At various points in his pre-NFL football career, it seemed like Josh Allen might play a couple of years of junior college football and then return to help run his family’s 3,000-acre cotton farm in Firebaugh, California.
Clearly not a football factory, Firebaugh is a farm town in the Central Valley with a population of approximately 8,000 and one stoplight. One of Joel and LaVonne’s four children, Josh guided the Firebaugh High Eagles but received little attention from college coaches.
Despite tearing up opposing defenses during his senior season, in which the Eagles won 10 games, the 6’3”, 180-pound quarterback with a cannon for an arm did not receive a single FBS scholarship offer.
Zero.
They say that no matter how good you are, they will find you. However, for whatever reason, they seemed to avoid spending their time in Central Valley when they were able to capture bigger fish in the Bay Area or Los Angeles, where the lights on Friday night were much brighter.
Unlike his peers and five-star recruits who may have bounced around from high school to high school and attended various elite camps, Allen stayed in the comfort of Firebaugh.
While he lived just two and a half hours from Fresno, Allen appeared nonexistent in the eyes of NCAA coaches; even the Bulldogs’ head coach Tim DeRuyter passed on him.
“I truly felt like I was a Division I quarterback, and I’d felt that way for a long time,” Allen said. “I just wanted other people to see it.”
Taking the route of numerous talented and overlooked players, Allen attended Reedley College, a junior college program less than an hour away from the farm.
In his freshman season with the Tigers, he became one of the top junior college prospects and the nation’s fifth-ranked JUCO dual-threat quarterback, despite not starting his first four games.
Now weighing in at 6’5”, 220lbs, one would assume that FBS offers would make their way to the Reedley, California campus. But that wasn’t the case.
So Josh took matters into his own hands. Along with the Tigers’ coaching staff, he put together an email containing his season highlights and sent it to basically every FBS program in the country.
1,000 emails to head coaches, assistant coaches, positional coaches, and anyone who was connected with the team.
Needless to say, chances are that email was either deleted or sent straight to “junk”.
Of the few schools that may have clicked “open”, Wyoming, which had just finished a tough first season under new head coach Craig Bohl, was in search of a transfer quarterback after their original recruiting target decided to attend Syracuse at the last moment.
The only FBS coach willing to make the trip to the Allen farm, Bohl told Josh’s dad, Joel, “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.”
Despite the fact that he got his shot because the Cowboys’ “Plan A” decided to take his talents elsewhere, the door had been opened, even if it was just a crack.
And for Allen, a crack was all he needed to blast it wide open.
Laramie, Wyoming isn’t exactly a destination hot spot for star football players to aspire to go to school.
Fellow Cowboy alum Tashaun Gipson once said, “From the sign that says ‘Welcome to Laramie’ to the end of the town, I could have probably rode my bike and got through the whole town in 10 minutes.”
Playing in the Mountain West Conference, the Cowboys get a fraction of the media attention that Power 5 programs do, but it was a Division 1 opportunity that Allen wasn’t going to let pass.
His sophomore season was far from what he had dreamed of. Playing just two games with one start, Allen’s season came to an end due to a broken collarbone.
The Cowboys finished their season 2-10 with Josh on the sidelines, sporting a metal plate and eight screws in his collarbone.
Given the QB1 tag at the beginning of his third college season, Allen started all 14 of the Cowboys’ games, leading the team to an 8-6 record.
With an impressive stat line, he was suddenly considering declaring for the 2017 NFL Draft, where many had him slotted as a top-three pick. After basically every NFL GM and owner packed his pro day workout – where he launched 70-yard bombs down the field – Josh talked himself out of the draft due to his respect for his coach.
“Coach Bohl was the only guy who stuck his neck out for me,” Allen said. “He came to my family; he came to my house in the middle of nowhere. I just felt I owed him the respect to come back for one more year.”
While his final season with the Cowboys wasn’t as impressive statistically as the previous year, the team finished the regular season 8-5 and won the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl (not exactly must-see TV by most Bowl standards).
Where he was once in conversations as the top overall pick, Josh saw his draft stock slide due to his numbers and questions of whether his abilities in the Mountain West Conference would translate to the NFL.
Then-Bleacher Report draft analyst Matt Miller wrote, “His subpar completion percentage (56 percent) can be attributed to poor decisions, passes thrown too hard, drops, and plain misses.”
Former NFL QB Dan Orlovsky said, “Allen often spends too much time staring down receivers, and…those bad eye habits take a lot of time and hard work to iron out at the pro level.”
The folks over at Barstool Sports even created a satirical website, DraftJoshAllen dot com, sarcastically pointing out things like:
- “Josh Allen is tall”
- “Josh Allen’s hands are big”
- “Stats are for losers”
- “Sometimes he overthrows his receivers…but that’s their fault, not his.”
As for Josh himself? “I’m not going to bow down to anybody,” he said.
“My main goal is to win. I’m going to do everything in my power to put the team in position to win the football game. I’m going to take everything with a chip on my shoulder still and go out there and compete.”
Selected 7th overall by the Buffalo Bills (who traded with Tampa Bay to move up from 12) in 2018, Allen was the third quarterback drafted behind Baker Mayfield (1st overall) and Sam Darnold (3rd).
Earning the QB1 spot to start his rookie season, Allen and the Bills were on the receiving end of a 47-3 blowout loss to the Baltimore Ravens. The following week saw the same end result despite a closer score.
While the Bills once again struggled, ending the season with a 6-10 record, their rookie QB showed promise, both with the arm, the legs, and his willingness to run through a defender instead of around him.
Still, there were questions.
ESPN’s Bill Barnwell wrote, “As a passer…it’s difficult to see any signs of improvement from Allen. His numbers are horrific…and don’t bear any resemblance to the quarterback Allen was supposed to be coming out of college.”
In his second pro season, though, it didn’t take long for Josh to make his mark on the Bills, turning the team into a perennial playoff team.
For a franchise and a fanbase that had been seeking a star QB to hitch their wagon to since Jim Kelly retired in 1996, Josh Allen became the man.
Although it took some time to rebuild his mechanics, improve his decision-making, and tighten up his accuracy, he kept putting in the work that had followed him since his days on the family farm.
By 2020, he’d become one of the most dangerous and popular quarterbacks in the NFL, a legitimate MVP-caliber player who could beat you with his arm or steamroll his way through opposing defenders.
A four-time Pro Bowler and a two-time All-Pro, Josh was rewarded for his individual efforts with the 2024 NFL MVP award, edging out Ravens QB Lamar Jackson in one of the closest votes in league history.
“I definitely think mental toughness is way up there (when it comes to evaluating quarterbacks),” Allen said. “Going through my own trials and tribulations, I know that stuff makes you hungry. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder, from not getting any offers out of high school to going to a junior college to get noticed. That’s a badge I wear with honor.”
Imagine if Wyoming’s first-choice quarterback didn’t decide to relocate to Syracuse.
Imagine if Craig Bohl didn’t make the drive out to a farm in the middle of small-town nowhere.
Imagine if Josh didn’t sit down and write countless emails that likely were never read.
Imagine if he didn’t have the work ethic instilled in him by his family’s farm.
That’s a lot of what-ifs for a guy who is now an NFL MVP. But that’s the part of what makes his path to football stardom so special.
It was a thousand emails, one coach willing to make the drive, and a kid from a wheat farm who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
