Gunslinger: Can Josh Allen Win a Super Bowl like This?
On the duality of Josh Allen, quantifying and identifying the league's gunslingers, and why they aren't winning Super Bowls.
It was a chilly 35 degrees at Washington’s Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, and the home team had been putting a beating on the visiting Atlanta Falcons. The score was 49-17, and with 55 seconds left in the game, the ‘91 Falcons waved the white flag by sending in their third-string quarterback. He got behind center with a smirk, not the smile of someone grateful to be getting their first NFL action, but the smirk of someone who knew he was the best quarterback on the team, even if nobody else did yet.
Brett Favre had been taken in the second round of the draft by the Falcons, but by the time he got his first throw for the organization in November against Washington, he was all but checked out. After starting the season competing for the starting job, Favre had slid all the way down to the bottom of the depth chart. Favre’s most notable contributions in his ‘91 season were to Atlanta-area bars, where he had become extremely popular and could be found nearly every night until close. Falcons head coach Jerry Glanville said that for Favre to get game time that season, “We gotta have two plane wrecks and four quarterbacks go down.”
But in an attempt to get their starting quarterback out of harm's way, and with the clock running down and the game out of reach, Glanville sent Favre into the game.
Favre looked right, then left, and took the snap. The slot receiver ran a slant about five yards downfield. Favre fired in a pass, a little high, that glanced off the receiver's hands and floated right into the chest of a Washington linebacker, who trotted almost untouched into the endzone, turning Brett Favre’s first-ever NFL throw into a pick-six. On the next drive, with eight seconds left on the clock, Favre chucked a second interception on a 55-yard hail mary. That was his last pass as a Falcon. Favre finished that game, and his season with the Falcons, 0-4 on passing attempts with two interceptions.
It’s Monday night, September 11th, 2023. The Buffalo Bills lead the New York Jets 13-6 in MetLife stadium. Bills quarterback Josh Allen takes the snap out of the shotgun. Wide receiver Gabe Davis is on the right side of the formation and drives his route down the middle of the field and out towards the right sideline. Allen hasn’t taken his eyes off Davis from the snap, confident he can fit the ball in. Allen fires in the pass, and Jets safety Jordan Whitehead jumps the route and intercepts his third pass from Allen on the night. The Bills lose in overtime, and all fingers are pointed straight at Josh Allen.
The media quickly reminds us that Allen, a perennial MVP candidate, has also led the league in interceptions since he was drafted out of Wyoming in 2018. The Athletic publishes a piece a few days later, asking: “How Do You Tame a Wild Quarterback like Josh Allen?” It begins by pointing to another quarterback known for his combination of super-human arm talent and rash decision-making: Brett Favre.
Upon finishing his strange season with the Falcons, Atlanta dealt Favre to the Green Bay Packers. In Green Bay, Favre would go on to break the NFL records in passing yards, passing touchdowns, and consecutive starts. He won the NFL MVP award in three consecutive seasons. Yet Favre never entirely buried the reckless streak he showed the world in that first start with the Falcons. As he threw those record-setting touchdowns, he also set the NFL record for interceptions at 336. Favre never threw for fewer than 13 picks in a season during his time in Green Bay. His tendency to throw first and ask questions later earned Favre the nickname “The Gunslinger”.
Allen is the “Gunslinger” of today’s NFL. A young quarterback can do much worse than being anointed the next Brett Favre, but in discussing Favre’s legacy, there is always one sour note: Despite all those touchdowns, and yards, and MVPs, Favre finished his 20-year career with only one Super Bowl to show for it. The 2023 season is Allen’s fifth full year as a starter, and despite winning 10+ games in each of his previous four seasons and putting together MVP-level campaigns throughout, he’s yet to get through the AFC and make it to the Super Bowl. It leaves us to wonder: Does Allen’s gunslinging nature leave him destined to follow a career trajectory like Favre’s - a path that will see him rack up accolades but fail to bring championships back to Buffalo?
Quantifying the Gunslinger
To begin to answer the question of how Allen’s gunslinger mentality affects his Super Bowl prospects, let’s try to move our more abstract understanding of what a gunslinger is into something concrete. We’ll identify characteristics of gunslingers and then map those to stats from NFL Advanced Analytics.
