Josh Allen

• 1. Introduction

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  Josh Allen finished high school in Firebaugh, California, without a single scholarship offer from any NCAA Division I program, whether at the top level or the one beneath it. Years later, the National Football League named him its most valuable player. Between those two facts sits one of the stranger scouting stories in modern football. Allen is a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills who can throw a ball harder than almost anyone ever measured. He also hurdles tacklers and runs through them like a linebacker. So why did every major college look past him? What did it take for a farm kid with a baseball arm to convince a single coach that he was worth a chance? And why do his brightest seasons keep ending in the same place, in January, against the same opponent?

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• 2. The Farm Kid

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  Three thousand acres of cotton surround Firebaugh, a small town about 40 miles west of Fresno, and Allen grew up on a farm of that size. His family's roots there go back to his great-grandfather Arvid Allen, a Swedish immigrant who settled in the area during the Great Depression. The farm itself was founded in 1975 by his paternal grandfather. That grandfather also sat on the local school board for years, and the gymnasium at Firebaugh High School carries his name. Allen graduated from the school in 2014.

  Fresno State was the team he loved. He went to its games and its football camps, hoping the coaches would notice him. His father pitched the Bulldogs' head coach at the time, Tim DeRuyter, on the idea of signing his son. DeRuyter passed. San Diego State offered a spot as a walk-on, but coach Rocky Long could not promise any playing time. Allen said no.

  ESPN journalist Mark Schlabach later tried to explain the silence. Allen stood about 6-foot-3 and weighed roughly 180 pounds. He had skipped the elite quarterback camps. His teammates spent their offseasons on baseball and other sports, so the school rarely entered 7-on-7 tournaments. Allen led his basketball team in scoring, and on the baseball team he pitched a fastball that reached 90 miles per hour.

  Yahoo Sports writer Jeff Eisenberg described a family that refused the usual recruiting playbook. After a breakout junior season, bigger Central Valley programs tried to lure Allen away. The Allens declined, because they lived by a family saying: "you bloom where you're planted." Allen kept working on the farm and at the restaurant his mother ran in Firebaugh. He also joined the National FFA Organization, and in 2014 he ranked in the top four nationally in diversified crop production of cantaloupe, cotton, and wheat. His next stop that same year would be a junior college, far from the big-time campuses he had once dreamed about.

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• 3. The Mass Email

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  One of the football assistants at Reedley College happened to be married to Allen's cousin, and that connection brought him to the junior college. Reedley's offense that season averaged 452.2 yards per game, which ranked ninth among California junior colleges. The team scored 39.4 points per game and passed for 285.3 yards per game. Allen sat out the first three games. In the next one he came off the bench and ran for four touchdowns, and he took over the starting job. From then on he threw 25 touchdown passes against only four interceptions. His 26 touchdown passes on the year tied him for seventh among California junior-college quarterbacks.

  By then he had grown to 6'5" and 210 pounds, and his Reedley coaches predicted a flood of offers. The flood never came. Near the end of the season, Allen emailed every head coach, offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, and quarterback coach in the top level of college football. Only a small number of schools answered. Eastern Michigan and Wyoming made offers, and Eastern Michigan pulled its offer after Allen visited Wyoming.

  Wyoming had not even come to see him at first. Its coaches were at Reedley to look at a different transfer. Dave Brown, a former Fresno State assistant on the first staff of new Wyoming head coach Craig Bohl, remembered Allen and pushed offensive coordinator Brent Vigen to look closer. Vigen noticed a pattern. In 2010, at North Dakota State, he had recruited Carson Wentz, who later became a starting quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles. Wentz matched Allen in size and shared his small-town, multi-sport, late-blooming story.

  Bohl needed some convincing, and he came around once Wyoming's first target committed to Syracuse. He became the only top-level head coach to visit the Allen farm. There he told Allen's father: "We went all around the country and there's only one quarterback we want and that's your son. He's going to be the face of our program." Allen still made one last attempt on Fresno State. He emailed an assistant there and pointed out that the Bulldogs had just landed a quarterback shorter and lighter than he was. The staff turned him down again, so he committed to Wyoming and enrolled before the 2015 season.

  His first Wyoming season lasted barely a game. He made one start, threw only four passes, and broke his collarbone. Because the injury came so early, he earned a medical redshirt. In 2016 he returned as the starter, throwing for more than 3,200 yards and 28 touchdowns. That performance made him consider the 2017 NFL draft, and he told his family, his girlfriend, and a few friends that he was leaving. Shortly before the deadline, Vigen phoned Allen's father, Joel. According to Eisenberg, Joel then walked into his son's room and found him "riddled with anxiety about his decision."

