What's different for Josh Allen this year?

[ET80]

20 minutes ago, Xenos said:

Maybe wait the entire season before declaring Allen’s 4 games to be indicative of MVP. And I like the kid especially his work ethic and realization that he needed to work on his flaws.

[Maxmw22]

One misconception is that this turnaround has only been for 4 games. That is false. While he only has 4 games under his belt this season with Diggs, working with Jordan Palmer in the off-season, ask any Bills fan, and they will say they saw a difference with his decision making after the 3 INT game against New England last year. Unless you watched a lot of Bills games last year, you probably only remember the Wildcard game where he went Hero Ball on a few plays towards the end. While he still does that on occasion, though it is not nearly as much as before.

 

His accuracy and mechanics have been improved for maybe 4 games, but that was only possible because his decision making started to improve after Week 4 of 2019.

[Xenos]

Peter King actually had a segment about this last Monday:

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/09/28/josh-allen-buffalo-bills-nfl-week-3-fmia-peter-king/

I love his passion and dedication to being the best. And really, that more than raw physical talent, is why his accuracy is better this year. The willingness to be coachable. To reach out to people like Romo for help. And to never be satisfied.

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Through three weeks of his third NFL season, Allen has progressed from being a bright prospect with the occasional brain-freeze play to being a top-five NFL quarterback (it’s early, but he’s been that so far) atop a 3-0 team, with fewer bad plays on his résumé. Remember Allen the rookie in 2018, when so much of his identity was about throwing the fastest fastball in the league? His touch now is sublime. Allen has gone to school—with former quarterbacks Jordan Palmer and Tony Romo, and his own coaches, Brian Daboll and Ken Dorsey with the Bills—to be better, and it shows. It was evident in Buffalo’s melodramatic 35-32 win over the previously 2-0 Rams on Sunday in western New York. It’s been there on each Sunday of Buffalo’s 3-0 start.

Allen is gaining a sense of who he is and where he is, as he told me late Sunday afternoon. He knows what’s important. The wins, of course they’re important. But the zits in the wins? You’d better address those now; if you don’t, they’ll end your season in January. To me, it‘s impressive that, at 24, Allen sees the big-picture stuff like that.

My post-game point to Allen: You’ve got to be pretty happy, playing so much better than you’ve played, and with your team 3-0.

“Make no mistake, we’re happy,” Allen told me. But . . .

“Excuse my language: I’m pissed off how we allowed the 28-3 lead to dwindle there. I take that very personal.”

Good answer.

“That’s better than a good answer,” Romo said from Texas late Sunday night, after landing from his CBS assignment in New England. “It shows that he has a very high standard of excellence. That’s the quarterback I want. When we talked this offseason, he forcefully asked me: ‘How can I be better?’ That’s what you want out of the quarterback of your football team.”

 

Quote

So much of Allen’s off-season work showed on those throws, and it’s shown in the first 15 days of Allen’s third season. His study started at the Super Bowl, when he asked Romo what he could be doing better, and they began a back-and-forth that continued through the offseason. “I didn’t do anything,” Romo said Sunday night. “Really. Believe me. This is him.” Allen’s off-season tutor, Jordan Palmer, praised Allen for being coachable, and for working on his control, his deep-ball accuracy, and his touch. “To be make drastic changes in your mechanics, you’ve got to be coachable, and you’ve got to be all-in on the right plan,” Palmer said. “Josh worked it every day.”

“I’ve kind of been tweaking a few things in my mechanics,” Allen said, “and allowing myself to throw a better, more catchable ball. As much as I want to pat myself on the back, I had a lot of help along the way with Jordan Palmer, and with [offensive coordinator] Brian Daboll and [QB coach] Ken Dorsey and the players we brought in.”

Romo, Allen said, taught him to “feel your head is on a stake through the ground and you’re just trying to rotate it around and use [the torso] as an axis. . . . With Jordan Palmer, we worked on how to be a more rotational thrower. Then obviously, having these Zoom calls with Dorsey and Daboll and just kinda going over our offense. And I feel like I’m very in tune with what our offense is doing. I know our answers when we’re not right. I feel like I’m being put in a good situation.”

“Josh could throw a football really well,” Romo said. “I just wanted him technically to do it better.” Palmer worked with Allen daily in southern California on the technical things. In camp, he continued to be honed with Daboll and Dorsey. The results:

• Accuracy: A 56-percent passer through his first two years, Allen has completed 71.1 percent through three games this year.

• TD-to-interception differential: Through two seasons and 28 games, Allen was plus-nine. This year, he’s also plus-nine: 10 TDs, one pick.

• Passing yards per game: Up from 184.4 over his first two years to 346.0 this year.

• Yards per pass attempt: Up from 6.6 in 2018-19 to a gaudy 9.1 this season.

The explanation is wonky, but it’s worked. When you really want to be better at something, and you’re not just nodding and saying things to make the teacher happy, that’s when education happens. And the education of Josh Allen is one of the good stories of an explosive offensive season so far.

 

Edited October 10, 2020 by Xenos

[CWood21]

12 hours ago, VanS said:

In his last 16 starts, Josh Allen has thrown 32 TDs to 4 INTs.  And that's without including his production as a runner. 

