NFL

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.