None of You Deserve Josh Allen

There have been 27 Super Bowls played since the year 2000. Yes, I know the one they played in 2000 was technically the 99 Super Bowl, but it was easier to section out this way, sue me. By my count, 17 of those Super Bowls were won by players who were considered at the time to be Elite Quarterbacks. Most of these players are already in the Hall of Fame, or are not yet eligible because their Hall-worthy exploits occurred too recently (or are still occurring, in the case of players like Patrick Mahomes and Matt Stafford).

Pictured: A man still burnishing his legacy

That’s 62% of all championships in the 21st century, won by players belonging to a category that encompasses no more than five players in any given year. Often, it’s even fewer than that.

Now you might say “Of course, the good players win most of the games,” and you’d be right about that. But the thing is, teams with basically every weakness you can imagine have won Super Bowls in this time period. Weak run games, porous secondaries, difficulty generating pressure, shoddy pass protection — all of it can be overcome if you have The Guy. Or sometimes even just A Guy.

See, it’s not just the Elite guys. 24 of those 27 Super Bowls (89%) were won by teams with quarterbacks who were at least considered in their time to be very good. Guys who got the “Is he Elite?” treatment at the height of their powers. The answer to that question was usually no, but reader I can promise you nobody ever asked it about Mike Glennon.

It’s true that many of those teams had to work harder than the ones that could just say “Lol, we have Mahomes,” but a franchise-caliber quarterback is still the engine that has driven basically every successful team of the last 30+ years of NFL history.

The last quarterback who is more or less universally agreed to have been mid or worse to win a Super Bowl was Nick Foles. Who, it should be noted, won by playing the four best games of his life in a row, briefly simulating the impact of an Elite Quarterback. Foles went from Super Bowl MVP to fighting for his life against the likes of Carson Wentz, Gardner Minshew, and Mitch Trubisky; but for one brief period in the winter of 2017/18, he played like a Hall of Famer and that was all it took to get the Eagles a ring — something their fans have been very normal about and grateful for ever since.

Before Foles, you have to go all the way back to the likes of Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer in the early 2000s to find a “bad” quarterback who nonetheless led his team to a Super Bowl win. The odds are vanishingly small that your team can contend if quarterback is any kind of a weakness, or even if it’s just not a strength.

Quarterback cope and you

So what do you do if your team is one of the statistically larger number of teams that don’t have A Guy? You cope. You take a long hard look at the future clipboard-holder your team is trotting out every Sunday, and you convince yourself that there is some combination of circumstances that will suddenly and miraculously transform him into a top-10 quarterback. Or, if the time for that has passed, you point the finger at all the fools that stunted his development. 

Coping for your quarterback hasn’t always been easy, but in 2020 the journeyman coper was given a tremendous gift — the Josh Allen comp.

Josh Allen is one of the most exciting quarterbacks in the league. He is a statuesque, ungovernable himbo juggernaut who makes ridiculous trickshot throws and has more rushing touchdowns than Marshawn Lynch. The only thing stronger than his arm is his willingness to just Try Shit, hurling the ball impossible distances into extreme danger and somehow coming away with magic more often than he does an interception. But before he became one of the faces of the NFL, Josh Allen sucked. God he sucked so bad.

Allen was not even a viable NFL starter for the first two years of his career. He was erratic, inaccurate, and displayed extremely poor judgement. For those watching, he did show clear signs of improvement in some aspects of his game between years one and two, but he was still firmly in the bottom quarter of the league. In 2018 his 4.4 ANY/A was good for 32nd in the NFL. In 2019 he improved to 5.7 — a sharp jump up but still only good for 23rd in the league, well below average.

Then, in 2020, he performed a miracle. His ridiculous attempts were suddenly ridiculous completions, and he became both a significant rushing threat and a frighteningly good deep-ball passer. His ANY/A exploded to 7.8, 5th in the entire league that year. He finished second in MVP voting that season, a truly unprecedented feat for a player who some doubted would even be considered rosterable in his previous two seasons.

