13 ways of looking at Josh Allen

Josh Allen is tall. I watch a lot of college football. The one thing I definitely know about Josh Allen is that he is tall. Every time he played, I would note that, and tell my friends: My, is he tall. He is no Brock Osweiler, the most notably tall football player in the history of football, who from his college debut forward was only known as “Brock Osweiler who is 6’7”. But of all the things to know about Josh Allen, the Wyoming quarterback who may be a first round pick for an NFL team in 2018, the first is his height. He stands 6’5”.

Josh Allen is a catapult. He’s a big, sort-of-exact instrument capable of throwing the ball very, very, very far on a football field. Like a catapult, he has wheels, though relative to other things on the field those wheels turn relatively slowly.

He might not be much use at close range.

Accuracy is a very important thing for a quarterback. There were fifty-three quarterbacks in college football who completed sixty percent of their passes. Josh Allen was not one of them.

Josh Allen is a car bought by someone who does not buy cars often. It is a hard thing to successfully sum up the potential of a single athlete in a team sport. It gets much, much harder when talking about a quarterback. A quarterback could, in theory, be asked to do everything: film study, game planning, adjusting pre-snap alignments on an offense, calling plays, selecting plays from an option, reading a defense, making a shift, re-reading after a shift, sending a player in motion, re-re-reading a defense, and then in two to three seconds at most getting rid of the ball before being annihilated.

This is why a good 50% of all coaches treat quarterbacks like a necessary evil. QBs have to be there, are extremely important, and also have a tendency to break the whole machine if they go wrong. Most people, when coming to a decision like that, play it safe and abstract their needs.

Somewhere there is a dropdown menu for quarterbacks in the marketplace. In the case of Josh Allen, he fits the needs of someone who clicked “HEIGHT” and “ARM”, left the rest of the options blank, and did not watch one video of even a single test real test drive. This is how most Americans shop for their second largest purchase, a car. Thinking that the NFL would be any different about their largest purchases would be to question the NFL’s American-ness. Some NFL team is going to get a Maserati, because it sounded cool! Some NFL team might be trading in the car for a new one in two years because the reality of owning a Maserati always comes up well short of the expectations.

Josh Allen is a just an ol’ high prairie wind rustling through the junipers. You like that? Of course you like that, everyone likes good branding. Josh Allen sounds cool to some people for the same reason Carson Wentz sounded cool to some people. He came from a SMALL SCHOOL, which is basically the football equivalent of calling something “artisanal.” He went to out-of-the-way Wyoming after a stint at a junior college, which is why even a lot of college football fans haven’t seen him play.

There’s a little Aaron Rodgers in here, a little Wentz, and just enough of a whiff of a lot of intangibles the NFL talent scouting community cannot resist when it comes to certain prospects. If this isn’t clear, let me help. Please put on your best Jon Gruden voice and read it with me: I call this guy cowboy, cause he’s from Wyoming and likes to sling it! Josh Allen sounds a lot like a lot of other good ideas, so he must be a good idea, too.

Full disclosure: Josh Allen is from California, and this is mostly garbage, but by small margins it’s the kind of non-quantifiable thing people fall in love with when the charts and graphs and projections have been looked at a thousand times. Ooh, put his game tape in a mason jar, cause he’s the heartland’s pick! Josh Allen doesn’t deserve this, but we’re here and it’s happening whether anyone wants it to or not.

Josh Allen is a bug cleaned off large windshields. The game tape is not why anyone is drafting Josh Allen, and is the principal reason college football people give the full collar-tug when his name pops up that high on draft boards. No one has a problem with players on mediocre-to-bad teams getting drafted high. It’s just that most of them were at least memorable, or had memorable performances in games against high-profile talent.

