The best Bengals offensive line of the decade ends its break-out season Sunday (1 p.m.-Cincinnati’s Local 12) at Paycor Stadium trying to contain the most prolific sacker of the 2020s as Cleveland's Myles Garrett stands a sack away from breaking the single-season record that has stood for a quarter of a century.

How good is Myles Lorenz Garrett?

Bengals Ring of Honor Member Willie Anderson, who has reached the threshold of the Pro Football Hall of Fame with a career where he blanked seven of the top eight sackers of all-time, has an idea.

"Bruce Smith is the top of the line when it comes to pure pass rush," Anderson says. "He's got those pass rush moves of Bruce Smith, but the athletic ability of a Julius Peppers."

Garrett began this run to break 22.5 sacks against the Bengals with two in the opener 117 days ago. But any resemblance between that Bengals offensive line and this one is purely coincidental.

The reasons Joe Burrow’s line is better read like an everything-in-it recipe from Ja’Marr Chase’s New Orleans cuisine. A re-branding, the linemen themselves call it:

The recipe starts in a room with two rare, respected leaders working on a combined two decades of experience in left tackle Orlando Brown Jr., and center Ted Karras keeping the group together.

That's allowed first-year offensive line coaches Scott Peters and Mike McCarthy to hone individual techniques and develop young players while tapping the potential of a new veteran, like right guard Dalton Risner.

Risner, the seven-year vet who arrived hours before the season's first appointment with Garrett, has found himself at the heart of the evolution supplying stability in the middle and for emerging elite right tackle Amarius Mims on the outside.

There's also the rise of running back Chase Brown patiently picking holes behind the line's new go-to in the run game, the duo double-team block. There's the ooze of confidence that began with the arrival of quarterback Joe Flacco. In the 11 games since, the Bengals have the league's fourth-lowest sack percentage and an upper half of the league yards per rush.

"All kinds of reasons," Risner says. "Look at the players they've surrounded us with. The quarterback, the wide receivers. The backs and tight ends. The scheme.

"And a crazy freak of a human being at right tackle, and Amarius Mims is only getting better. (Rookie left guard) Dylan Fairchild is getting better every week. All these things have culminated together."

It has all received Burrow's face-of-the-franchise-stamp-of-approval

"I think this is the most comfortable I've felt back there since I've been in the league," Burrow says. "I think we've also done a better job this year of mixing in different looks, different personnels, and running the ball in different situations. I think that's helped the guys up front and helped us as an offense, too.

"Obviously, I think we're built on the outside and the explosive pass game, but I think we've taken a step this year in terms of being a physical, downhill run team."

This is Burrow's team, and that means they're going to pass. In the decade Garrett has terrorized quarterbacks, the Bengals have thrown the fifth-most passes and the fifth most touchdown passes.

"It takes special people," Peters says. "Every offensive lineman in the world wants to run the football. But we embrace throwing it and we're always talking about different and better ways to protect Joe."

Risner: "We don't complain about it. We love it. I think Scott's done a good job with that. Embrace it. We'd love to see Chase Brown get 100-yard games and rush for 1,000 yards. But we want to win games, too."

The massive Mims is the larger-than-life poster of the O-line surge. He's just beginning to scratch the 6-8, 340-pound surface of his enormous talent: "A big first-round hit for the Bengals," Karras says.

Anderson, the man who wore Mims' No. 71 into the Bengals Ring of Honor as the best right tackle in the turn of the century NFL, has noticed.

"You can tell watching film, and watching him play, you see he has a different body confidence in himself than his rookie year," says Anderson, a huge O-line social media influencer who teaches at his Atlanta academy. "You can tell he's been playing with a stance that he's figured out is a good stance for him. He's a big dude. He and Orlando are like two freaking Jonathan Ogdens out there.

"He's got the athletic ability, and he's starting to figure out the nuances of pass blocking. I like his trajectory. The third year is the break-out year. I started figuring it out in the middle of my second year. The third year is that big year. I started to realize, 'I'm pretty good. It's hard to beat me.'"

Mims vowed when the Bengals got eliminated from the playoffs that he would put his head down and get even better.

"More reps, processing information, good vets in the room, new coaching scheme," Mims says as reasons for his progress with a nod to Risner's counsel.

He's watched plenty of Anderson tape in the offseason, a bible for young tackles since Anderson pioneered the use of independent hands when the Garrett-like athletes began populating as edge rushers. The hand usage on Sunday defending Garrett won't be much different than what Anderson used to blank Peppers in a 2006 game at Paycor.

"I play like Willie. I'm a big clamp down with the hands. Orlando is the best at it," Mims says. "I've got confidence in my feet. I'm an athletic tackle. A lot of it is about the hand placement. How do I want to punch when I punch? The counters."

Peters teaches the Willie Way, which is not new to the Bengals, as well as bringing different techniques that are new. Such as his strike system spawned from his martial arts background supplementing fundamentals the vets have learned in the league.

Peters is appreciative of a vet like Risner who came in with an open mind seeking to improve his game, and Risner is appreciative of Peters giving him some other tools. It's a glimpse of the adjustment and melding of minds that have gone on in the room.

Risner, who starts his 92^nd game Sunday and his seventh straight game this season, says it's one of the best runs of his career.

"One thing (Peters) does great is adjust by player. What each player might be good at. What to teach players they can do differently," Risner says. "It's personally been great for me. It plays to my strengths.

"Playing with long arms, something I'm good at. Playing square in the pass game. Combinations in the run game. Hand placement. Independent hands. Things that benefit the game that I play."

Now they have to play the best.

How good is No. 95?

"Nobody like him," says Peters, who saw Garrett every day for four years when they were with the Browns together. "Micah Parsons is explosive. Twitchy, fast, and has some strength. But he doesn't have the range Myles has from a lateral perspective."

Brown Jr., got a heavy dose of Garrett in the opener on the left side, the side where Garrett got his sacks.

"So strong. And the thing about him is that while he's coming at you on the rush, he's able to play the run, too, and you almost never see a guy be able to do that," Brown Jr. said.

And, as Burrow says, he's usually the best athlete on any field he takes.

Peters says at one point Sunday, each of his five linemen are going to find themselves one-on-one with Garrett. They move him, but he'll be primarily over Brown on the offense's left side. But Mims will see him some, too, as Garrett looks for places to exploit.

"They find ways to isolate him and prevent your help systems," Peters says.

Willie Anderson chuckles from Atlanta when asked how he would block Garrett. That, says the man who blanked seven Hall-of-Famers, would be a problem.

"I ask myself all the time," Anderson says. "I'm sitting here at 50 watching him on social media thinking what the 25-year-old me would do.

"You can't just sit back there all the time on seven-step drops. He'll eat you alive. He's too athletic. Get on him faster than usual."

The Steelers shut out Garrett last week, and Anderson says the Bengals have bigger and better tackles. But the Bengals have their own agenda that they have been using for the last 11 games, when they have the NFL's second-most passing yards and second-most touchdown passes.

Garrett or no Garrett.

"When Ja'Marr and Tee (Higgins) and our tight ends are catching balls, and Joe is throwing," Risner says, "we're scoring. That's our thing. Protect him."