head since: Joe Burrow is the same sort of quarterback as Ryan Tannehill and Tony Romo.

This hit me in a weird way. Primarily because I couldn't shake that it's an observation that's true on its face – maybe even a little bit obvious.

Ryan Tannehill is a quarterback I have watched and thought about a lot. I've seen every one of this throws with Miami – some of them five to ten times. I originally started writing about football several years ago to answer the question of why he wasn't considered among the top ten quarterbacks in the League. I am routinely surprised that he's still misunderstood – he and the Titans, now. I didn't watch enough Tony Romo to have drawn the comparison myself, but that's not really the point. It's definitely not what I want to talk about.

I responded that if the comparison is right – because I thought and think it might be – then Burrow is the best possible version of whatever that composite quarterback style is. Burrow has something they don't. I didn't say what it was because I don't know what it is – but whatever it is, it's not Burrow's early mastery of the game.

If I were to quickly scout Tannehill, I would say that he's got plus athleticism, a decent arm, wants to go deep, but the strength of his game is throwing short and intermediate in a rhythm attack; he's better reading defenses pre-snap than post-snap. That probably makes him a West Coast quarterback. Which... reminds me of how Chris Wesseling wrote a think piece years ago about how the West Coast offense was nearly called the Ohio River offense because it originally debuted in Cincinnati. So maybe things do come full circle.

If I were to sum up what I know about Romo, I would say he had plus athleticism, a decent arm, was good enough to want to go deep, but his strength was passing with timing and rhythm; my memory of Romo is that he was ascending toward post-snap mastery when he broke his collarbone the first time. On the face of it, Romo and Tannehill really are the same guy. They even took too many sacks because they were holding on to the ball in the pocket. Romo ran around and made things happen a lot more than Tannehill.

It blew my mind reading that. Putting those pieces together in my head to see if they fit.

Because it lets me see Tannehill a little differently, for one. Which, for me, is something I'm always (still) doing: trying to understand who Ryan Tannehill is as a quarterback – but also why no one else seems to like him.

More than that, it makes me think about perhaps my new favorite quarterback in the League: Joey Burrow.

When I think of Burrow, I think plus athleticism, great arm, great deep, but his strength is throwing short and intermediate with timing and rhythm. The difference, I would say, between Miami-era Ryan Tannehill and Joe Burrow circa Week 15, 2021 is that Burrow already demonstrates a significantly higher degree of mastery at the line of scrimmage.

I've written too many words about how rare it is that Burrow has won two games on audibles.

But it is really rare for a second-year quarterback (especially a quarterback with fewer than 16 full starts) to read and manipulate defenses the way Burrow does.

The thing that's uncanny about the comparison with these three players, though, is that Romo and Tannehill are both dudes whose narratives are that their receivers let them down.

Think about it. The Cowboys are a much more televised team, but the last twenty years of Dallas football haven't looked all that different materially from the last twenty years of Dolphins football. That's part of why I've sort of had my eye on them every season – the NFL is more fun when the Cowboys are good. The other reason is that you can't really ignore the Cowboys, even when they're legitimately bad.

And all of this has me thinking, in a swirling, obsessive sort of way about Joe Burrow and the trajectory of his career.

I'm already thinking about how the Bengals have to be careful not to stunt his growth.

When I was in seventh grade, I got it in my head that I wanted to be an archer. Like you do when you're in seventh grade. By whatever luck or grace, my grandfather decided he wanted to support this. But everything he bought me was sized for who I was when he was buying it – and in seventh grade I was growing about as rapidly as you can grow. You all remember being children. So I grew out of my bow and all my arrows before the season in which they were bought was over.

The one narrative I keep finding myself weaving through Tannehill's time in Miami is that he outgrew his coaching too quickly. Like me with my bow, his coaches (whether they be Joe Philbin or Adam Gase or any of their offensive coordinators) were sized to fit who he was at the start of the year, instead of being plenty too-big for him to "grow into" their coaching. It's interesting, and I think relevant, that Joe Burrow's head coach is a former Ryan Tannehill quarterbacks coach.

Is that why I'm ready to hit the panic button on Burrow's career already? Probably. I give all the Bengals losses this year to Zac Taylor. But people around the League who know much much more about these things than I do like him. So I might be very wrong. I might be projecting the stink of Zac Taylor's Dolphins days onto the Bengals.

I might also be remembering that the Bengals and their fans aren't exactly unfamiliar with mediocrity and missing the Playoffs because of coaching.

