Before Joe Burrow led his team to an AFC championship with his arm, before he had even taken an NFL regular-season snap, the Cincinnati Bengals quarterback "won the team over" during an emotional meeting about racial injustice back in the summer of 2020.
The Bengals were holding a meeting at team headquarters around August, in the wake of George Floyd's murder by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and the protests against racial injustice it had sparked across the nation. As defensive tackle D.J. Reader recalls, "a lot was going on at that time" around the country and players were discussing weighty issues in the meeting.