Joe Burrow ends silence about Bengals' aggressive spending, big trade

On one hand, most everyone knew what Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow was going to say about the team’s super-aggressive offseason.

On the other, fans probably won’t complain about hearing him address the topic, anyway.

While bouncing around from the Kentucky Derby to the Miami Grand Prix to the Met Gala over the last few days, Burrow sat down with Nick Remsen of Vanity Fair and chatted about the football outlook for his Bengals.

On things like big free-agent spending and the Dexter Lawrence trade?

Burrow is happy, to say the least.

"I'm really excited about the moves we made this offseason," Burrow said. "We need to get better, so it was exciting to see the initiative from everybody in the organization to realize that we're in this exciting stage. We're in our primes playing great football. Finding guys like Dexter and Bryan Cook ... to, you know, really solidify that defense so the young guys can also kind of rise up. We're really going to try to achieve what we want to achieve."

It’s a generic football answer, no doubt, and surely what fans expected.

Doesn’t make it a bad thing.

There’s been plenty of speculation that the Bengals needed to nail this offseason to keep Burrow happy. Not in a he-might-leave way, but for a franchise with Carson Palmer scarring, it matters.

To their credit, the Bengals spent at the top of the free agent market at edge rusher and safety, then . These are win-now moves, with the trade a generational shift out of normal franchise behavior and comfort zones.