How Two Brushes With Joe Burrow Helped Bring New Bengals Safety Bryan Cook Home

Bryan Cook, who first ran around Paycor Stadium as a Marvin Lewis Camp first-grader and shivered here at his first NFL game a few years later in a December game against a forgotten foe, has always had ties to the Bengals.

Even when he played for their bitter archrivals from Kansas City.

“Born and raised,” said Cook, whose smile never left him when he returned Thursday morning as the steel-belted safety they need.

Cook came out of the Cincinnati neighborhood of College Hill and the University of Cincinnati to become one of the NFL’s top safeties. And Cook says it was two interactions with Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow during his rookie year of 2022 that helped put him in front of the microphone Thursday as his hometown team’s richest safety ever.

One helped Cook get his mind right. The other one righted his career.

The first one came on the field where he was a camper in the regular season, and he was struggling. Cook played just eight snaps as Burrow beat Patrick Mahomes in the fourth quarter of that 4:25 p.m. national window game. But he’ll always remember what happened on the field before one of those plays.

During a break before he huddled them up, No. 9 saw Cook and asked, “You’re a Cincy kid?” because he knew he was. When Cook said, “Yeah,” Burrow encouraged him with, “Keep it up. Doing a good job.”

“His character,” Cook said. “Really simple, but it was a time where I was mentally really trying to figure out my place in the league and I think from that, it was like, ‘Hey, I’m being seen.’

“For me, as a rookie coming in, especially at that time … He didn’t know that at that time. I had three weeks I was not figuring it out. It helped me a lot. Having that understanding for someone that the city would say was basically the Golden Goose, to be humble enough to speak to me in that aspect, and support me even though I was on the opposite team. It was nice.”

Nice, but no bigger than a moment about six weeks later in Kansas City when Burrow came in trying to engineer a second straight road AFC title game win in Arrowhead Stadium.