And this was no trick of the light, Josh never went back to the talented but unreliable washout most thought he was shaping up to be. He received MVP votes again in four of the next five seasons, winning the award in 2024. He will surely receive votes again this season. Unfortunately he has had to share the AFC with Patrick Mahomes and has yet to earn a Super Bowl ring, but there is no doubt that Josh Allen went from “barely playable” to “probably the second-best quarterback in the league,” and he did it seemingly overnight.

And to the fan dying for cope, the myth of the Josh Allen leap is a very dangerous thing. Gone are the days of reasonable expectation. Why bother tracking a guy’s growth year over year? Why examine what he’s good at or why he’s struggling? 

“My quarterback, like Josh Allen, is bad in year two. Therefore it’s possible that my quarterback, like Josh Allen, will suddenly and inexplicably become great in year three!”

Your team blew a first-round pick on a guy who looks like he’s never seen a football before in week 8 of his second year? Don’t sweat it! Josh Allen was bad his rookie year, and barely better the year after. Then he was nearly league MVP and he never looked back! So don’t worry about Bo Nix turning down those deep crossers, guys, because next year he’s just magically going to be the best quarterback in the AFC!

I want to be perfectly clear: Allen was never a bad quarterback who suddenly and inexplicably became good. If you think that is what happened, you either never attempted to understand it or you just plain don’t know ball. If you were blindsided by his improvement in real time that’s okay, it caught a lot of smart people by surprise. But the evidence is there for us to analyze after the fact.

If my not-at-all veiled condescension wasn’t enough and you somehow missed the title of the article, let me just say it plain: If you are comparing your team’s bad quarterback to Josh Allen in a hopeful way, you might be a moron. As the world’s leading exporter of Jay Cutler apologia, I am also a moron; so you can trust me on this. Let me explain.

The three deaths of cope

Everything is inevitable after it happens, but it’s really not that hard in retrospect to see what changed between Allen’s second and third years. He was always a physical freak, blessed with all the tools you could possibly imagine. He’s big, he’s fast, and he’s strong, and that gives you an advantage most guys simply don’t have.

Allen’s poor numbers and frequent bozo moments resulted from the fact that he could extend plays by outrunning pressure or, in some cases, just tossing dudes aside. He also had the arm to attempt dangerous, tight-window throws downfield even on the run or totally off-platform. Plays that would have simply been sacks or throwaways for most of the quarterbacks in the league become opportunities to do highlight-reel stuff when you have those tools.

This is the first death of the Josh Allen cope. If your quarterback is a timid little guy who gets called a “superprocessor” to cover up his lack of physical traits, he is not Josh Allen and he will not make the Josh Allen leap. Through coaching and experience, players can and often do improve their accuracy and decision-making. But no amount of exposure to the NFL can turn a weak arm into a Howitzer. There is no coach who can turn an evasive but injury-prone scrambler into a brick shithouse more likely to injure a cornerback than the other way around.

In Allen’s first two years, the highlights never quite manifested, but it’s obvious now that he was simply calibrating to the NFL. Once he had seen enough and learned enough to place those risky bets just a little more safely, he became the kind of weapon offensive coordinators can only dream of.

But the key is that he was trying to be this quarterback the whole time. Allen’s weakness was not the very common rookie reliance on short, easy passes, clean pocket scrambles, and RPO bullshit to cover up his deficiencies.

This is the second death of the Josh Allen cope. If your quarterback is in his second (or even third and beyond, in some cases) year and still running a shotgun-based Gremlin offense where he refuses to target the middle of the field, he is not Josh Allen and will not make the Josh Allen leap. Allen was attempting to hit sicko MOF shit through those first two years, it just started working in the third. The willingness to try those throws isn’t common in the NFL today, and the talent to make it work is even less so.

For example, here are a couple of 2018 Josh Allen passing charts: 

Obviously there are far more incompletions and interceptions than you’d hope for, but the placement of those dots is textbook ethical hooping. From the beginning, Allen attacked all parts of the field and seemed almost pathologically committed to pushing the ball deep. Once those white and red dots started turning into green ones, he became an MVP candidate.

