For the first time in Joe Burrow\u2019s career, the Cincinnati Bengals are off to a hot start with both sides of the football playing at a high level.<\/p>\n
The Bengals started 2-0 for the second straight season, but this time Burrow is healthy heading into week 3.<\/p>\n
The front office invested heavily on the defensive side of the football this offseason, and it has shown so far to kick off the new year.<\/p>\n
Cincinnati is 1 of 8 teams that are undefeated heading into week 3 alongside the Chiefs, Seahawks, Bills, Vikings, Eagles, 49ers, and Raiders.<\/p>\n
Bryan DeArdo of CBS Sports has the Bengals 2nd on the contenders list behind the Seahawks, writing, \u201cGuilty as charged in terms of drinking the Bengals Kool-Aid after two games. A big reason for the optimism is Cincinnati\u2019s revamped defense (including former Giants Pro Bowl defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence), which has complemented Joe Burrow and the team\u2019s high-flying offense. In fact, the Bengals\u2019 defense is actually ranked ahead of their offense through two games. Cincinnati\u2019s schedule is another reason for optimism. They\u2019ll play five games against teams that are currently 0-2. The Bengals also play in an AFC North division that appears to be having a down year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bills and 49ers are the remaining contenders, while the Chiefs, Vikings, Eagles, and Raiders were listed as the pretenders by CBS Sports.<\/p>\n
We will see how the next few weeks go, but history has shown that Joe Burrow and the offense find their stride after the first two weeks of the season, which only makes the start even more exciting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time in Joe Burrow\u2019s career, the Cincinnati Bengals are off to a hot start with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1012067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2053],"tags":[228,227,256,1561,2296,7,6],"class_list":["post-1012066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cincinnati-bengals","tag-bengals","tag-cincinnati","tag-cincinnati-bengals","tag-cincinnati-bengals-news","tag-cincinnatibengals","tag-football","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117342532030099005","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1012066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1012067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1012066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1012066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1012066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}