After missing half of the 2023 NFL season, Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow returned in 2024 and had not only the best season of his career, but also one of the best seasons in the league.
It was not enough to get the Bengals in the playoffs, but it was enough to get Burrow the NFL Comeback Player of the Year Award for the second time in his career.
Burrow also won the award in 2021 when he returned from an injury that cut his rookie season short in 2020.
It's especially notable because Burrow is just the second player in league history to win the award two different times.
He joins an extremely short list that includes only quarterback Chad Pennington who won it in 2006 as a member of the New York Jets and again two years later as a member of the Miami Dolphins.
Burrow led the league with 460 completions, 4,918 passing yards and 43 touchdowns, while also throwing just nine interceptions.
In most seasons that would have been enough to turn a team into a Super Bowl contender. But because the Bengals defense was so bad, they managed only a 9-8 record and missed the playoffs for the second year in a row.
Given that Burrow came back from a significant injury and played at such an elite level, he is a very worthy winner. There was some thought that perhaps Minnesota Vikings quarterback Sam Darnold could win it after the way he turned his career around. But this is where the award has a lot of subjectivity to it.
Is coming back from struggling on the field and being a backup more impressive than coming back from an injury? In past years it has been, when Joe Flacco won it a year ago and Geno Smith won it the year before that. This year it went to the player coming back from injury.
