Allen just keeps getting better and better

‘I was always going to be the guy who figured it out,’ says the 25-year-old Bills QB after monster season

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — Josh Allen recorded the greatest season by a quarterback in Buffalo Bills history. He powered the team to its first AFC Championship Game in nearly three decades and, after losing to Kansas City, he left Arrowhead Stadium that January night knowing the Bills would be back.

Allen allowed himself a few weeks to decompress from the longest, best and most disappointing year of his young career and, when he was done, a week or two into February, he visited a sock company. There, on the basketball court at Stance headquarters in Southern California, Allen set about refining what his personal quarterback coach, Jordan Palmer, characterized as a “very, very specific” mechanical inefficiency.

Allen, 25, loves nerding out on his mechanics, or, really, anything he thinks can accelerate his development. Of all the traits that enticed the Bills to trade up to draft him out of the University of Wyoming in 2018, beyond physical gifts and a capacity for distilling reams of information into essential shards, paramount was how Allen married a desire to improve with an aptitude for doing so.

He spent his childhood on a ranch in California’s flat and fertile Central Valley and, as with the crops his family raises, he didn’t need to see immediate returns. If he worked hard, and with purpose, he knew the results would come.

“Some guys have those incredible years, and then that’s who they are,” one such guy, Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner — who won the league’s Most Valuable Player Award in his first season as a starter — said in a telephone interview. Now an analyst for NFL Network, Warner added: “And other guys just do it that once, and they never quite capture it again. I hope this is who Josh is the rest of his career, but I did not see this coming. I did not know he was capable of it.”

Allen’s incredible year — 4,544 passing yards, 46 total touchdowns, second place in the MVP balloting — thrust him into the National Football League’s upper echelon. It also, in August, enriched him with a six-year contract extension that tethers him to Buffalo through 2028, an investment in his future with implicit expectations.

Allen built himself into a top quarterback for a team constructed to contend for the Super Bowl title that his distinguished forebears of the 1990s could not win. Two games into this season, the central question for the Bills (1-1) is no longer whether they can make the playoffs, but whether they can remain among the NFL’s elite. The answer depends on Allen.

“I think there’s two kinds of players in this league: guys that get figured out and guys that figure it out,” Allen said after a recent practice. “And I was always going to be the guy who figured it out.”

Allen’s evolution to this lofty moment toppled a principle of football doctrine: that quarterbacks can’t enhance their accuracy. After selecting Allen in 2018, Bills general manager Brandon Beane was told he had just taken a tight end. He knew otherwise.

At his job interview the year before, after Buffalo’s 16th straight season without making the playoffs, Beane noted the New England Patriots dynasty had been sustained in part by their three fellow AFC East teams, which regularly changed coaches and front offices.

Unseating the Pats, he said, demanded time and patience, and as he scouted quarterback prospects before the draft he resolved to invest both in Allen.

Rarely does a quarterback improve by vast margins, as Allen did, in his third season.

The best predictor of a thirdyear eruption, according to a May 2020 study by Pro Football Focus, is a proclivity for completing passes. At Wyoming, Allen had connected on a meagre 56.2 per cent of his throws and, in his first two seasons in Buffalo, he rated last in the league.

To better evaluate Allen, Beane needed to protect him, so in 2019 he signed offensive linemen Mitch Morse and Jon Feliciano in free agency. He bolstered the receiving corps, too, adding Cole Beasley in 2019 and, in a trade with Minnesota in 2020, Stefon Diggs, who led the NFL last season in yards and receptions.

“We just feel like, as he’s learned to not try and do too much, if I give him weapons, he won’t feel like he’s got to try and put the team on his back,” Beane said of Allen. “He’ll let these guys make plays.”

Allen could do that because he had reworked his delivery, with the guidance of Palmer and Bills coaches, concentrating each off-season on a single objective: widening his stance, for example, or commanding his off-speed passes. Concentrating on the fundamental components of his motion enabled him to throw more accurately, to any spot on the field, than he ever had. So did offensive coordinator Brian Daboll’s preference for calling pass plays on first down, when opposing personnel generally must guard against the run.

Never before, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, had any quarterback across a three-season span raised his completion rate as much as Allen did: His jump to 69.2 per cent from 52.8 per cent exceeded the previous biggest increase — Jim Zorn’s 15 percentage points with the Seattle Seahawks from 1977 to ’79.

For the last year and a half, Allen has also worked with a biomechanics expert, Chris Hess, who at various stages of the off-season has gauged Allen’s functional movement and, using 3D motion capture analysis, digitally mapped his throwing motion. At first, Hess didn’t think Allen was engaged. For every assessment Hess relayed, Allen offered a monosyllabic response. Two weeks later, Hess re-evaluated him, and he was stunned to discover Allen had retained everything.

“I wasn’t moving fast enough for him,” Hess said. “He processes so quick, but he can filter it, too, and be like, ‘That’s important to me.’ ”

In Hess’s experience, quarterbacks typically don’t improve their mechanical efficiency during the season, either because they revert to old motor patterns or they compensate for various ailments that arise. But Allen did in 2020, helping him start from a more advanced place this off-season, when he focused on building lower-body strength and mobility.

Standing in a tunnel beneath Highmark Stadium just before the season began, Allen mentioned how attuned he felt — to expectations, his body, his responsibilities. “It’s not about me,” Allen said. “Whether I’m throwing 30 times a game or three times a game, if I throw three times, I better have made three right decisions on where the ball should be.”