Colin Cowherd is squarely in the Joe Burrow fan club

It’s rare to post something nice about Colin Cowherd, also known as the king of hot takes on his show The Herd but Cincinnati Bengals fans are starting to like the guy because of how high he is on franchise quarterback Joe Burrow.

Chris Rolling of Bengals Wire provided the quote from Cowherd:

"“You know you’re really great when you go into a losing culture and Year 2, you’re in the Super Bowl,” Cowherd said. “Does everybody understand? Like as good as Kyler Murray is, he got them into the playoffs, and then that’s it. You know how good you have to be to go into a place that doesn’t win, and win immediately? It’s very Andrew Luck…what Joe Burrow did last year, it’s without a lot of precedent. There’s not a lot of examples of what Joe Burrow did last year.”"

What Burrow did in the second year of his career was incredibly impressive, especially considering how his rookie season went. He put up okay numbers as a rookie but he was joining a team that won a league-low two games the year before.

In year 2, after having surgery in the offseason, Burrow rose to the occasion and led a team that hadn’t won a playoff game since the early 90s all the way to the Super Bowl. It’s not easy to get to the Super Bowl and it certainly isn’t easy to do so when a team is coming off just four wins the year before.

Colin Cowherd is a Joe Burrow fan.

Cowherd threw out the Andrew Luck comparison and it makes perfect sense as to why. Both Burrow and Luck went No. 1 overall in their respective drafts (Luck in the 2012 NFL Draft, Burrow in the 2020 NFL Draft) and turned over their respective franchises from pretty much Day 1.

Now, Luck led the Colts to the playoffs in his rookie year but he also remained healthy enough to do so. Burrow’s rookie season ended in Week 10 when his offensive line couldn’t protect him enough and he was injured, missing the final six games.

Hopefully, Burrow’s career doesn’t end in the same way that Luck’s did but for a while, it did seem even eerily closer. Luck didn’t have an offensive line to protect him for the first few years of his career and that led to injuries.

He missed over half of the 2015 season and the entire 2017 season due to injuries and despite coming back for the 2018 season and leading Indy to the playoffs, he shockingly retired before the 2019 season got underway. He was only 29 when he called it a career.

Cincinnati didn’t give Burrow a good offensive line for the first two years of his career and after it cost them a win in the Super Bowl, they went to work on trying to build up the trenches this offseason. That’s hopefully the difference between Burrow and Luck.

Either way, it’s nice to hear Colin Cowherd say something nice about the quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals. Fans have grown accustomed to the national outlets not paying much attention to the stripes and, in their defense, there wasn’t much praise to heap onto them prior to last year.

Keep doing what you’re doing, Cowherd.