Super Bowl 2022: Bengals' Burrow is not your average Joe

When it comes to the Super Bowl, there is no such thing as an Average Joe.

The first Joe of lore was, of course, Namath. He brought swag and cool and technicolor to a game that up until his arrival a little more than five decades ago was mired in a black-and-white world.

Then, in the 1980s, came a Joe named Montana. He rewrote the records, collected the rings and, for a while, established himself as such a regular at the Super Bowl that his exploits there started to blend together. His accomplishments have since been dwarfed by the guy who just retired, but for a while he sat firmly atop the list of all-time great quarterbacks.

And now comes this generation’s Epic Joe. The kid who combines the sizzle and the substance of the two namesakes who preceded him on this stage.

The quarterback whose sunglasses and bling are as meme-worthy as his pinpoint throws and on-field acumen. The Ohio native who has his hometown team on the precipice of a title. The Joe who by next week not only could become the first quarterback to win a Heisman Trophy, national championship and Super Bowl but do it all in the span of about 26 months . . . with a torn ACL in the middle of it.

Tony Dorsett, Marcus Allen and Charles Woodson are the only three players to hit that trifecta. Only two quarterbacks — Namath and Montana — won a college national title and a Super Bowl, but they lacked the Heisman to complete the sweep.

"Joe Burrow" and "average" shouldn’t even appear in the same dictionary.

As his introduction to an even wider audience looms with Super Bowl LVI next Sunday — when he will lead the Bengals against the Rams after vanquishing Las Vegas, Tennessee and Kansas City in the playoffs by a combined 13 points and putting himself in position to take his place among the other Joes who have made a lasting imprint on the NFL’s biggest stage — Burrow recalled that he never actually wanted any of it. At least not from the most important and glamorous position in the game.

"I got to my first pee-wee practice and the coach at the time, coach Sam Smathers — I still see him all the time when I go back home — he basically asked me if I wanted to be quarterback, and I said, ‘No, not really,’ " Burrow said. "But then he said, ‘Well, you’re gonna be quarterback. Too bad.’ "

Coach Smathers knew what the rest of us are only now learning: that Burrow was born for this.

"I wanted to be a running back or a receiver," Burrow said. "I don’t know why. I guess I thought in pee-wee football we weren’t going to throw the ball very much, so I wanted to have the ball in my hand. Obviously, I’m glad it worked out the way that it did. This is my career.

"I don’t know if I’d be an NFL wide receiver. That’s probably a pipe dream.

But I can play quarterback pretty well."

And play the role of a quarterback well, too. Receivers and running backs and the players who block for them and try to stop them, they’re all significant elements in a championship-caliber team, but it’s the quarterbacks who make the league go. They are the front men, the personalities. They do the commercials, get the broadcasting gigs, become the face of a franchise and, if they are lucky, the game. If they are really lucky, they become household names that transcend football.

Even when that name is as common-sounding as Joe.

That’s what could be on the other side of Super Bowl LVI for Burrow. If he is lighting one of his signature post-victory cigars in the locker room at SoFi Stadium next Sunday, he’ll be thrust into a level of celebrity that no one — not him, not his football-coach father who introduced him to the game, not Coach Smathers back in southwest Ohio — could have imagined.

He’s not a pretty boy, though. Throughout his career — whether it was how he bounced around the college football landscape before finally finding a throne at LSU or the way he was pummeled by the Titans while absorbing nine sacks in a divisional-round game last month — Burrow has proved that he can take a beating and keep coming back.

It’s even earned him the respect of Tom Brady, who had Burrow on his podcast after the AFC Championship Game and said: "The way that we can show our toughness is to stand in the pocket and make throws. Sometimes you get the [expletive] knocked out of you and you gotta get up and just go on to the next play."

Burrow said of his actual affinity for contact, a rarity among quarterbacks: "I wouldn’t feel like a football player if I didn’t."

This will be the 10th Super Bowl in which a guy named Joe started at quarterback. Between Namath, Montana, Washington’s Theismann, Minnesota’s Kapp and Baltimore's Flacco, they have won seven and lost two.

There is only one other quarterback first name that has been as victorious in Super Bowls: Tom. All seven of those wins came from the same person.

Burrow has a chance to put the Joes back on top.

More important, for the first time in their history, he has a chance to put the Bengals on top.

And in a league that elevates its quarterbacks higher and loftier than any other position — and just so happened to lose its greatest player of all time to retirement this past week, creating an opening in the hierarchy that a bevy of brash young players such as Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Justin Herbert are scurrying to fill —   put himself on top as well.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.