Making Sense of Joe Burrow's Clutch Stats

He loses a lot of games with a successful clutch drive

If Burrow is mounting successful clutch drives at a reasonable rate but still losing these games, there must be a lot of losses in which he successfully mounted one.

There are.

Below is the win percentage of each quarterback's team in games where he had at least one successful clutch drive in the final eight minutes while down a score.

In those games, Burrow's team won 1 of 10, the lowest rate among 31 quarterbacks by a wide margin. The next lowest are C.J. Stroud (2 of 5) and Jacoby Brissett (5 of 11). The group as a whole wins about 63% of the time.

The sample is small: just 10 games. But Cincinnati lost nine of those 10.

In eight of those nine losses, the other team scored the deciding points on its final possession: four field goals in the final five seconds of regulation (Dallas, Baltimore, Houston and Cleveland), three field goals in overtime (Green Bay, San Francisco and Pittsburgh), and a touchdown with 16 seconds left (Cleveland, 2020).

The kicker here is the, um, kicking

Finally, the kicking.

This is win probability added (WPA) by every field goal and extra point, made or missed, in the final 10 minutes of the fourth quarter while the kicking team was down a score, from 2020 to 2025. A make adds WPA; a miss takes it away. A WPA of 1.00 represents one full win.

CIN's kickers were below average, but not disastrous: net -0.18 WPA, 24th of 32 teams. The average team was +0.33.

CIN's 20 makes in 23 attempts added 0.47 WPA, while three misses took away 0.64. The gap between Cincinnati and an average team amounts to roughly half a win over six seasons. That's real, but small compared with how those nine games ended.

Is Burrow clutch?

Down one score late, the numbers pretty definitively say yes.

He moves the ball as well as anyone, ranking first in EPA/play. He turns drives into a tie or lead at a better-than-average rate, ranking 13th of 31 quarterbacks. Unfortunately for him and the Bengals, in the games where he does that, CIN has often lost because of what happened afterward. There's an argument that in these situation the Mahomes is probably the only other QB you'd want.

The only caveat here, is that YUNO Sports, and perhaps you personally, would include tied situations in the definition of clutch. One-score deficits are only part of the clutch picture.*

Tied drives outnumber one-score drives 33 to 24, and Burrow is closer to middle of the pack when asked to turn a tie into a lead. Combine tied and one-score situations and he's still fourth in EPA/play, but 28th of 38 in win percentage and 28th of 35 in clutch-drive success.

So he's good and the answer depends a bit on how YOU define "clutch", but there is no QB or offensive centric measure that look even close to as bad as the 1-34 would suggest.

tl;dr

"1-34" is more a team stat than a Burrow stat. Down a score late, he's very efficient and a better-than-average finisher of clutch drives, but nine of the ten times he tied it or took the lead, Cincinnati lost, usually on the other team's last possession. That's an end-of-game problem more than an offense problem.

Notes

The "1-34" figure. We don't reproduce it. Depending on the definition (his snaps while trailing; games he played in where Cincinnati trailed; any amount of time) the final-8 record comes out between 1-29 and 1-32. There is at least one game (BAL @ CIN, 2024) that he lost in OT having never trailed in regulation.

* We also include leading situations where you can bleed the clock, extend the lead to two scores, or effectively end the game. Thats a topic of a bigger discussion but you can see those numbers on the Clutch Drive Analyzer.