  Bohl added his own argument that another year in college would help Allen's long-term prospects. Allen also called Wentz, who warned him that in the NFL, veterans would depend on him to "win games and help secure their jobs." Allen stayed. In 2017 he threw for 1,812 yards, 16 touchdowns, and six interceptions, and he earned a degree in social science. In September 2025, Wyoming announced it would retire his number 17 jersey, the first number retired in the program's history. The ceremony took place on the 22nd of November 2025.

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• 4. Boom or Bust

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  ESPN reporter Adam Schefter passed along a bold claim just after the 2017 draft: a personnel director told him that Allen would go first overall the following year. Allen closed out his college career in December 2017 with a 37-14 win over Central Michigan in the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, leaving Wyoming at 8-5. He then declared for the 2018 draft. Analyst Mel Kiper Jr.'s first mock draft in January had the Cleveland Browns picking him ahead of Josh Rosen, Sam Darnold, Baker Mayfield, and Lamar Jackson. ESPN.com's Dan Graziano called him the "ultimate boom-or-bust NFL draft prospect."

  On draft day, old posts from Allen's high school years resurfaced on Twitter. They contained racial and homophobic slurs. He apologized and said he was "young and dumb" when he wrote them. Buffalo still took him seventh overall, after trading up from 12th with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. On the 25th of July he signed a four-year, fully guaranteed contract worth $21 million.

  He began the season as the backup. A. J. McCarron had been traded to the Oakland Raiders, which left Nathan Peterman ahead of Allen. Peterman posted a 0.0 passer rating in the opener against the Baltimore Ravens, and Allen came in. He finished with 74 passing yards and 26 rushing yards in a 47-3 loss. The next week he started against the Los Angeles Chargers, throwing his first NFL touchdown to Kelvin Benjamin and two interceptions in a 31-20 defeat. One throw to Zay Jones went for 57 yards of gain but traveled 64 yards in the air, tying for the second-longest air distance on a completion that NFL Next Gen Stats had recorded.

  The Minnesota Vikings brought the first win in Week 3, 27-6, and a clip of Allen leaping over linebacker Anthony Barr went viral. An elbow injury against the Houston Texans in Week 6 sidelined him for four games. He returned against the Jacksonville Jaguars, whose cornerback Jalen Ramsey had called him "trash" before the season. Buffalo won 24-21, and Allen ran for 99 yards, a franchise record for a quarterback that had belonged to Tyrod Taylor. Over the next two weeks he ran for 135 and then 101 yards, making him the first quarterback in league history with at least 95 rushing yards in a three-week span. His 335 yards on the ground across those games set the mark. The year ended with a 42-17 rout of the Miami Dolphins in which he scored five touchdowns.

  Buffalo finished 6-10, going 5-6 with Allen starting. He became the first Bills quarterback to lead the team in both passing and rushing, and his eight rushing touchdowns led all quarterbacks. His completion rate of 52.8 percent was the lowest among qualified passers. The 2019 season brought a captain's patch and similar flaws. In the opener, Buffalo trailed the Jets 16-0 before Allen led 17 unanswered points. A helmet-to-helmet hit from Patriots cornerback Jonathan Jones put him in the concussion protocol in September, but he played the following week. He finished with 3,089 passing yards and 510 rushing yards, yet his 58.8 completion percentage was again the league's lowest.

  The wild-card game against Houston showed how close the Bills were. Allen opened with a 42-yard run that broke Jim Kelly's franchise postseason rushing record for a quarterback, and he caught a 16-yard touchdown pass from John Brown on a trick play. Buffalo led 16-0 early in the third quarter and still lost 22-19 in overtime. Only two players since 1975 had matched the combination of 250 passing yards, 40 rushing yards, and 15 receiving yards in one game.

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• 5. The Breakout

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  In August 2020, Allen was reportedly one of 77 NFL players whose COVID-19 tests came back positive. Every one of those results turned out to be a false positive, caused by a laboratory's mishandling. Allen said the mistake frustrated him. The season that followed removed any doubt about who he was.

  Wins over the Jets, the Dolphins, and the Los Angeles Rams gave him the first three 300-yard passing games of his career, including 415 yards against Miami. He was the first Bills quarterback to reach 300 since Tyrod Taylor, and the first to do it in back-to-back games since Drew Bledsoe in 2002. After two weeks, only Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Patrick Mahomes had matched his 700 yards, six touchdowns, and no interceptions to start a season. His ten touchdown passes through three games topped a franchise mark of Kelly's.

  On Tuesday, the 13th of October, the Bills played the Tennessee Titans in a game moved because of a COVID-19 outbreak on Tennessee's team. It was only the second Tuesday night game in 70 years, and Buffalo lost 42-16. A few weeks later, Allen beat the heavily favored Seattle Seahawks 44-34. He completed 31 of 38 passes for 415 yards and three touchdowns. Afterward, coach Sean McDermott revealed that Allen had played one day after his grandmother died.

