After the Bengals lost to the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game, quarterback Joe Burrow said that he feels good about the direction the team is moving in and shared his belief that they will “come back stronger” for the 2023 season.
With Burrow entering his fourth season and a slew of returning players on both sides of the ball, there’s plenty of reasons to share Burrow’s optimism about what’s next in Cincinnati. A more experienced teammate tempered that enthusiasm a bit while discussing the lack of guarantees in the NFL, however.
Center Ted Karras said on Monday that “the team’s not going to be the same” because of free agency, the draft and other offseason moves that will change the makeup of the roster. Those changes are also why the team’s success the last two seasons leaves no guarantees that 2023 will be as fruitful.
“We’re in the final four two years in a row,” Karras said, via the team’s website. “That puts us in the top four, I guess, for the year. There’s no rollover factor; there’s no transitive property in the NFL. We have to come back ready to go. There’s been a lot of history of teams that don’t do well after a long season like that. We’ll do everything we can to start faster next year and our goal is to get back to the championship game.”
The Chiefs are going to the Super Bowl for the third time in the last four years and Sunday’s conference title game was their fifth in a row. That run of success is one that the Bengals will be trying to emulate once they return to the field later this year.