Last season Joe Burrow played at a level that would have won him NFL MVP honors many previous years but the Cincinnati Bengals’ postseason aspirations were undone by a porous defense. This created a situation where the start quarterback’s performance became a bit of a Rorschach test for sports media pundits with some of them pointing out that he was awesome (led the league in completions, yards and touchdowns) and others putting the blame on his shoulders.

It felt like uncharted territory to have one of the more productive passing seasons of the last decade become something polarizing and shows got a lot of mileage out of the situation.

Burrow himself, months after the Bengals were officially eliminated from the playoff picture, offered his own take on the situation over the weekend.

“If I had played even better, we wouldn’t have been in that spot that we were in,” he said, via Geoff Hobson of Bengals.com. “I just focus on getting better myself, and I feel like everyone in the locker room feels the same way. If I go out there and play better than I did last year, then it doesn’t matter what goes on anywhere else.”

One cannot argue with that logic because every player in history could probably say the same thing and have it ring true. If they’d only played better their team would have won with more frequency. With Burrow, of course, there’s the more difficult to answer question: just how much better could he have possibly been expected to play?

All of that arguing could be in the past though as the organization has had a productive offseason shoring up its offensive playmakers. Burrow’s comment is exactly what teams want to hear—a leader taking accountability so it shows he knows how to navigate a difficult, perhaps unfair situation.