  The highs kept coming against bigger names. In Arizona he threw a go-ahead touchdown to Stefon Diggs with 34 seconds left, then watched Kyler Murray's Hail Mary to DeAndre Hopkins win it for the Cardinals with two seconds to go. On Monday Night Football he threw for 375 yards and four touchdowns against the 49ers. A win over the Denver Broncos delivered the franchise's first AFC East title since 1995. A 38-9 rematch with the Patriots gave Allen the Bills' single-season record for touchdown passes and a sweep of New England.

  He ended 2020 with 4,544 passing yards, 37 touchdown passes, and ten interceptions. His completion rate jumped to 69.2 percent, fourth in the league, after leading the league in the wrong direction in his previous two seasons. He won AFC Offensive Player of the Week four times, a franchise first for any one year. In MVP voting he finished second to Aaron Rodgers, with four votes, ahead of Mahomes.

  Buffalo moved quickly to lock him in. In May 2021 the team exercised the fifth-year option on his rookie deal, and on the 6th of August 2021 it gave him a six-year extension worth up to $258 million, with $150 million guaranteed, running through 2028.

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• 6. Chiefs in January

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  Four times in five postseasons, Allen's season ended at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs. The first came at the end of the 2020 run. Allen beat the Indianapolis Colts 27-24 in the wild-card round for Buffalo's first playoff win since 1995, then beat Lamar Jackson's Baltimore Ravens 17-3 without a turnover. In Kansas City's rematch for the AFC title, the first Buffalo had reached since 1993, he threw for 287 yards and rushed for 88, but the Bills lost 38-24. During the game Chiefs defender Alex Okafor tackled him after a play was blown dead. Allen flicked the ball at Okafor's helmet, Okafor taunted him, and Bills linemen Jon Feliciano and Dion Dawkins shoved Okafor to the ground. All four players drew offsetting penalties.

  The next January brought the strangest game of his career. Against the Patriots, Buffalo scored a touchdown on every possession except for the final kneeldowns in a 47-17 win, the first "perfect offensive game" in NFL history. Allen threw five touchdowns and was incomplete only four times. A week later, in the divisional round, he threw two go-ahead touchdowns to Gabe Davis in the last two minutes. Kansas City tied the game at 36-36 and forced overtime. The Chiefs won the coin toss, scored on their first possession, and won 42-36, so Allen never touched the ball again. He had completed 27 of 37 passes for 329 yards and four touchdowns, all of them to Davis. His postseason passer rating of 149.0 broke Joe Montana's 1989 mark of 146.4, still the highest ever in a single postseason.

  The 2022 playoffs ended in a different way. After a 34-31 win over Miami in the wild-card round, the Bills lost 27-10 to the Cincinnati Bengals. In the 2023 playoffs Allen ran 52 yards for a touchdown against Pittsburgh in a 31-17 win, the longest rushing score in Bills postseason history. Then the Chiefs came to Buffalo. Allen accounted for all three of his team's touchdowns, but the Bills lost 27-24 for a third straight divisional-round exit.

  The most recent chapter came in January 2025. Allen passed Kelly for the most postseason touchdown passes in franchise history in a 31-7 win over Denver, then ran for two scores in a 27-25 win over the Ravens. In the AFC Championship Game against Kansas City, a fourth-and-inches quarterback sneak by Allen was ruled short, even though one official seemed to signal a first down. Replay review found too little evidence to overturn the call. The Chiefs scored on the next drive, the Bills turned the ball over on downs while trailing by three with under four minutes left, and they lost 32-29. That dropped Allen to 0-4 against Kansas City in the playoffs.

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• 7. Arm and Mind

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  Before the 2018 draft, Allen appeared on a show called Sport Science and wore sensors that tracked his movements. His throws averaged a release speed of 74.3 miles per hour, the fastest launch velocity the show had ever recorded. On the movement pass test, which measures throwing on the run, his speed was 58 miles per hour. Given one try to hit a soccer-goal crossbar from 35 yards away, he hit it, and he was the only 2018 quarterback prospect tested who did. Host John Brenkus later argued that Allen's college completion percentage was a misleading number, pointing to Brett Favre's 52 percent in college.

  Scouts reached for big names when they described him. Comparisons ran to John Elway, Randall Cunningham, Brett Favre, and Cam Newton. Allen calls himself a gunslinger, a player who tries and often completes difficult throws and who sometimes takes risks that were not needed. Analysts also credit his work with offensive coordinators Brian Daboll and Ken Dorsey and throwing coaches Jordan Palmer and Chris Hess. Hess rebuilt his mechanics so that his hips did more of the work. In his breakout third season, Allen was 17 percent more accurate than in his rookie year, an NFL record improvement across two years.

