How Josh Allen is imitating Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes — but not in the way you’d think
The best postseason tight end in NFL history walked into the Chiefs media room Friday and reminisced about his high school days as a quarterback.
Nostalgia, just a couple days shy of a championship weekend — but it wasn’t completely unprompted.
Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce had been asked a question about Bills quarterback Josh Allen, and it first prompted a memory.
“Josh,” Kelce said, “is who I used to dream about being like in the NFL.”
Kelce fancied himself as a big, athletic dual-threat quarterback while at Cleveland Heights High School and into the early years at Cincinnati. The university, though, turned him into a tight end.
Allen turned into one of the most captivating quarterbacks in the NFL.
But it’s not the captivating player — not the type of player Kelce once dreamed of being — that has led the Bills to the AFC Championship Game against the Chiefs on Sunday.
It’s a more mundane version.
A really effective mundane version, to be clear, and that’s precisely the point.
A week ago, as the Bills were inching toward a playoff win against the Ravens, Allen was stood up at the goal line on a third-down play late in the fourth quarter. Rather than giving up on reaching the end zone, he took a quick peek into the backfield and saw a teammate, James Cook, all by his lonesome. And ever so briefly, it looked as though Allen might lateral it.
Before he thought better of it.
Well, the 2025 edition of Josh Allen thought better of it.
A younger edition?
“He would have done it, yes,” Allen admitted to reporters in Buffalo this week. And with a smirk, he added, “It may have crossed my mind.”
More than ever before, the MVP-caliber quarterback in Buffalo is imitating the MVP-caliber quarterback in Kansas City.
For years, that symmetry — how quarterbacks tried to mimic Patrick Mahomes — referred to the spectacular. The unthinkable. You know, the off-platform, the no-look, the unique arm angles, the make-something-from-nothing off-script plays that had high schoolers practicing it.
But now, after Allen has three times left GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium contemplating the end of his season, it means something entirely different.
Allen is still plenty capable of the spectacular, same as the quarterback on the opposite sideline Sunday afternoon. But more than ever, he’s content with the unimaginative.
Content with the, well, boring.
And the Bills have been better for it.
Allen, a man synonymous with turnovers for two years running, transformed into the quarterback who avoided mistakes this year better than any of his peers. His sack-avoidance rate (only 8.0% of pressures turned into sacks) led football by a mile, according to PFF data.
After turning the ball over a combined 41 times over the last two seasons, including 22 a year ago, Allen trimmed that number to just eight this season. There is some luck involved in turnovers, but there’s been a conscious effort made in Buffalo. Allen’s turnover-worthy play percentage, also calculated by PFF, was a career-low 2.6%.
The Bills, as a result, did not lose the turnover battle in a game all year. Their eight turnovers ranked as the fewest for any team in any season since 1993. That’s how you get to 14-3 and an appearance in the AFC Championship Game.
The best quarterbacks in football — the truly elite — are those who can adapt their game and still steer every bit as productive of a ship as the past. That’s not easy.
It is, for example, Patrick Mahomes topping 5,000 yards by way of a gunslinger’s mentality — completing 12 more downfield passes than any other quarterback in the game; and then it’s Patrick Mahomes throwing short passes more frequently than any quarterback in the league.
All with one consistency mixed in: winning.
Not easy.
Allen is a member of that elite tier and now with the description to go with it, even as the endeavor to reach the ultimate tier endures.
A year ago, Mahomes said something that took some by surprise, particularly if you’d known him awhile.
“We can punt, man,” he said.
We haven’t heard Allen say this out loud, per se, but he might as well have:
We can run.
See, the Bills, quarterbacked by the odds-on MVP favorite, are a run-first team. They have the fifth-highest run frequency rate in the NFL this season, per Next Gen Stats. It’s as key to the game Sunday as the passing game.
Allen is part of that mix. He has 27 rushing touchdowns over the last two seasons. But that too is part of the point. Over the previous four seasons, Allen averaged 591 passing attempts per season. In 2024, he threw just 483 passes, a dip of more than 100 throws.
The end result of all of this? He had the highest QBR of his life.
“This year, you can see his confidence,” Chiefs cornerback Trent McDuffie said. “(He is) making smart decisions, not turning the ball over as much. He’s really got the offense rolling.”
On tape, McDuffie said, that really pops in the scramble drills. When on the move, Allen would often fire a deep shot or throw a ball up for grabs and hope his receivers would make a play. Now, as McDuffie described, “he’s just tucking it and running it, or if he doesn’t see it, kind of throwing it away.
“That shows growth.”
Allen is much less likely to gift-wrap you a defensive stop. You have to earn it.
Don’t get it twisted. He’s still capable of the spectacular. The two quarterbacks in this AFC Championship Game are as capable as anyone of producing something you’ve never seen before. Be prepared for it.
But Mahomes has thrown all of one interception in his last three postseasons, a stretch covering eight games. He’s changed his game — even if he still taps into the magic.
A week ago, that was releasing a football as he was nearly parallel to the ground and still finding Kelce for a touchdown. It’s not a coincidence he took the chance on a third-down play. Allen has plenty of examples, too.
They have elite traits. But part of maximizing those traits are knowing when to use them.
Knowing when the risk is worth it.
Knowing when the mundane is effective.