Pro Football Focus is among the many who had to change their tune on Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen after his 2020 season.
Whether the eye test, basic numbers, or fancy stats, the Bills QB jumped leaps and bounds forward in his growth. PFF itself graded Allen as their No. 7 quarterback this past year and admitted he is “an anomaly” based on how much he improved.
Adding to that, we now have PFF’s future outlook on Allen, and it’s another good one. The football analytics outlet recently did a deep dive on the Bills ahead of free agency and the 2021 NFL Draft. In that, the word is that Allen is here to stay.
PFF’s Ben Linsey brings the lookahead on the QB:
Historical data made a very strong case that Josh Allen was never going to be a high-level starting quarterback in the NFL. His 60.0 PFF passing grade across the 2018 and 2019 seasons ranked dead last among 32 qualifying quarterbacks, and traditional passing statistics didn’t paint him in a much better light. Then, one of the greatest third-year breakouts from a quarterback in modern NFL history completely flipped all that data on its head.
Allen finished the 2020 season ranked seventh among all quarterbacks in PFF grade, coming in second in MVP voting on the year. Much improved accuracy was the driver in that success. As you surely saw on a television broadcast at some point this year, Allen’s 68.4% completion rate on the season was over 10 percentage points higher than his 2019 total. His accuracy numbers per PFF’s ball-charting data indicate that there was no fluke there, either.
For that reason, I believe that Allen’s improvement in 2020 was real.
There you have it: Allen will continue on as an elite quarterback. As referenced, PFF was certainly a doubter of Allen, and while it’s taboo and almost a passage of rite in Buffalo to go back to 2018 social media to prove you said something positive about the QB back then… doubters weren’t in the wrong on Allen… at the time.
Allen wasn’t good his first two years and no one saw 2020 coming.
But if anyone thinks his All-Pro honors or second-place finish in MVP voting was a fluke? Maybe it’s time for such folks to stand down if PFF even is.
For context on how much the analytics folks are swallowing their pride, look no further than recent grade they handed out. In their end of 2019 QB rankings Allen was at No. 26 overall. That landed him just ahead of the Bears’ Mitchell Trubisky and behind others like the Giants’ Daniel Jones (24) and Cowboys’ Andy Dalton (23).
Now he’s seventh. How times have changed.
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