  The 2023 season tested the gunslinger streak. After a 6-0 stretch of inconsistent play went the other way, with losses to the Jaguars, Patriots, Bengals, and Broncos, Allen said he had tried a "low positive" mindset. He wondered if he had "reined himself in too much." Buffalo fired Dorsey, the coordinator Allen had vouched for after Daboll left, and promoted quarterbacks coach Joe Brady. The Bills then won six of their last seven games. Allen explained the change in an NBC Sports interview: "Josh being Josh" is just the big kid that loves football. Sometimes it's not going to be pretty, but he's going to make plays, he's going to help his team win football games." He added that to lead, "you have to be authentic, you have to be 100-percent who you are."

  The next year demanded a different kind of discipline. Across the league, defenses leaned into two-high safety looks, a trend linked with coordinator Vic Fangio, which punished offenses built on deep throws. The Bills had lost Stefon Diggs, so Allen and Brady built a quicker attack of short throws that let receivers run after the catch. Brady called it an "everybody eats" offense. Allen threw six interceptions, down from 18 the year before, and he credited the change partly to maturity and "the patience that I've learned to have on the field." On the 6th of February 2025 he won the AP award with 27 of 50 first-place votes, edging out Lamar Jackson. He became the third quarterback to win without a first-team All-Pro selection. His 41 total touchdowns came with eight turnovers, the fewest of his career.

  He keeps his own nerves quiet with older music. His pregame playlist includes Frank Sinatra's "That's Life," Paul Anka's "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," and Billy Joel's "The Stranger." Away from the stadium, he was in a relationship from 2015 to 2023 with Brittany Williams, a former Fresno State cheerleader he had grown up with. He began dating actress and singer Hailee Steinfeld in May 2023, and they revealed it in July 2024. He proposed on the 22nd of November 2024, and they married in Ventura, California, on the 31st of May 2025. Steinfeld announced the birth of their daughter in April 2026.

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• 8. Records and Reckoning

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  On the 1st of December 2024, against the San Francisco 49ers, Allen became the first quarterback in league history to score a passing, rushing, and receiving touchdown in the same game. The receiving score came on an improvised hook-and-lateral with Amari Cooper. His touchdown pass to Mack Hollins in that game was his 245th total touchdown, passing Kelly for the franchise record. A 44-42 loss to the Los Angeles Rams a week later brought three passing and three rushing touchdowns, another first. On the 29th of December he scored his 65th career rushing touchdown to tie Thurman Thomas for the Bills record, and he extended his run of 40-touchdown seasons to five. In the regular-season finale he played one snap, which stretched his start streak to 104 regular-season games, the longest active streak in the league.

  On the 9th of March 2025, he signed a six-year extension worth $330 million, with $250 million guaranteed. At the time of signing, no player in NFL history had received more guaranteed money. The 2025 opener against the Ravens fit the legend. Buffalo trailed 40-25 in the last four minutes, and Allen threw for 394 yards, ran for two scores, and won 41-40. His 66th rushing touchdown passed Thomas for the franchise mark. Records fell through the autumn. On the 26th of October he passed Newton for most games with a rushing and a passing touchdown. On the 16th of November, against Tampa Bay, he tied Newton at 75 rushing touchdowns by a quarterback, and on the 30th, against Pittsburgh, he took the record alone with an 8-yard score.

  The offense around him weakened, though. Critics blamed the receivers and coordinator Joe Brady after upset losses to the Atlanta Falcons in Week 6 and the Dolphins in Week 10. Against Miami his time to throw was 3.53 seconds, the longest since his rookie year. In Week 12 the Houston Texans sacked him a career-high eight times in a 23-19 loss. A foot injury in Week 16 against Cleveland did not stop him from playing on. In a 13-12 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles the next week, he lost a fumble, and a late two-point attempt to a wide-open Khalil Shakir missed, ending any chance of catching the division leader.

  The playoffs began better. A 27-24 comeback in Jacksonville gave Buffalo its first road playoff win since 1992. Then came Denver. Allen threw three touchdowns but also had four turnovers, including a fumble just before halftime that led to a field goal. He was the first quarterback in ten years to throw two interceptions and lose two fumbles in a game, and the Broncos won 33-30 in overtime. In an emotional press conference he said: "It's extremely difficult. Feel like I let my teammates down today." Two days later the Bills fired head coach Sean McDermott, who in eight years with Allen never reached a Super Bowl.

  Brady took over as head coach, and Allen was part of the interview process that led to the choice. At the introductory press conference he appeared on crutches and in a walking boot. He confirmed that he had undergone a procedure to repair a broken bone in his foot, which had been aggravated against Cleveland. He told reporters he would be ready for organized team activities.

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