stripes361B

Yes, I’ve quite enjoyed winning three consecutive division titles with a couple of 13-3 seasons. The end result of sitting at home during the Super Bowl has been the same but September through December has been so much better with Josh Allen than it was before him lol.

Narratives are dumb and are driven by team results and short term thinking more than anything. Allen has one bad game, he’s trash. One great game, he’s God.

Smartest thing to do is look at his overall body of work and realize that he’s actually a damn good QB who consistently gives his team 5000+ yards and 40+ TDs of total offense a year (on track to roughly match those numbers for a 4th straight year, I say roughly because in 2020 he was 35 yards short of 5,000.) Despite mostly having had bad O-lines and limited run games (although I think they’ve been better this year) and a lot of inconsistency past his #1 receiver.

He definitely has flaws. He will never be Aaron Rodgers in terms of taking care of the ball and avoiding turnovers. His career INT% is 2.4, which is roughly comparable to Drew Brees, Tua Tagovailoa, Joe Flacco, Matt Stafford, Ryan Tannehill, Ben Roethlisberger, and Andrew Luck. From 2019-2021 it was 2.0%, which is better than Jalen Hurts’ and Lamar Jackson’s career averages and in line with Joe Burrow. The last two years, with insanely injured defenses adding even more pressure for him to be everything on top of being the Bills’ pass game AND run game, those percentages have gone up. Take all that for what you will.

It’s unfortunate that we can’t run more experiments in the NFL. It would be fun to see what Josh Allen’s or Lamar Jackson’s numbers might be if they played for Andy Reid or Doug Pederson or had two elite targets like Joe Burrow and Tua do. It would be fun to see what Herbert could be doing if he wasn’t held back by Staley’s coaching and a terrible defense. It would be fun to see what sort of numbers Burrow could have by now if he could stay healthy. I feel like there are too many contextual factors that cause year to year swings in players’ performances for Reddit/Twitter/bloggers to always jump to such definitive conclusions on a player being either elite or trash.

A college football team lost a game this year when a QB got his helmet mostly knocked off by the defender on the game tying two point conversion play and he grabbed it with his hand and held it there. Got flagged for taking his helmet off, 15 yards on the kickoff. Opposing team had just enough time to position themselves for a last-second 48 yarder, got it blocked, but got a redo on a 15 yard personal foul for hitting the longsnapper.

Game very likely goes to OT without the penalty.