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Here’s some news—last year’s AFC title game actually wasn’t Chiefs-Bills. That epic was the week before, in the divisional round, and the winner, Kansas City, wound up losing championship weekend. Which left, yes, the Bengals to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl.
Not that you would know it from listening to everyone talk over the past nine months.
“We know who we are,” Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow told me early Sunday night when I asked about his team being routinely skipped on lists of contenders. “We don’t worry about what anybody else says. We know exactly what we have here in this locker room. And we’re just going to go show it each week.”
The Bengals are, again, a player in the AFC race, and they outgunned Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, 27–24, on Sunday. It was their fourth consecutive win and sixth victory in seven games. They remain a tough, resourceful, unselfish bunch, which explains how Burrow took down Kansas City for the third straight meeting.
Burrow is obviously indicative of those attributes. But on Sunday, Tee Higgins was just as much so, and that’s according to Burrow himself.
Higgins’s story starts with the Bengals taking the lead for the final time with 8:54 left on a Burrow checkdown to third-down back Chris Evans to cap a 10-play, 53-yard drive. Defensive end Joseph Ossai came through on the following possession to drop Mahomes for a sack, which pushed Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s kick back four yards. Butker then missed the 55-yarder.
And that left Burrow and Higgins to, collectively, throw the knockout blow. The Bengals got the ball back with 3:19 left and, in two plays, churned out a first down that forced the Chiefs to start calling timeouts. Three plays later, it was third-and-5, and Burrow found Ja’Marr Chase in the right flat, hemmed in by the sideline. Chase put his shoulder down and ground out the first down, drawing (and deserving) plenty of praise for it on the broadcast. Hidden in there was Higgins’s role in freeing him up.
“The key was the block outside from Tee, and that’s what I’m talking about, just Tee being such an unselfish player,” Burrow says. “They were doubling Ja’Marr on that play, and Tee was able to seal the edge for him to outrun those two guys to get us a first down.”
That left the Chiefs without a timeout and 2:49 left. One first down would end the game for the Bengals. On first-and-10, Samaje Perine picked up six yards to get Cincinnati closer. But Burrow got caught trying to scramble from the pocket on second-and-4 and was dropped by Chiefs rookie George Karlaftis for a seven-yard loss.
“It was either my read, or I’m going to go try to make a play,” Burrow says, “because I knew, third-and-6, third-and-11, the difference is five yards. But it’s not much of a difference to me.”
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Which would sound like a silly premise, especially if you heard it before you saw what happened next.
Burrow leaned on Higgins again, this time with the ball, rather than for a block. And in doing so, he delivered a strike into his breadbasket. Burrow, as he usually does in these situations, made it look a lot easier than it actually was.
“When it gets into crunch time like that, we’re going to go into the concepts that we know and to the guys that we know are going to make plays,” Burrow says. “Big-time play by Tee. He probably didn’t get as many chances as he would’ve liked throughout the game, but that’s the kind of guy that he is. Unselfishness, going to come down with it when you need it the most.”
Higgins gathered the ball over the middle and lunged over the marker, and the game was effectively over. And so Higgins showed, again, who the Bengals are, in all that he did.
“The organization has done a great job of finding players where it means a lot to ’em—they’re going to work really hard to do whatever they can to help the team get a win,” Burrow says. “And Tee, the last two games, had over 100 yards and several touchdowns, and he came up with key blocks and key catches today, and you can say that for just about every guy in this locker room.”
And a lot of guys were around last year, too, so we probably should’ve seen this coming.
You certainly shouldn’t be surprised anymore.
