3 reasons NFL scouts want to gamble on Josh Allen (besides ‘he’s tall’)

It seems like every year the NFL becomes enamored with a player who didn’t exactly wow fans and analysts of the college game. Those players tend to follow a similar profile: big athletes with strong arms and great measurables despite less impressive results at the college level.

The debate between college fans and scouts tends to look something like this:

“If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?” could just as easily read, “if he’s a good quarterback, why doesn’t he complete passes good?”

In 2017, a few players fit that profile, but by far the most polarizing is big, strong, athletic, mildly successful Josh Allen.

Allen had a pretty big sophomore year, throwing for 3,203 yards for an 8-6 Wyoming that narrowly lost the Mountain West title to San Diego State before narrowly losing to BYU in the Poinsettia bowl. During that bowl game, Josh Allen made several eye-catching plays and appeared clearly on the NFL radar.

Then his junior year happened, which looked much more like a regression than Allen arriving as a prospect. His passer rating fell to 127 (No. 73 in the country), his completion percentage remained around 56, and his numbers again fared poorly against Power 5 teams and top mid-majors like Boise State.

So what’s the story here? Is Allen just another big, strong athlete with impressive measurables but an absence of QB skill? Or a potential gold mine for the team willing to take a chance?

Why do scouts like Allen so much?

... capture a lot of what makes Allen such a popular talent. His ability to move the pocket and drop dimes down the field is certainly not common. In the NFL, the thinking is often that better defenses, coverage, and pass-rushers require the QB to out-execute people with better accuracy, mobility, and having a “mobile platform” from which to launch passes.

That’s true in the minimally useful sense that he took snaps under center, but also in the more important sense that he had responsibilities at the line of scrimmage and executed West Coast concepts.

The under-center component is overblown, but what scouts want to see is whether a QB can coordinate the footwork on his drops with the timing of the receiver’s routes and make rhythm throws. The footwork from the shotgun is different, so if a team wants to regularly go under center, it’d rather that not be something that is wildly unfamiliar to its QB. Allen checks a few boxes for scouts because he regularly went under center in Wyoming’s offense, albeit typically for play-action passing that could be as improvisational as the rest of his game:

The more important sense in which Allen ran a “pro-style offense” is that it was based on West Coast passing concepts and it used motion and multiple formations while asking him to make pre-snap reads and checks at the line before progressing through reads after the snap. Much has been made of this being the same offense in which Carson Wentz played at North Dakota State, which was a major factor for the Eagles, while Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield has demonstrated this skill within the context of a spread offense.

Scouts often get nervous about QBs, however talented, who have played in spread-option offenses that don’t use the same plays or tactics as NFL offenses. However, the real concern is and should be about QBs who go from managing simple reads with minimal responsibility to having to diagnose NFL defenses. The reason physical measurables routinely fail as predictors is that the mental side of playing NFL QB is so much more important. What made Peyton Manning and Tom Brady great wasn’t their height or arm strength, which were good but common in other prospects, but their ability to diagnose defenses at the line of scrimmage.

Allen did some of that at Wyoming, which is one of the better indicators that his raw talent could actually translate.

Here’s an example of Allen operating the “pro-style” elements of the Wyoming offense to generate an easy gain on what should have been a hotly contested third down:

The ability to diagnose defenses and clear up the read after the snap is what allows great QB play, not the ability to consistently beat good coverage with execution and sheer talent. One of the main reasons Brady is rarely sacked is because he’s so quick to get the ball out, because he knows where it needs to go.

Allen wasn’t a total maestro who could always get Wyoming into the right play or protection, of course. Iowa caught him on a few occasions with disguises.

It appeared the motion was triggering the Iowa safety to drop down in the box to replace a linebacker, but then he dropped back into a deep cover 2 without Allen checking back to make sure. So when Wyoming ran a fade route, there was nothing doing, since a safety was sitting on it, and nothing to the field either where the Hawkeyes had rotated linebacker help.

However, Allen was regularly dabbling in this world and showed potential as a player that could manipulate the chalkboard from the field.

So how come he didn’t “hit good?”

If Allen had some real pro-style abilities and lots of raw ability, why wasn’t he very effective this season for Wyoming? That’s the question college fans are asking, one the team that drafts him feels it can answer positively.

The supporting cast was very different for Wyoming’s 2017 campaign than the more productive 2016. The Cowboys usually face a talent deficiency even within the Mountain West (247’s “team talent” roster breakdown ranked them ahead of only Air Force in the MWC for each of the last three years), and here were the surrounding players Allen was working with in these seasons:

The one obvious difference in the skill corps: everyone except Allen was different. All of his top targets were seniors, and top back Brian Hill departed for the NFL while center Chase Roullier became Wyoming’s first offensive lineman to be drafted since 1997. In 2017, the line included true freshmen at center and right tackle. All of that tells a sympathetic story for Allen, who was asked to lead a complete rebuild.

Another difference was the quality of the players around Allen. Gentry and Maulhardt were big, strong receivers who might not have been blazing fast, but were reliable targets to throw the ball up to. Hill was an explosive back who commanded attention from defenses and opened up passing lanes. That tells a less sympathetic story, in which 2016 Allen was propped up by the talent around him.

The 2017 game film suggests there are elements of truth to each, but that the first is the stronger explanation. Wyoming is ostensibly a power run game team, but its rushing attack regularly failed to move the chains or set up the passing game for success. Instead, the Cowboys spent a lot of time trying to pick up passing downs from spread sets with inexperienced wideouts and offensive linemen.

That meant much of the offense came from Allen executing hero ball ...

... and that bad routes or drops regularly left opportunities on the field.

Allen made his share of mistakes, including in some pretty simple situations, but there was sometimes zero margin for error, due to the lack of playmaking at receiver and the struggles of the Wyoming run game. All of this also means Allen and Lamar Jackson had a little bit in common.

Some scouts clearly see him for his positives, and because of the supreme importance of great QB play, they talk themselves into him.

Others will laugh at him going above the fourth and proclaim doom on him as the next bust.

The reality is probably that Josh Allen has at least some of the arm and mental talent that make for great NFL QBs and, much like in college, the context he finds himself in will determine how much of his ceiling is explored.