This falls under the anecdotal, but since stats are for losers (thanks Mel) let’s compare. Carson Wentz was an FCS quarterback, but still won championships at North Dakota State. When Jay Cutler was at Vanderbilt, the team’s record did nothing to dissuade people from going slack-jawed at his arm strength. Fittingly, his big moment was almost beating Florida on the road, which sort of sums up the whole Jay Cutler story arc right there. Almost incredible.

Joe Flacco at Delaware was a transfer who had obvious skills, moments, and insane grades on the unreliable eye test. Ben Roethlisberger was can’t-miss at Miami (Ohio), and only lost one game his senior year. J.P. Losman was ... he was drafted by the Bills, okay? He doesn’t count, and with the exception of last season the Bills don’t count here, either.

This is all just saying: If everyone hears someone’s name as a draft pick at QB and goes “Who?” there might be something to give a potential drafter pause there. Not because the person went somewhere small, but because when that player got a chance to play in the spotlight they didn’t scare anyone watching or playing the game

Josh Allen is an advertisement for the Big Ten. Josh Allen got killed by Iowa just like Ben Roethlisberger did. In 2003, Roethlisberger threw four INTs in the opener to lose 21-3 to the Hawkeyes. In 2017, Josh Allen threw two picks in a 24-3 loss. The lesson for a young QB with serious NFL draft prospects is to never let your team schedule Iowa in your final season. They will cost that prospect money, even if only in the short term.

Josh Allen is a suggested follow on Twitter. Fitting a certain profile is as much why he’s bring looked at so hard by scouts. It’s not sexy to say this but there is a system behind the scrutiny, and the system sees all the things it wants out of a new quarterback. Josh Allen is 6’5, has a gigantic arm, and can, at times, make breathtaking throws downfield in a college football game. We can work with that, is the thought, even from the New York Jets, who have not worked with any quarterback very successfully ever. The system was built to identify talent, talent has measurements. Josh Allen fits a few of the most desirable ones. Computer, draft Josh Allen.

Josh Allen is a C student with two excellent test scores. The system was made to identify talent, sure, but it was not made to develop it, or even recognize where that talent might be uneven or spottily distributed. Josh Allen’s accuracy can be dodgy. That may scare interested parties the most, because accuracy is so necessary in modern football across the board. The short to mid-range pass is football offensively now, and if it arrives late or high someone runs the other way with it for six points.

Josh Allen is your future brilliant college dropout. There is something super-American about all this. The NFL is really good at spotting things labeled talent. It is also rigidly inflexible at adapting to new talent or irregular/odd talent if it doesn’t fit the exact mold—even if that talent yielded results in the right framework somewhere else. The training to succeed at that level is, more often than not, skimpy at best. Josh Allen could be the rural high school valedictorian who, despite obvious talent, fails at negotiating the system and drops out after three semesters. He could be your cousin who still works as a dealer at the Mohegan Sun despite that outrageous SAT. It’s cool, they have benefits and he gets to meet a lot of interesting people.

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Josh Allen is Jamarcus Russell. It’s there, if someone wants it to be. Jamarcus Russell is a punchline now, but at the time he was drafted in 2007, the LSU quarterback summed up everything someone might want—by profile, at least— in a quarterback. It would be deeply unfair to quote people after the fact about predictions they made in the past about where Jamarcus Russell would end up, wouldn’t it. The future is so uncertain, and the—

“I can’t remember being in such awe of a quarterback in my decade of attending combines and pro days. Russell’s passing session was the most impressive of all the pro days I’ve been to. His footwork for such a big quarterback was surprising. He was nimble in his dropbacks, rolling out and throwing on the run. The ball just explodes out of his hands.” — Todd McShay

“The workout Russell had was Star Wars. It was unbelievable.” —Jon Gruden

“You’re talking about a 2-3 year period once he’s under center. Look out because the skill level that he has is certainly John Elway-like.” — Mel Kiper

Ah, that’s not fair at all, is it? It’s fun, but there are now hundreds of scouts looking at Josh Allen, and their talent level varies wildly and widely, too. Most everyone agrees Allen is tall, can throw the ball through gale force winds, and that he could be exactly what a coach might need in a certain offense and context. The rest is up for debate, including the whole very real question of his accuracy as a short range and mid-range passer. Who doubts the importance of stats here, by the way? Mel Kiper, who, again, says that stats are for losers, and mainly if we’re talking about his case for Josh Allen, who he says is a first rounder. For the record I thought Jamarcus Russell would be good, but like most everyone else I did not know he would go to what was then one of the worst franchises in the NFL, or that he really, really liked lean.

