There was a shot during Sunday’s Seahawks-Bengals broadcast on CBS that Joe Burrow would have no idea the cameras caught, a few ticks after he found rookie Andrei Iosivas scored his first career touchdown to give Cincinnati a 14–7 lead with 12:20 left in the second quarter.
Burrow had jogged over to Bengals coach Zac Taylor when it hit him. Out of seemingly nowhere, he planted his foot, and ran to a member of the officiating crew wearing a black vest and handling the footballs. The official saw Burrow and pointed to the end zone, where a ball was sitting on the turf. The quarterback retrieved it, ran it back over to the 5-yard line, tucked it under Iosivas’s arm and patted the rookie on the head.
He knew Iosivas would want to keep that ball, and he wasn’t going to let him lose it in the post-touchdown celebration.
The play that led to the score, if you look closely, was another example of how Burrow’s ailing calf is coming around, and the Bengals and Burrow are optimistic it’ll only keep getting better from here. Its aftermath, and an act Burrow probably figured would never see the light of day for most of us, is another reason why it meant so much to everyone else in that organization to help get the quarterback through all of this.
“That’s why guys rally around him—it’s because he’ll do anything for you,” Taylor told me over the phone about an hour after the Bengals survived a 17–13 prizefight with Seattle. “He does a great job. He gets along with everybody on the team. For him to throw the last play of the game last week to Kwamie Lassiter [II]… are you familiar with that story?”
I told Taylor I wasn’t.
The elder Kwamie Lassiter played 10 years in the NFL in the late ’90s and early 2000s, eight of them as a safety in Arizona. He passed away in January ’19. His son, also named Kwamie, has been with the Bengals since last year, bouncing back and forth between the practice squad and active roster over that time. As fate would have it, with Tee Higgins banged up, he dressed for Cincinnati’s Week 5 game against the Cardinals in Arizona.
“We got him in the last two plays of the game just to get him some snaps at Arizona where his late father had played,” Taylor says. “So Joe signals a run alert, kind of a one-step quick throw outside on a run play in our four-minute [offense], and gets him his first career catch. It was a really special moment. He did that for Kwamie Lassiter. This week he goes and gets Yoshi’s first touchdown and goes and retrieves that ball.
“It just speaks to the way that these guys will do anything for the guy because he’s thoughtful. He does things for his teammates. Pretty cool.”
On Sunday, a number of those teammates would show, again, that to be the truth with their play, in how they gutted out a fourth quarter through which Burrow and the offense hit their bumps. It was Trey Hendrickson. It was Sam Hubbard. It was B.J. Hill. It was all of them.
It was, overall, a pretty full expression of how capable the Bengals are now of pulling Burrow out of the fire when need be. Which, of course, he’d always do for them.
