
He's tall, athletic and good looking. He's a solid 6'5, 237 pounds. He looks the part of an NFL quarterback with a strong arm and an ability to look good in workouts. Sounds good right? Unfortunately, he's missing that one key ingredient that makes a good qb: accuracy. How can something so obvious be overlooked, especially when we are talking about a potential number one pick. As the great Bruce Arians once said, "you cant teach accuracy, you either have it or you don't". With Allen were not talking about something that can be left to interpretation. We are talking about a career 56.2% career completion percentage. Now I know what your thinking, how many tds did he throw? Well I'm glad you asked. While playing for an incredibly small school (Wyoming) against shitty competition, Allen managed 28 tds and 15 ints as a sophomre and only 16 tds vs 6 ints as a junior. Not exactly incredible numbers. Combine that with the fact he never beat a ranked team in his two years and you have some real issues. There seems to be this narrative that Allen had a terrible supporting cast and drops tell a large story of his accuracy struggles. The problem with that narrative is his receivers only dropped 12 combined passes. Compare that to the likes of other top QB prospects and that is the lowest percentage of drops. Comparisons include Baker Mayfield (26 drops) and Sam Darnold (19 drops). So where is all of this hype coming from? The ever reliable Mel Kiper (note the sarcasm) has crowned him king. In fact every mock draft has a first round grade on what is a low second round talent. The real answer here is twofold: the overvaluation of the quarterback position and the love of measurables. The quarterback position is the most important in sports. If you don't have one, you want one, you need one. We see it every year where a guy who was average in college ends up picked in the top ten (Blake Bortles and Christian Ponder to name a few). The NFL is a qb starved league and the need to acquire that franchise quarterback trumps reason more often then not. The second answer to this absurd question is mesurables. When you see a guy like Josh Allen whose big, strong, fast and has a canon for an arm, you fall in love. You convince yourself that with just a little coaching this guy will be a star. We have seen it time and again with such world beaters as Blaine Gabbert and Jamarcus Russell. The league is obsessed with big strong qbs, so much so that talents like Russell Wilson are overlooked because of their height. We've seen this movie before, it always ends in heart break.
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