Josh Allen is Blake Bortles. Not an insult, shockingly, after 2017-18. Blake Bortles for a while was the highly-touted talent asked to play too soon and cast adrift on the seas with a disastrous franchise, the Jacksonville Jaguars. This could be the scenario for the large adult son of the Wyoming Cowboys, and it is a tricky one, because it involves everyone around Allen getting better consistently, a run game to balance out what might be a hit-or-miss passing game, and a team with management happy to let Allen endure some very public growing pains.

Because the secret here is that by the numbers Blake Bortles has gotten marginally better, while the whole team got drastically better, and that if Josh Allen can land in the right place he can Bortle the daylights out of this situation? Preferably in some place very far away from an intense spotlight? This is the first time anyone has every wished for two Jacksonvilles or two Jaguars franchises, but a duplicate/alternate Jaguars franchise located in Jacksonville Two would be ideal for a big and very raw prospect like Josh Allen. “Jacksonville Two” would also be the worst Damon Lindelof show ever made.

Josh Allen is a phenomenal case study in confirmation bias. The revolution in statistical analysis in sports has hit football very, very unevenly. In general, teams use statistical analysis a lot more than people think, particularly for staff management and other very corporate-y things. They use statistical analysis in evaluating the draft and value, unless they have a Bill Walsh hanging around. There was only one of those, and apparently he was as good as a computer.

In gametime decision-making and talent evaluation, analytics still lose to gut instinct more often than not. (See: Football’s refusal to do simple math and go for it on 4th down more often than even the most cautious computer would.) Most of that stubborn refusal to math is a long, weird defense of tradition, along with a fear of being mocked if and when a fourth-down try inevitably fails. Related: No one ever brings up when a team loses anyway after punting on third and short, which is really something we all need to try to do.

Confirmation bias can be just as prevalent when it comes to evaluating talent. To be fair: Whatever moment started an NFL scout’s fascination with Allen, I can’t blame someone for having it. Allen throws 60 yards accurately on air in workouts. He is famously tall. Allen has enough speed and agility to do the job, no obvious character flaws or troubled history, and can throw the ball sixty yards downfield with accuracy. Did I mention that part? Say it again and feel the power melting your brain into a satisfied goo: Sixty yards downfield with ease.

He doesn’t look that way on tape playing for Wyoming. But there are probably reasons for that, right? He did lose a bunch of talent from his team in 2016, when he had better numbers. Allen does play in a college offense with college players, an inferior scheme and supporting cast of Mountain West-level talents. If my team drafts him, surely it won’t be like that. When have the Browns ever failed to develop a prospect? Or maybe more appropriately: Sure, we’ve failed in the past—but this guy is can’t miss, even for us.

Confirmation bias is a worm that crawls into the brain of even the smartest people, and sometimes it finds its way into a host by riding along inside a bright, shiny apple like a Josh Allen-type prospect.

Josh Allen might be Josh Allen. There is so little chance he will actually be a consistent starting quarterback in the NFL. So many things can happen, none of which are the intended end of this process. Josh Allen, if he is lucky, will get to be Josh Allen. His case will be his own, his career will be as long as he wants it to be, and he’ll leave football healthy and with much more money than he came in with. That would be the ideal case, wouldn’t it? That in the end, he’d get to be the most intact, happiest version of himself, no matter what happens on the field?