Dan Le Batard Proclaims Josh Allen Is Doing Something We’ve Never Seen
Credit: Tina MacIntyre-Yee via Imagn Images
As Josh Allen marches closer and closer to the Super Bowl, the national media is starting to line up to give the star quarterback his props. While statistically in the same stratosphere as Patrick Mahomes or Joe Burrow, his lack of rings (as compared to Mahomes) or Super Bowl appearances (as compared to Burrow) has led to some really silly, bad takes about Allen.
Now that Allen is headed to a Sunday showdown with Mahomes in the AFC Championship Game, the narrative finally gets to be about his evolution into someone who is indisputably one of the league’s very best. Dan Le Batard took time on his show on Tuesday to marvel at how big of a step forward 2024 has been for the Bills’ signal-caller.
"It's legitimately something I do not understand and have not seen: A quarterback who was wildly inaccurate coming out of college and unbelievably reckless with the football…Josh Allen has become the greatest protector of the football in the SPORT." – Dan marvels at the… pic.twitter.com/W7pWPq9tJs
— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) January 21, 2025
“A quarterback who was wildly inaccurate coming out of college and unbelievably reckless with the football has become a quarterback that we haven’t had in the league since 1970,” Le Batard started. “Because that’s the last time you’ll find someone who fumbled as little, and thrown as few interceptions, and taken as few sacks — negative plays from the quarterback — as this one.”
It’s incredible to witness. Between the regular season and playoffs, Allen has thrown just six interceptions on 531 passing attempts and fumbled just five times on 120 carries. That includes zero interceptions or fumbles in the postseason. That wasn’t always the case, even when Allen was at his best. Before 2024, his career interception rate was 2.5%. He’s cut that more than in half. He fumbled 11 times for every 17 games coming into the season, and Allen cut that rate in half, as well.
Then we throw in the sacks. You might have thought that last season, where Allen led the NFL with a 3.98 sack%, was the height of his powers. Wrong. Allen shaved a percentage point off of that, getting sacked just 2.82% of the time.
Just watch Sam Darnold with the Minnesota Vikings or Jared Goff with the Detroit Lions to see how easy it is to grasp the impact of negative plays in the playoffs. It’s harder to see the impact of the absence of something, but the cumulative impact of not getting set back adds up. You don’t notice it until the end of the game and you say, wow, the Bills scored a lot of points.
Or until 19 games into the season, and you see that what Allen is doing is, indeed, unique among quarterbacks in the last 50 years or so.
“Josh Allen has become the greatest protector of the football in the sport!” Le Batard exclaimed. “This is an offense that is historic at protecting the football in a time everyone’s protecting the football. Why’d you beat the Ravens at home? They turned it over, and you did not.”
Co-host Stugotz roundaboutly explained how this is by design by Joe Brady and the Buffalo offense. “[Allen] threw the ball 22 times. They’re not putting him in spots where he’s gonna turn the ball over… He’s kind of like a game manager. It’s time of possession, it’s keep the other quarterback off the field, and it’s not Josh Allen throwing 45 times to win.”
Game Manager is a dirty word in quarterback circles, but in Allen’s case, it’s working. Allen is more than talented enough to be a game-breaker as a game manager, and if he can break games without the downsides of being the Brett Favre-esque gunslinger… you get seasons like the one we just witnessed. As Le Batard said, “It’s not game management [like Alex Smith] because you’re still terrified of him on 3rd-&-11.”
Yep, now you’re getting it.
“How is everyone in the world not talking about [how] that quarterback does not make mistakes?” Le Batard wondered.
Let’s give it a week and see how few people are still talking about Allen’s historic season. If Allen can finally get past the Chiefs in the playoffs, Le Batard will have a few more people joining his ranks to praise the Bills’ MVP.
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