For comparison, here are some Bo Nix charts:

I’m sorry you had to see those, but it’s important to establish the contrast here. As you can see, Nix rarely pushes the ball more than 10 yards downfield, and is uncomfortable taking deep shots to the middle of the field other than the occasional go ball. In the 49ers game week 4 of this year, he threw the ball at or behind the line of scrimmage 15 times. Disgusting. This quarterback will never turn into that one, they’re playing entirely different kinds of football.

We are constantly hearing about how this year is the year that Joe Burrow, Jalen Hurts, Jayden Daniels, or whoever else is going to stop playing Gremlin ball and start throwing MOF more often, and yet somehow those guys never do end up turning into 2000s-style quarterbacks who love to hit those deep crossers off play action.

Allen simply plays a style of football that is disproportionately rewarding if you can do it successfully. Guys who play their best within the training-wheels offenses that have made the NFL so welcoming to college quarterbacks in the past 10-15 years are not likely to just suddenly start playing a different, better style of quarterback and thereby become Josh Allen 2.

And speaking of college quarterbacks, let’s talk about the other thing that was very unusual about Allen. In today’s NFL, rookie quarterbacks are, to put it simply, old as shit. 

2028 first-round draft pick (artist’s approximation)

The NIL and Covid exceptions have produced a crop of young quarterbacks who are older and more experienced than anything we’ve ever seen before. They are both physically older and have far more pass attempts in college than was the norm even 10 years ago.

For an extreme example, let’s look at a guy who is getting (and 100% does not deserve) the Josh Allen cope this year — Bo Nix. Nix is, to borrow a phrase from our esteemed colleague SKO, possibly the most finished product we have ever seen in his third year as an NFL quarterback.

Nix was 24 years old when he took his first NFL snap. He attended Auburn and then Oregon, and threw more than 300 passes in each of his five seasons as a starter. Way more, actually; in his final year at Oregon he threw the ball 470 times. By the time he graduated, Nix had thrown nearly 2,000 passes, the 8th most of any player since 1956, the earliest year I could find. 

Allen is more or less the exact opposite of this. He entered the league at 22 years old, which was once what you expected out of a rookie. He attended Wyoming, a school that barely matters. He technically threw the ball in three seaons, but in 2015 he attempted a whopping six passes. All told, Allen attempted just 649 passes in college — a laughably small sample size compared to most of the quarterbacks receiving Allen-based cope.

Why does this matter? Well, to put it simply, Allen was about as raw as quarterback prospects get. He had all the room in the world to grow in his first few NFL seasons because he’d barely played quarterback at all. The year he made the third-year leap that inspired all this cope, he was a few months younger than Nix was when he entered the league.

Despite how people talk about these post-Covid rookies, these things matter. It’s just easier for a young and inexperienced player to go through dramatic growth in his early seasons than it is for a guy’s 3,000th pass attempt to be the one that spontaneously turns him into an elite passer.

This, then, is the third death of the Josh Allen cope. If your quarterback has put more than 2,000 passes on tape and shown no signs of the physical talent or willingness to Try Shit Josh Allen displayed from the jump, he is not Josh Allen and will not make the Josh Allen leap. 

Too often, quarterback development conversation is centered around the phrase “if he just.” And the thing is, not all “justs” are created equal. Hoping that Caleb Williams will “just” take 3-4 more checkdowns a game is a very reasonable thing to do. Hoping that Drake Maye will “just” stop taking those god-awful sacks is a little harder to quantify. Hoping that a guy will “just” transform into an entirely different, more versatile type of quarterback is basically nothing. If your guy is in his third year and still checking down instead of throwing the wide-open dagger, he is unlikely to spontaneously develop that inclination.

And speaking of guys in their third year, I want to be very clear that this cope simply cannot be applied beyond that. The first three years of a player’s career are the only three in which it is hypothetically understandable to hope for unprecedented growth.

