Head coach Joe Brady made a promise before the Buffalo Bills’ first preseason game: If a player was healthy, he was playing. I was on record with the assumption that star quarterback Josh Allen was going to come down with a very serious, and very last minute, hangnail. So suffice it to say when I saw number 17 take to the field on the Bills’ opening possession. A drive that ended with a field goal. “Well” I said, “that’ll be the last we see of Allen today.” But it wasn’t. The starters had one more
drive for the day, ending with a Keon Coleman touchdown.
As it turns out, it was the most (preseason football) action that Josh Allen has gotten in years.
Let’s quantify said “action”
Playing time
Josh Allen had 15 snaps against the Carolina Panthers, which amounted to 22% of the team’s total snaps. For comparison, Kyle Allen and Shane Buechele had 27 and 25 snaps respectively. So Josh wasn’t exactly featured mind you, but he wasn’t that far behind either. As noted above, this was two drives for Josh Allen.
Now there’s no comparison to his 2025 preseason whatsoever. He never played last year until the regular season hit, and you could say he had a good opening night against the Baltimore Ravens.
To find the last time Allen played at all, we need to go back to Week 1 of the 2024 preseason, against the Chicago Bears on August 10 of that year. Just over two years since he had ANY preseason play. In that game, Allen had 12% of the team’s playing time, which was only eight snaps. Just over half of what happened this year. When it comes to drives, it was equal to the current year. The starting offense had two drives, they just weren’t very good ones hence the shorter play time.
To find a game in which Allen had a greater playing time in the preseason, we need to go back one more year. On August 19, 2023 Josh Allen had 16 snaps against the Pittsburgh Steelers. That was 27% of the team total. Kyle Allen and Matt Barkley had 24 and 20 snaps in that game, respectively. This game was also two drives for Allen, the second long one inflated his snap counts but resulted in a punt.
Please note that Allen also played in Week 2 against the Chicago Bears in 2023 as well, just less play time than he did against Pittsburgh (so I’m not looking up any more info on that one).
Was Allen put to work?
Let’s compare some stats to see if Josh Allen was nominally on the field, or actually getting some warm up reps in. We’ll start with our 2023 game to set our baseline for this one. Against the Steelers that year, Allen was 7 of 10, for 64 yards with zero sacks, touchdowns, or interceptions. That gives us 10 passing downs to six rushing ones for this game.
Against the Bears in 2024, Allen was definitely not out there to play. He went two of three. The zero sacks, touchdowns, and interceptions continued in this game as well too. That’s three passes to five rushing downs for the team. In both 2023 and 2024 his longest pass
This season, I was pretty shocked at how much Allen threw it around, but was it all that wild statistically. Remember that Allen was on the field for 15 snaps. The last two games had 6.5% passing against Pittsburgh and 37.5% against Chicago.
This year, Allen had eight passing attempts and one sack for nine passing downs of 15, or 60% of his playing time. In other words, pretty comparable to 2023’s game against the Steelers, another game where it seems Allen was being asked to get a tune up.
For the rest of the stats, Allen had 111 yards, one touchdown, and no interceptions. His longest pass was 32 yards, compared to a long of 15 in both our other games. Allen had a 156.2 passer rating this year. In neither of the other years did Allen even hit 90 in that metric.
What does it all even mean?
In the grand scheme of things, it merely means that Joe Brady meant what he said; and said what he meant. So far this head coach is faithful… 100% (to his word). It’s possible that with the new scheme-ish on offense, Brady felt it was a good idea to get the team in rhythm with Allen. Or maybe Brady just differs on this philosophically from what Sean McDermott felt was best.
Or maybe, just maybe, there was some pressure to have Allen be the first player to hit the field at the new stadium. Heck, if I were Allen I might have even insisted on it. Is there any evidence to this? I’m not sure, but Buffalo did win the coin toss and then they did send Allen out. If only there was some way to deduce their mindset from that and let’s say… the first play called at the new stadium…
(14:53) J.Allen pass deep right to K.Shakir to CAR 48 for 21 yards (M.Jackson)
