Chase Brown hears the Batman jokes. He kind of loves them. “Everybody’s making it seem like it’s gonna be like this big like Dark Knight Rises return or something like that,” the Cincinnati Bengals running back said of Joe Burrow coming back from turf toe surgery.
“It could be. I’m just excited for him to get football back. He loves football, and taking that away from him, for however long, it’s probably been hard.” Brown said via John Acree of the Cincy Jungle.
Joe Burrow was given roughly a three-month timetable after surgery on Sept. 14. He is beating it by about two weeks to start on Thanksgiving night against the Baltimore Ravens, with the Bengals sitting at 3-8 after going 1-8 without him.
Cincinnati’s season is hanging by a thread, but Burrow’s mindset hasn’t changed. “I’m a football player,” he said this week. “If I get hurt, I’m going to go through the rehab process, and then I’m going to let everyone know when I feel like I can go out there and play… I’m not going to live my life and play this game scared of something happening.”
The Bengals are not exactly dragging him back to a broken offense. In six starts with Joe Flacco, Cincinnati has averaged 27.2 points per game, as Flacco has thrown for 1,636 yards with 13 touchdowns and four interceptions via ESPN.
The real plot twist is the ground game. Chase Brown is on a five-game streak of 100-plus scrimmage yards and can set a franchise record with a sixth against Baltimore. He just stacked 130 total yards on the New England Patriots in Week 12, including 19 carries for 107 yards in a 26-20 loss, as the Bengals ran for 120 yards and averaged 5.2 per carry.
So now Joe Burrow walks back into an offense that can lean on a hot back and a more physical line instead of asking him to throw 45 times on a bad foot against a Ravens defense that lives to hit quarterbacks.