Maybe I'm imagining it. But I can easily imagine that Burrow is chaffing under his coach's style. And if I'm a Bengals fan (which more and more every week I am) the last thing I want is Joe Burrow going into the offseason thinking about his head coach the way Aaron Rodgers went into this previous offseason thinking about Matt LeFleur. Specifically what I mean by that isn't wondering whether the head coach is going to kick field goals on fourth and goal inside the 2; what I mean is asking himself whether his head coach has what it takes to win it all.

Or at all.

I'm not sure which. Either is a problem for your quarterback to be considering.

I'm concerned about Zac Taylor as the long-term head coach in Cincinnati. Marvin Lewis was not, I don't think, challenging Carson Palmer to be a better quarterback on a day-to-day basis the way Bill Belichick was and now Bruce Arians is with Tom Brady. (It's funny, the Andy Dalton years are just a gray buzz in my memory; I could have forgotten he even played.) But I'm more concerned with the Bengals receivers. Chase, Higgins, Boyd, and Uzomah should be plenty to beat everyone every week. Mixon is a good back when he's healthy and everything is working, and the defense is excellent.

The defense, in fact, is so good that 24 points should be enough to beat anybody - and the offense should be finding 31 points easy.

So why are there so many stalled Cincy drives?

Drops are the first thing that come to mind. And when I think about quarterbacks whose careers were limited because of drops, who do I really think of more than Ryan Tannehill and Tony Romo? It's freakish, actually.

Romo's career is defined by that Dez no-catch. And the field goal botch. Am I wrong in understanding that teams switched from their quarterback being the holder to their punter because of Romo botching that?

Drops are a very real problem for the Bengals. Boyd and Higgins kill Burrow at least four times a game. The thing is, I don't know what the fix is. Because that's neither the quarterback nor the head coach.

Justin Fields might be one of these guys, too. I'd scout him as having plus athleticism, a live arm with the ability to push it deep, but his strength is the rhythm passing game. The difference between him and Burrow is that where Burrow is the high end of these dudes' potential as a reader of defenses, Fields obviously cannot read defenses yet. The low end might be Teddy Bridgewater.

Which makes me kind of pull up my nose at this whole project like it stinks. When Teddy doesn't really stink. His Broncos offense does – with the same questions I'm asking about the Cincy offense. In fact, the Broncos offense is kind of the garlic breath, body odor version of the Bengals offense just because Burrow puts so much shine and perfume on the game. So I guess what I'm really asking is whether these offenses go as their quarterback does, or whether their quarterback goes as the coaching does? Or if it's some other combination I'm not taking into consideration. The wide receivers go as their city goes?

I don't know.

I don't know that I have an answer.

I do think that Justin Fields is the worst case scenario for where Burrow could be. Remember that it was Burrow who melted down under the pressure of the Bears defense, not the other way round when they played this season.

It's the recency bias of the ugly Bears Monday Nighter, but Fields is obviously limited by his coach and his receivers. I did it again – went a series of plays predicting what the Bears were going to call. It's an uncanny feeling; but it's not a good look for a playcaller: If I can predict what you're going to do, it takes an especially bad defensive playcaller – and, hell defensive players – to not do the same. It's more than that, though.

The Bengals don't score as many points as they should. Neither did the Tannehill Dolphins when the defense was playing well – and complimentary football was never Tony Romo's Cowboys' game. The Bears in that way are an identical team. And it's not Jakeem Grant that has me thinking about this.

Whenever Miami's defense would play like the Bears did last night, Tannehill would have one of his games where he throws two picks and gives an opponent an insane statline like... of 30 dropbacks, he'll be pressured on 27, hit on 18, sacked on 9. Because he did that a lot. Because he held the ball a lot. Because he was coached to hold it until the last second to give his receivers ample opportunity to get open – and they just refused like that was their job. And Justin Field and Joe Burrow look like dudes prepared to follow that same trajectory and have that same narrative dominate the stories of their careers.

I'm not sure Burrow takes as many sacks. In fact, I'm confident he doesn't. Yeah – he only took three against Denver; it isn't the pass rush that's beating Burrow. Frankly, it's his pass catchers.

I don't know enough about the game to tell you whether that's an artifact of the plays or the way the guys are coached – or just the guys themselves. Can you swap them out for other guys and get more production? I doubt it. They're all three very young. That matters.

Anyway, I'm going to stop because I'm running into more questions than answers. But I'll be back to this topic. I can already tell that Burrow-as-Tannehill is going to get a lot of mileage for me this season. Thank you, OP.

Thanks for making it this far. I've been away a while. Working on other projects, but also reconfiguring in my mind what I want to do with this space. I'm going to stick to pieces like this one, I think. Sort of a written word version of a radio talk show. Maybe I go back to picking headlines and talking points and giving my two cents. Still not sure. But this one has been fun. I'm sure I'll revisit this topic plenty as I move forward.

I'll talk at you soon.