Good morning, I’m Tyler Lauletta. Your usual host, Dan Gartland, is still flying back from his tryout with the Bengals. His phone is still on airplane mode, so I don’t know how it went, but my hopes are not high.
In today’s SI:AM:
🦅Eagles’ offensive uncertainty
A Tale of Two (Ohio) Cities
The Cincinnati Bengals looked at themselves in the mirror on Tuesday, took a deep breath and exhaled a simple truth: “We need another Joe.”
The Bengals traded for veteran Joe Flacco, essentially swapping a fifth-round pick for a sixth-round pick with the Browns to nab the new, old (like, literally 40-year-old) quarterback.
It’s a move that stems from a combination of desperation and sincere hope in the wake of Joe Burrow’s brutal case of turf toe.
The desperation comes from Jake Browning’s downright bad play through three games. Two years ago, Browning pulled off the main goal of every backup quarterback in the NFL—making dads across the country say, “Hey, he’s not that bad!” at the television, to no one in particular. When Browning took over for the Bengals in 2023 after Burrow went down, he led the team to a 4–3 record to close out the year. While the team’s 9–8 record wasn’t enough to make the playoffs, Browning’s numbers—71.5% completion percentage, 266 passing yards per game and 11 touchdowns against seven interceptions in the games he started—were enough to give Cincinnati fans hope that this year’s Bengals could rally and find a way.
That has not happened. Browning’s numbers are down—64.5% completion percentage, 189.2 passing yards per game and six touchdowns against eight interceptions—and those figures look much better than they actually should, thanks to some garbage-time success (and they don’t look that great to begin with).
But while Cincinnati’s acquisition of Flacco does carry the scent of desperation, there is also hope behind the deal. The Bengals believe this team can do something. They believed they could do something with Browning, and now they think they can still do something with Flacco. Specifically, they feel that they can stay afloat and sneak into the postseason, at which point Burrow could be back on the field, having recovered from his surgery.
This offseason, Cincinnati locked in Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins to their long-term deals. The franchise even convinced Trey Hendrickson to take a nice raise this year and negotiate again in 2026. This is the core that the Bengals believe can get them a ring. But as soon as the ink was dry on those deals, the clock was ticking. Cincinnati only has so many shots at the postseason with this core intact before the front office has to pull off a deeper rebuild, so they can’t just waste a year saying, “Oh well, you know, Joe got hurt.” This is good! It makes for compelling sports.
As for Cleveland, wow, look at how far we’ve come. After spending the entirety of the offseason wondering just how the Browns were going to manage holding on to four quarterbacks, they’ve cut down their current depth chart to two rookies—Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders.
Flacco didn’t do enough to hold on to the starting job in Cleveland, and the Browns seemed ready to see what they had in Gabriel—and it looks like they might have something! It’s another turning of the page for the Browns at quarterback. You could fill a novel with those pages by now, but I don’t think anyone would read it.
Just how will Flacco do? It is hard to say. He was running for his life quite a bit for the Browns, and he might be stuck doing it again with the Bengals. When he was initially hired off his couch to start for Cleveland in 2023, though, Flacco won Comeback Player of the Year honors.
As things stand, the Bengals are 2–3. The Steelers are atop the AFC North at 3–1, but the division has produced at least two playoff teams each year since 2020. Those teams have only needed 10 wins to reach the postseason in each of the past three years. Given how dreadful Browning has played, the Bengals might look like a whole new offense if they can get just slightly below-average play out of Flacco.
It’s something of a low-risk, high-reward bet from the Bengals. If they can get a similar version of Flacco to what he showed in 2023, they could still sneak into the postseason—remember, there are seven spots now, and the AFC is a circular shootout of talent—and get themselves another lotto ticket of a Burrow playoff run. If they fall flat, well, hey, at least they tried.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Stephanie Apstein writes that Aaron Judge’s game-tying blast, a swing that quieted the noise and reshaped his postseason legacy, in Game 3 came on a pitch no one had ever homered on before.
- Seattle’s pitchers are sticking to a simple, old-school game plan to silence Detroit’s bats in the ALDS—and it has them on the brink of the ALCS, writes Tom Verducci.
- Greg Bishop argues that the Eagles’ season hinges on whether they can finally establish an offensive identity—because so far, their evolution hasn’t gone far enough.
- The 2025 SI NBA 100 Rankings continue with Nos. 50–11, highlighting Jalen Williams’s rise and where stars like Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard and Stephen Curry land. Plus, Chris Mannix and Kevin Sweeney rank the top-five coaches and top-five rookies.
- Sports Illustrated’s men’s college basketball preseason rankings roll on with No. 18, a team looking poised for its first deep March Madness run since 2017, thanks to a breakout star and key portal additions.
- Clare Brennan explains how a decades-old team chant created by a former player could become the Mercury’s X-factor during the WNBA Finals.
- Jordi Alba has announced his upcoming retirement from soccer, and longtime teammate Lionel Messi paid tribute to him.
The top five…
…things I saw in playoff baseball last night.
5. Aaron Judge’s big ol’ dinger off the foul pole in New York.
4. Aaron Judge’s teammates reacting to that big ol’ dinger.
3. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s Superman slide into home.
2. The guy in a “DUMP HERE 61” shirt getting a home run hit to him by the Big Dumper.
1. The absence of Phillies baseball from my television screen. Tonight, however, I am not so lucky. (Sighing heavily.) Talkin’ ’bout the Phightins.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Joe Flacco Gives the Bengals a Lifeline.
