WSJ - Josh Allen Is the NFL’s Myth Busting Quarterback
The WSJ had a good article about Josh Allen.
It goes through some of the old adages that you can't teach accuracy to a quarterback.
It also said, and I find this crazy, that the only reason he got the opportunity to play at Reedley (before transferring) is because a coach was dating Josh Allen's cousin.
article in spoilers below in case
it is paywalled for people:
[Show spoiler]Josh Allen Is the NFL’s Myth Busting Quarterback
The Bills are 6-2 this year and poised to make a playoff run. That’s because Allen has become more accurate than anyone predicted.
By Andrew Beaton
Nov. 4, 2020 8:00 am ET
When NFL coaches and executives trekked to college football’s hinterlands three years ago for a firsthand look at a quarterback with fabled arm strength, Wyoming coach Craig Bohl gave them less hype and more of a warning about Josh Allen.
“I said over and over again that he’s far from a finished product,” Bohl says.
Bohl told them Allen would continue to grow into his rare abilities—and that’s where some decision makers opted out. There is a camp of football traditionalists who stand by one of the game’s oldest axioms: Nothing is more important than a quarterback’s accuracy, and accuracy can’t be taught. They looked at a quarterback who completed just 56% of his passes at Wyoming and shook their heads at the notion he could do any better against far superior competition.
The Buffalo Bills disagreed and made him the No. 7 pick in the 2018 draft. Three seasons later, Allen is offering a crash course in how that old wisdom is more outmoded than telex machines. He’s growing into one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks.
The Bills are 6-2 this year and poised to make a playoff run, and the reason is that Allen has learned to throw the football with phenomenal accuracy. He’s completing 67.1% of his passes—more than eight percentage points higher than just a season ago, a meteoric transformation that has flown in the face of traditional football logic.
“I’ve never believed you could coach accuracy,” said Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman. “Josh has proven me wrong.”
Allen was the NFL draft’s Rorschach test in 2018. Coaches and executives looked at the same player and arrived at opposite conclusions based on what they believed in, and their beliefs were based on how closely they were putting Allen under the microscope.
From one angle, he looked like a near perfect model. At 6-foot-5, with uncanny speed and the ability to casually launch footballs 70 yards in the air, he was everything anyone could ever dream of in a theoretical quarterback. If NFL coaches could design quarterbacks in a laboratory, they would come out built like Josh Allen.
But the closer anyone looked, the harder it was to ignore the red flags. His numbers in his last year at Wyoming were among the worst in the entire country. He struggled against Mountain West Conference opponents and even more against top-shelf competition, completing under half of his passes against Power Five schools.
“The accuracy thing cracks me up,” said Bill Magnusson, Allen’s coach at Firebaugh High School.
The strange thing was that NFL executives weren’t the first ones to doubt him because of the competition he faced. Every Division I college coach in America had already done the same exact thing.
The Nick Sabans of the world don’t exactly make regular stops in Firebaugh, Calif., a small agricultural town that’s more famous for its mention in a Bruce Springsteen song than producing football players. Even his dream school, nearby Fresno State, wrote him off though he attended the school’s camps and Magnusson exhorted its coaches to give him a chance. Allen didn’t get any Div I offers and ended up at Reedley College, also near Fresno. The coaches there stumbled upon him only because of the sheer happenstance that one of the coaches was dating Allen’s cousin.
Ernie Rodriguez, Reedley’s offensive coordinator, quickly realized Allen would improve far more than other quarterbacks for two reasons. The first that was when Allen took his pads off, Rodriguez saw a frame that would easily gain more muscle. The second was that Allen picked up on the offense far quicker than any player he had ever worked with.
“I knew if you put talent around him, watch out—it’s going to explode,” Rodriguez said. “He just needed a shot.”
His play in one year in junior college led to exactly one offer. Wyoming wasn’t quite Alabama, but its coach knew something about working with a talented and overlooked quarterback. Bohl had been the coach at North Dakota State when Carson Wentz rose to become the No. 2 pick in 2016.
In practice and then in games, Bohl watched Allen make tremendous plays and others that were deeply questionable. “He was raw fundamentally,” Bohl said.
As they worked together, Allen made fewer and fewer of those mistakes as he gained muscle and experience. Slowly, NFL scouts and executives started showing up at their games to make a franchise-changing decision about this one player. He finished his final year at Wyoming with 16 touchdowns, six interceptions and only 165 passing yards a game while completing just 56% of his throws.
There was hardly any precedent for such a discrepancy between a quarterback’s seeming talent and collegiate production. Wyoming’s passing offense ranked 113th out of 130 teams in a metric that adjusts for quality of opponent. The only quarterbacks in the prior decade who went in the first two rounds despite completing under 58% of their passes in their final collegiate year were Jake Locker and Christian Hackenberg—massive busts who reinforced the idea that accuracy wasn’t teachable at the NFL level.
The question league executives had to reckon with was: Why were Allen’s numbers so crummy despite his exceedingly rare talent?
There were plenty of reasons to explain his low completion rate. His offensive line was troubling. His receivers were crummy. Some even believed they dropped his passes because Allen’s arm was too strong. “He was throwing so frickin’ hard,” Rodriguez said.
When it came time for the draft, the Browns took a quarterback No. 1 overall in Baker Mayfield. The Jets traded up to No. 3 to get Sam Darnold. They came from big-time colleges and put up big-time numbers. Then the Bills traded up to No. 7 to make the bet those teams weren’t willing to make—that Allen could keep getting better and become more accurate than he had ever shown.
That’s precisely what has happened, and it’s why Buffalo is the favorite to win the AFC East and make noise in January. Allen completed 52.8% of his passes as a rookie and 58.8% last year, when the team made the playoffs as a wild card. That’s up to 67.1% this season. He has 20 touchdowns this season—a Bills record through eight games, surpassing the mark set by a guy named Jim Kelly.
That’s in large part because Allen has accented his throwing abilities with making big plays on the run. Over the last two years, he’s third among all quarterbacks in rushing yards.
The quarterback who ranks first in that statistic also completed under 60% of his college passes and fell even further in the 2018 draft—the same year as Allen—because of questions about his accuracy. Now that quarterback is known as the NFL’s reigning MVP: Lamar Jackson.
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