‘Exactly How We Hoped’ – Bengals’ Zac Taylor Talks Process, Not End Game With Joe Burrow Recovery

Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor’s experience with injury projections and timelines dates all the way back to the first practice in his first season with the team when A.J. Green’s year-long ankle saga led to a rocky start.

That’s why Taylor chooses his words carefully when discussing quarterback Joe Burrow’s recovery from wrist surgery, as he did Monday morning at the AFC coaches’ breakfast at the NFL Owners Meetings in Orlando.

Bengals QB Joe Burrow on Track for Throwing in OTAs

“On the injury front, I always try to stay back as far as I can,” Taylor said. “But everything’s positive, everything’s encouraging. He’s tracking well for the offseason program. We’ll continue to give him his space in his rehab work, but everything has been going exactly how we hoped it would go.”

Taylor said the expectation is that Burrow will be throwing by the time the voluntary workouts move into the organized team activity portion in May.

Burrow suffered the wrist injury Nov. 16 in Baltimore — nearly three years to the day after his ACL injury at Washington in 2020 — and had surgery Nov. 27.

In his end-of-season news conference, Burrow said he wasn’t ready to put a timeline on when he would be able to resume throwing, but in an interview with ESPN’s Ben Baby earlier this month, he gave an estimate.

“I think middle of May is when I am expecting to kind of be cleared for full contact and everything,” Burrow said. “Over the next month, month and a half, we’ll kind of decide all those things.”

The 2022 and 2023 offseasons for the Bengals were among the lightest in the league due to late postseason runs combined with the organization’s philosophy on body management, stressing rest and recovery.

But the team’s failure to make the playoffs in 2023 gave the players more time away before returning in April for the start of voluntary workouts. And Taylor said he expects this spring to be different than the last two.

“I think we do a good job of managing our team as a whole,” he said. “This year will be a little more all-encompassing because we have a little longer offseason. So we’ll utilize all nine weeks.”

And the expectation is that Burrow throwing to his teammates — with the defense on the field as opposed to on air as in the past — will be part of that plan.

But putting a pin in the calendar to mark when that will begin is not something Taylor is willing to do.

“I’ll wait on that one,” he said. “We’ve always targeted the offseason program as a good time for (Burrow) to get back out there and be with the guys. So we’ll go from there.

“But everything has been really positive,” he added. “We try to take the pressure off the injury guys in the offseason and not make any proclamations.”

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