Reining in Josh Allen

The last thing offensive coordinator Joe Brady wants to do is keep Josh Allen from utilizing his talent. No quarterback in the league has his combination of arm strength, size, speed, power, and ability to make spectacular off-schedule plays. Seriously, just look at some of his highlights from Sunday’s win over the Chiefs:

Yet, there is a limit to how much the offense can live and die with these types of plays. Allen’s game needs to be reined in to a certain extent, otherwise you get too many critical mistakes like these:

The ups and downs to Allen’s game have kept Buffalo in perpetual 2-steps-forward-1-step-back mode. And over the last year or so, he’s become an increasingly frenetic quarterback. We see less and less of him sitting in the pocket and progressing through his reads systematically. Instead, he’ll often look for his first read, and if it isn’t there, he’ll start scanning the field indiscriminately or look to run. That can lead to some great plays, but it also leads to mistakes like the one above. The end result is inconsistency, which we’ve seen too much of throughout the 2023 season.

So the key is to put Allen in as many situations as possible where he feels compelled to stick with the play design because the route combinations create a clear advantage early in the down. The opportunities to “make a play” will still be there, but they can’t be the core of the passing game or the offense.

Since taking over as offensive coordinator, Brady has done a great job of putting Allen in more of these situations. On Sunday against the Chiefs, his use of 4-strong concepts were instrumental in keeping Allen and the offense on track.

You could see it on their first touchdown. Here, the Bills would use fast motion to get 4 receivers to one side of the formation: