Joe Burrow's brother reveals surprising fact about infamous cigar celebration

Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow is synonymous with smoking cigars thanks to his now infamous celebration after Burrow led LSU to an undefeated national championship-winning season during the 2019-20 college football season.

The video, taken by LSU videographer Matt Karin, saw Burrow sitting on the couch with his leg propped up, puffing on the victory cigar and sprung into action.

“He just sat right down on the couch, crossed his legs and started hamming it up,” Karin recalled to Sports Illustrated. “It was like a scene out of a movie. The ironic thing about the whole couch-smoking thing is it only happened because [Clemson coach] Dabo Swinney ran long in his press conference.”

The thing is — Burrow isn’t a cigar guy.

Joe’s older brother Jamie, who is a self-proclaimed avid smoker of Oliva Churchill Blondes, said he was the one to give Joe his first cigar after LSU beat Alabama on the road in 2019, but his little brother didn’t smoke it. In fact, after LSU’s championship win, Jamie saw the video on social media of his little brother puffing a cigar and thought it was odd.

“I didn’t know you smoked cigars,” he said to Joe.

“I don’t,” Joe told him. “That was my first one.”

Jamie laughed retelling the story. “A lot of cigars find their way to Joe. Whether he wants them or not, he gets them.”

The cigars were courtesy of Burrow’s teammate KJ Malone, the son of Karl (yes, that Karl Malone), where the Barrel Aged cigars were hauled into the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in two huge plastic bags. Of course, Malone forgot lighters and cigar cutters. Amid the chaos of a stuffy locker room, the City of New Orleans Police Department showed up because apparently the Superdome was a no-smoking zone. The police threatened to arrest players if they didn’t put the cigars out.

“Odell, the smoke, the police. It was chaos,” remembers Brandon Berrio, an LSU communications staff member.

Throughout all of this, Malone approached Burrow with a cigar, who immediately turned it away. As we all know, he eventually accepted it and the rest is history.

Two seasons later, Burrow is back in a championship game — Super Bowl 56 against the Los Angeles Rams. Malone has already let Burrow know that if the Bengals take home the championship, he’s sending the entire team one of his father’s cigars. It’s fair to say that regardless of Burrow’s cigar stance, it’ll be hard to pass one up after winning his first Super Bowl in his second NFL season.