The not-so-sudden success of Josh Allen and Buffalo Bills will generate many impersonators in the NFL. But because plagiarists copy and paste their work from Wikipedia, copiers in the league will likely understand the facts correctly, but will lose the main idea.
Allen’s ancestry is one of the biggest stories of the 2020 season. He was practically a caricature of a talented but clumsy newcomer, like the Buffalo Bills first round pick in 2018 (seventh in all). He improved modestly last season, although he often still looked like a team mascot on inline skates firing a cannon in a T-shirt.
But he flourished this season, playing for 4,544 yards and 37 touchdowns, running for eight touchdowns, winning a Pro Bowl spot and taking the Bills to a 13-3 record in the regular season and last week’s playoff victory over Indianapolis Colts, the first of the playoff victory franchise since the 1995 season.
Gradual and wide-ranging development, like Allen’s, is surprisingly rare: most young defenders display immediate potential (like Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs or Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens, whom the Bills face on Saturday night in a divisional round playoff) or stagger for long seasons of few highs and many lows (like any Jets defender in the last 44 years). So NFL coaches and general managers are sure to try to steal any stone from the alchemist who turned Allen from a spinning dispensary into a candidate for the Most Valuable Player Award.
Unfortunately, the league will likely learn all the wrong lessons from Allen’s success, starting when teams look for the “next Josh Allen” in the next squad.
Many NFL decision makers want height and arm strength when evaluating young passersby. Some would recruit a quarterback whose passes fall into the coaches’ parking lot, provided he is over six feet tall and breaks some windshields. Some would design a baseball pitching machine on stilts if it somehow looked them in the eye and offered a firm handshake.
Allen’s college statistics were terrible, and his game movie looked like the error roll at the end of a Jackie Chan movie. But he is six feet tall and has a rifle, even by NFL standards.
Allen’s success will not only give scouts and coaches more freedom to indulge their fetish by the arm, but the many negatives in their college scouting report will create an unfailing argument in favor of every prospect who launches sharp 40-yard spirals at receivers to 30 meters away. Of course, Lanky McRocketarm threw three interceptions and ricocheted a screen pass from a defender’s face mask against the directional state on Saturday. But that means he can be the next Josh Allen!
Agitated prospects that are already in the league can immediately benefit from Allen’s extended larval stage. Don’t give up on the 1.80 meter Giants quarterback, Daniel Jones, for now, for example: he just needs to drastically reduce his spins, produce more big shots, become more consistent, avoid irritating injuries and learn not to fall on his own. feet 10 meters before the goal line to enjoy an advance like Allen!
Jones’ better-late-than-ever leap would also justify General Manager Dave Gettleman’s decision to recruit him. The most popular trends in the NFL are those that provide coverage for mistakes, because the most powerful motivator in the league is not the desire to win, but the desire to remain employed.
Coaches will also benefit if Allen inspires a rebirth of delayed gratification. Any model of team building with two years free of consequences will be enthusiastically adopted by the league’s dedicated self-preservation experts. It will be an invigorating change of pace to justify missed seasons as a result of a much-needed “culture change”.
Some teams will try to copy the account formula more directly. The team’s offensive coordinator, Brian Daboll, has become a contender for tough jobs, as teams look for a coach who can slowly prepare their incoming or in-quarter quarterback candidates. In developing Allen over the course of three seasons, Daboll appears to have cut the line in front of Chiefs’ offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, who helped Mahomes become the league’s MVP in the quarterback’s second season.
Meanwhile, Anthony Lynn was fired as the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers, despite having managed a debut season of 31 touchdowns from Justin Herbert. The NFL never allows consistent logic (or anything else) to get in the way of your hiring preferences.
Ultimately, Allen’s appearance is likely to encourage coaches and executives to do all the things they already enjoy doing, just in a more assumed way. Among others, they like to overestimate their favorite prospect’s flavor; disguising risk-averse procrastination as the prudent construction of an empire; promote from within the camaraderie system; and congratulate each other when a plan that failed a dozen times finally worked out once.
Some nuance is inevitably lost whenever the NFL teams try to copy each other’s success. Allen was really a unique prospect, and the Bills invested heavily in their support cast (especially choosing picks in the 2020 and 2021 draft to get Allen as No. 1 receiver on Stefon Diggs). The signs of Allen’s growth were unmistakable in the second half of last season.
Bills’ success in 2020 is a testament to the talent and hard work of Allen, his teammates and coaches, but also a lot of patience, a little innovation and inspiration and a lot of good luck. It is not the result of a secret recipe, but of a long process that most NFL decision makers honor, but few are able to execute.
In fact, Allen’s success is the result of so many factors that it essentially cannot be repeated. But that won’t stop the rest of the NFL from trying.