I would say that's a pretty good sample size of elite play on his behalf. 

Trying to justify an opinion solely using TDs is a poor indicator of success since TDs are solely dependent on situation.  He's done a great job of limiting turnovers, I'll give him that but he's not consistently moving the chains.  His ANY/A over the last 16 games is 7.12 assuming my math is correct.  Just to put this into perspective, that would have ranked 11th last year.  That would rank 14th this year.  That's good, not elite.

EDIT: After messing with my Excel spreadsheet, if he doubled his interceptions (going from 4 to 8), his ANY/A would be 6.77 which would be ranked 18th this year.

[CWood21]

13 hours ago, VanS said:

Nothing in Allen's history thus far shows he has been a "poor QB". 

Because let me guess, he's got tremendous physical tools?

[CWood21]

12 hours ago, VanS said:

Actually I will freely admit that.  Allen played weak competition in college against very few NFL players. 

However, that is beside the point.  He didn't need to play against future pros for the weaknesses in his supporting cast to show itself.  His Wyoming supporting could simply have been poor in comparison to other Mountain West teams.  Similar to how Patrick Mahomes playing at Texas Tech meant he played with a worse supporting cast than QBs who played for Oklahoma or Texas in the same conference.  I'm not arguing the competition he faced at Wyoming was elite.  Just saying he was carrying a team that even by Mountain West standards was subpar. 

It's really not.  You're over here talking about how he was hampered by the fact that he was playing with mediocre talent while at Wyoming (which I fully agree with), but you're trying to brush off the fact that he was playing against mediocre competition.  You want to make a correlation between he and Mahomes, but Mahomes was highly productive in college.  How much was because of that Air Raid offense is up for discussion, but there was no doubt that Mahomes was productive.  Josh Allen wasn't.

[ET80]

7 hours ago, CWood21 said:

It's really not.  You're over here talking about how he was hampered by the fact that he was playing with mediocre talent while at Wyoming (which I fully agree with), but you're trying to brush off the fact that he was playing against mediocre competition.  You want to make a correlation between he and Mahomes, but Mahomes was highly productive in college.  How much was because of that Air Raid offense is up for discussion, but there was no doubt that Mahomes was productive.  Josh Allen wasn't.

[ET80]

7 hours ago, CWood21 said:

Trying to justify an opinion solely using TDs is a poor indicator of success since TDs are solely dependent on situation.  He's done a great job of limiting turnovers, I'll give him that but he's not consistently moving the chains.  His ANY/A over the last 16 games is 7.12 assuming my math is correct.  Just to put this into perspective, that would have ranked 11th last year.  That would rank 14th this year.  That's good, not elite.

EDIT: After messing with my Excel spreadsheet, if he doubled his interceptions (going from 4 to 8), his ANY/A would be 6.77 which would be ranked 18th this year.

[ET80]

7 hours ago, CWood21 said:

Because let me guess, he's got tremendous physical tools?

[VanS]

8 hours ago, CWood21 said:

EDIT: After messing with my Excel spreadsheet, if he doubled his interceptions (going from 4 to 8), his ANY/A would be 6.77 which would be ranked 18th this year.

WTH?  He didn't throw 8 picks so why even bring this up?  This is some major league reaching you are doing to justify your belief that Allen hasn't been good. 

[CWood21]

Just now, VanS said:

WTH?  He didn't throw 8 picks so why even bring this up?  This is some major league reaching you are doing to justify your belief that Allen hasn't been good. 

It was more or less my musings.  He's done a good job of limiting turnovers.

[VanS]

8 hours ago, CWood21 said:

Because let me guess, he's got tremendous physical tools?

No.  He's proven that when he plays his teams have been a lot better than when he doesn't play. 

[VanS]

Just now, CWood21 said:

It was more or less my musings.  He's done a good job of limiting turnovers.

Well negative musings are just as irrelevant as positive musings.  I could just as easily surmise fictional situations that benefit Josh Allen.  But what would be the point of that?

[Oregon Ducks]

When we played Wyoming, he legit sucked but the tools were there. And apparently that wasn’t his only bad game that year.

His stat line was 9/24, 64 yards, 1 pick. We weren’t anything special that year, either.

[VanS]

8 hours ago, CWood21 said:

but Mahomes was highly productive in college.  How much was because of that Air Raid offense is up for discussion, but there was no doubt that Mahomes was productive.  Josh Allen wasn't.

You answered your own question.  Everyone puts up huge numbers in the air raid.  I didn't bring up the Mahomes example to talk about numbers.  I was instead trying to talk about WINS.  Mahomes is currently considered the greatest thing since sliced bread in the NFL.  However, in college he never even had Texas Tech ranked let alone win a conference championship.  Why was that if he's such a dominant NFL QB?  Obviously its because his teams at Texas Tech weren't as talented as teams in the Big 12 like Oklahoma, Baylor, and TCU in 2014-2016.  So it didn't matter how great he was in comparison to the QBs on other teams, his team lacked the talent around him to win.  

Edited October 10, 2020 by VanS