While Pro Football Focus always has their critics, some of their analysis is hard to argue with, including their latest data released on Bills quarterback Josh Allen.
PFF dug into their numbers on deep-ball passing in the NFL. Allen’s analysis revealed that he’s among the league’s worst quarterbacks at the deep pass.
In PFF’s latest rankings, the football analytics outlet ranked 33 total QBs in terms of downfield passing, Allen ranked 32nd:
The player with arguably the league’s strongest arm is arguably the league’s worst deep passer. If that doesn’t put into context how we evaluate quarterbacks at draft time, nothing will. Allen can get the ball as deep as he wants it pretty much any time he wants to, and though he dialed it back in Year 2, he still went deep at the sixth-highest rate in the league. However, his adjusted completion rate was one of the worst figures in all of football, and he had the highest rate of uncatchable, inaccurate passes on those targets. Allen needs to find the touch to go with that cannon because it’s frankly inexcusable that a player with his kind of arm talent is this bad at passing deep.
For context, PFF took passes that traveled at least 20 years down the field into this equation. Say all you want about Pro Football Focus, but this supports much of what we already know about Allen. Overall, Allen had a 24.1 completion percent, 8.7 yards per attempt and 64.4 passer rating on deep passes last year.
That cannon on Allen is near useless if he can’t get the ball to his targets. But we have few reasons to believe there could be some improvement.
First, Allen, after his rookie season, needed to improve in his overall accuracy and he did just that. Allen was much better completing his passes from the mid-range areas, which helped his overall completion percentage improve from near 50 percent up to near 60 percent in one season. If Allen puts that same work ethic into improving, perhaps we can find some optimism that Allen will improve his deep ball in 2020.
And the most obvious reason: Stefon Diggs. The same outlet in PFF pegs him as one of the best go up-and-get-it wideouts in the entire NFL. That certainly won’t hurt.
On PFF’s list, only the Broncos’ Drew Lock was named a worse quarterback at the deep ball.
[lawrence-related id=62265,60734,62254,62243]