Quarterbacks improve upon who they are all the time. They get more accurate, better at reading defenses, more comfortable in the face of pressure, etc. Experience can and often does make up for lack of physical tools in players who manage to stick around long enough to amass that knowledge. But they very rarely change what kind of player they are, and they especially do not do so after the first three years of their career.

Even though I feel like we’ve established that Allen didn’t suddenly and randomly become a great quarterback in his third year, he did experience a very weird and extreme version of the typical rookie development curve for the position. If you’re hoping that your quarterback is on a similar trajectory and is going to at least become the best possible version of his type of quarterback, year three is where I have to ask you to get off the ride so some other hapless fanbase can get on. Your guy more than likely is what he is, and that thing is sadly not Josh Allen. It’s time for you to make peace with it.

So who CAN I compare to Josh Allen?

No one, really. I’m not saying nobody has ever looked or will ever look similar to Allen as a young quarterback, but anybody bad enough to earn Josh Allen comparisons in their first two years will probably never even be okay as a starter in their third year and beyond.

What Allen did is understandable when you view it through a historical lens, but I don’t want to take away from how unprecedented this outcome was. A toolsy but very raw prospect from a nowhere school should not have become a perennial MVP candidate. Drafting that Josh Allen and getting this one is like flipping a coin and calling tails, only to have it land on and completely scratch off a lotto ticket, revealing that you won a new car.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever see a quarterback with his exact circumstances again — most who possess that level of raw physical ability spend their entire lives preparing to be an NFL quarterback someday. They go to QB camp as children and generate huge buzz in high school. The ones who are on the right track earn massive scholarships to prestige schools where they play 100 years of college football. That means you won’t often see them hit the league nearly as undeveloped as Allen was, and those who fail to earn the hype do so probably because their college play reveals that they just don’t have it in some important way.

The closest current third-year quarterback to Allen in terms of his physical tools and approach to the game is unquestionably Caleb Williams. He’s strong and fast, he has elite sack avoidance, he loves to hunt big plays and attempt insane off-platform throws, and under Ben Johnson he has learned to relentlessly push the ball downfield and attack the MOF. That said, Caleb Williams’ 2025 was far, far closer to a “complete” quarterback than Allen’s second year.

It was understandable that both Caleb fans and Caleb doubters pointed to the Josh Allen leap as a source of hope, but it was always unrealistic to expect this because Josh was going from “barely a quarterback” to “elite.” Caleb was already knocking on the door of top 10 status last year, for him to take a Josh Allen leap would have resulted in him lapping everyone else and becoming the single greatest player in the history of the sport.

Drake Maye is another potential candidate, but he was second in MVP voting last year. I think we’ve seen enough to declare that the schedule allegations were inarguably true, and Drake’s failure to eat his veggies in a weak AFC last year are causing him some significant stumbles now. But for him to experience that level of improvement from last year to this year would likewise have resulted in the incineration of every secondary in the league. 

Jayden Daniels, Bo Nix, Michael Penix, and JJ McCarthy are the other 2024 first-round quarterbacks for whom the Josh Allen third year is “on the table.” Do any of them bear any resemblance to Josh Allen to you? 

Daniels and Nix are skittish scramblers who do their best work on short passes, often turning down MOF throws or having them cut from the playbook entirely. In addition, Daniels is plagued by injuries owing to his small frame and inability to avoid contact.

Penix can stand and deliver from the pocket, but his thrice-torn knee ligaments prevent him from escaping pressure or creating anything outside the play design, rendering him too one-dimensional to even mention in the same breath as a dynamic playmaker like Allen. 

JJ McCarthy.

Anyway, we’ll probably never see another quarterback quite like Josh Allen again. His impossible combination of physical tools, weaponized dumbass gene, and incredibly limited college experience is going to be very difficult to replicate in a league where he already exists. It’s nearly impossible that this happened a single time, and even less likely that we will see it happen again anytime soon. 

So as an expert in quarterback cope, I’m here to tell you that none of you ever deserved this and you all have to let it go. Except you, reader. Your team drafted the guy. It may not be this year. It may not be next year. But the year after? Who knows.