OVER/UNDER How Many More Super Bowls Will Joe Burrow Play In?

When a quarterback with as much talent and hype as Joe Burrow makes it to a Super Bowl in only their second NFL season, expectations crank into overdrive and reality becomes blurred. Call it the Tom Brady effect. If you lead your team to one Super Bowl at 25, surely more are to follow.

Except that's not the case. Only a select few quarterbacks make multiple Super Bowl starts. Many Hall-of-Fame quarterbacks have only had one shot at it.

Brady made us forget that reality; advancing to the Super Bowl at an unsustainable rate and making us think his presumed successors will do the same thing. That is not the case.

Which brings us back to Burrow. The No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft has certainly lived up to the hype he brought with him from LSU, leading the Bengals from the basement of the AFC to the Super Bowl in just two seasons, a similar meteoric rise to the one he had at LSU where he won the Heisman and National Championship in two seasons after transferring from Ohio State. But after losing Super Bowl 56 to the Rams, how many more shots will Burrow truly have to win a ring? The odds say not many.

Only 25 quarterbacks in NFL history have played in more than one Super Bowl. Of that, only 15 have played in more than two Super Bowls and only nine have played in more than three. The list of quarterbacks who have started only one Super Bowl includes Dan Marino, Aaron Rodgers, Steve Young and Drew Brees. So when you think of how many more Super Bowls Burrow will play in, history says its one or maybe two more max, unless he ascends to uber-elite status like Brady, John Elway and Peyton Manning or the Bengals become a dynasty like the Cowboys, Patriots or 49ers.

The other factor is the competition. The AFC is currently stacked with elite quarterbacks talented enough to lead their team to the Super Bowl highlighted by Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and Justin Herbert. It's easy to envision each of them making at least one (more in Mahomes' case) Super Bowl appearance, or maybe more, in their career. That will also take away from Burrow's future appearances.

Based on all of that, I'll set Burrow's OVER/UNDER of total Super Bowl appearances (including this season) at 2.5, with the UNDER a slight -125 favorite to -105 on the OVER. Obviously if you believe in Burrow, taking the OVER is the clear move. But injuries (he already tore his ACL as a rookie and hurt his knee again in the Super Bowl), the Bengals history of not contending, the history of quarterbacks making multiple Super Bowl appearances and the elite competition he faces to even make a Super Bowl leads me to feel like the UNDER should be favored here.

So there you have it. One, maybe two more appearances for Burrow in the Super Bowl. That's my contention at least and I feel the odds are fair based on all the factors discussed.

With NFL futures odds out, the BetSided team looks ahead to next year's Super Bowl! Check out the latest episode of our podcast, "Bet & Breakfast" below.