With the Ravens in an injury-riddled free fall and the Browns mired in an eternal rebuilding process, the Bengals swung an intra-division trade with Cleveland to bring Joe Flacco into the fold and attempt to revive their dormant offense. While not quite the ultimate desperation swing to salvage the season, it is damn close.
And, no, this was not your unemployed neighbor recounting breathlessly the updates of his suspiciously intricate Madden franchise while you try to grill dinner. This happened. And while the lot of you may not think that the prospect of shipping a 40-year-old from one troubled Ohio football outpost to the other is a big deal, I think it is for a few reasons.
The main one? We don’t see enough of this anymore. Truly. When a quarterback goes down, it is almost always a forum for the coach to become high-minded about the strength of the quarterback room he developed (since, almost always now, the coach is a former quarterback or comes directly from a background of working with quarterbacks). It’s performative and obscures the fact that, most often, owners don’t want to pay extra for good backup quarterbacks during free agency anyway, never mind good ones during the middle of the season when hope is dwindling.
When Davante Adams and Tyreek Hill got traded in 2022, I wrote about the prospect of the video game generation general manager. The kind of people who were raised not in football but on a console designing their own fever dream of a franchise. In that world, trades seemed less scary or preventative. But after that swoon, the league seemed to retreat back into the world where only Howie Roseman and the Eagles were making the kind of moves that satisfied our basic need to see a quality, available player plugged into a position of need. Derrick Henry wanted to play for the Cowboys and Jerry Jones—Jerry Jones! The Showman!—said Nah.
This trade isn’t on that level, but it is of that spirit. The Bengals tried to make it work with Jake Browning, a quarterback who had a successful track record of backing up Joe Burrow, and it failed. The team looked around at the best possible available solutions and sent draft capital to another team within the division. Thankfully, Dillon Gabriel played more than capable football in his starting debut, in London against the Vikings, enough to justify a longer runway with which to cement himself as a possible quarterback solution for the Browns in 2025 (also, leaving Cleveland one snap away from starting Shedeur Sanders and leaving Gabriel completely mentorless outside of his head coach). Gabriel was the first player this season to throw multiple touchdowns against Brian Flores’s defense.
At a bare minimum, this move allows the Bengals a chance to dig their collective heels in and stop the momentous backslide that has taken place since Browning got the call. It’s a chance to keep the Bengals relevant until Burrow returns. Flacco is a bit of an artist in this sense, having piloted a magical Browns run to the playoffs in 2023.
Another reason the trade is great? It’s a continuation of a narrative-busting argument I’ve made about the Bengals since the dawn of the Zac Taylor era. Owner Mike Brown is completely and totally taken by Burrow. You can see it clearly when they interact with one another. When the first wave of Burrow-related offensive line panic hit, the team signed La’el Collins, Ted Karras and Riley Reiff. After the second wave, the team paid a premium for Orlando Brown Jr.
The Bengals paid their star receivers. They eventually got the Trey Hendrickson and Shemar Stewart deals done. And while some of it seemed begrudgingly Bengals-esque in that it dragged along with the drudgery and confusion of post–Steve Carell episodes of The Office, it happened because there was a belief that this season could be worth the effort. The team has not let go of that belief. And it’s stunning how many others around the NFL may not have bothered once their starters went down.
To be fair, we heaped similar praise on Woody Johnson for acquiring Davante Adams last year under similar circumstances. To be clear, it doesn’t always work out, and Flacco could become nothing more than an additional statue-like presence operating an offense that is dead last in EPA per play and 20th in rushing success rate.
But again, we need to stop thinking of just results and praising intention. We need to note the precious few moments when an owner’s irrational hopes and wild dreams even minutely overlap with that of their fan base. It’s bleak out there when we examine the reality of many bottom-line approaches from NFL teams that are content to get fat off ballooning television rights deals and are unmotivated—save for country club embarrassment—to put a quality product on the field.
The frantic pull to rectify a mistake with a trade has been sucked out of many in personnel. When it happens, it makes football feel like a children’s game again, which is exactly how it’s supposed to feel. Yes, even when the person being dealt is the furthest thing away from an actual child. Here’s to Joe Flacco for making us all feel young again.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Joe Flacco Trade Says Everything About Bengals’ Belief in Themselves.