The first thing we note about gunslingers like Allen and Favre is that they tend to throw the ball deeper down the field than the average quarterback. During Favre’s strange rookie campaign with the Falcons, his head coach used to walk around during warmups, betting field personnel that Favre could launch a football all the way into the top ring of the stadium. Allen has taken up the mantle of “biggest arm” in the NFL today, with some claiming he can throw the ball the whole length of the football field. We can map the gunslingers' penchant for deep passes through two stats: Intended Air Yards (IAY) and Completed Air Yards (CAY). IAY measures the average length that these quarterbacks’ passes travel in the air, and CAY measures the average length of a completed pass. The gunslingers of the league are generally more likely to sling deeper passes and put up higher IAY and CAY metrics.
The second quality we expect of a gunslinger is that they take a little longer in the pocket to let plays downfield develop. Gunslingers are not the “dink-and-dunk” quarterbacks throwing a lot of quick slants or screens. Favre was known for getting outside the pocket and looking for the big plays downfield, leaving him with an above-average Time-to-throw (TT), which tracks the average time from snap until pass.
Finally, a gunslinger has an extremely high risk tolerance. Favre was not afraid to fit a pass into a tight window, as evidenced by his record-setting interception totals. The NFL quantifies this tendency through Aggression Percentage (AGG%), which measures the percentage of throws a quarterback makes where a defender is within one yard of the intended receiver. Today’s gunslingers are more likely to make risky throws, so we would expect them to have above-average AGG% metrics.
By normalizing, weighting, and combining these statistics from when the dataset started in 2018, we get a rough metric called the “Gunslinger Index.”
Sitting up near the top of the list is Allen, who has three seasons with a G-Index above the 70th percentile, and Jameis Winston, who, in 2019, put up a historic 30-touchdown, 30-interception season. Also featured are Dak Prescott, Russell Wilson, and Matt Stafford, whose 2019 season has the highest Gunslinger Index in the sample. These are all quarterbacks with high touchdown and high interception numbers who have been called gunslingers by commentators or the media at one time or another in their careers.
As interesting as identifying the gunslingers up at the top of the index, however, is seeing which quarterbacks fall toward the bottom of the Gunslinger index. Jimmy Garoppolo, Derek Carr, and late-career Drew Brees (whose arm power was well diminished) are recurring names. These quarterbacks are best known for their accuracy and decision-making, but lack deep-ball prowess. They also tend to throw fewer touchdowns and fewer interceptions per-play than their counterparts with a higher Gunslinger index.
So we have some measure of “Gunslinger” that seems to align with reality. Next, let’s find the quarterbacks Allen should aspire towards: those with playoff success.
First, a quick note on defining success when thinking about Allen: Allen has established himself as one of the league's best quarterbacks, just as Favre did shortly after arriving in Green Bay. They are what you call “Franchise Quarterbacks”: The foundation of title contenders, who are paid about a quarter of the team's payroll because of their immense contribution towards winning. For quarterbacks in this stratosphere, their team’s success is measured almost purely in Super Bowls. High regular season win-totals, which Allen and Favre both have plenty of, are only relevant in positioning for the playoffs.
So, in looking for quarterbacks that achieved the level of post-season glory Allen is striving for, we’ll grab each season in the data set where the quarterback led the team to their respective conference championship game. We’ll also make note of the quarterbacks that won the Super Bowl in each of those seasons.
The results? The quarterbacks who have won the big games over the past few seasons land right in the middle of the gunslinging index. Since 2018, three quarterbacks have won the Super Bowl: Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady twice each, and Matthew Stafford once. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers underlying their G-Indexes to see if we can better understand how their play styles differ from Allen’s.
The biggest differences between Allen’s numbers and these championship seasons are in the Intended Air Yards (IAY) and Time-to-throw (TT) categories. Allen throws the ball way farther downfield than any of these quarterbacks, about two yards per attempt on average. The notable exception is Brady’s performance in the 2020 season, where he tossed an average IAY of 9.3, compared to Allen’s 8.8. Yet, even as Brady was attempting significantly longer passes in 2020, Allen still held a much higher TT metric. Brady was getting the ball off in 2.57s in 2020, whereas Allen was holding it nearly a half second longer on average at 3.04s.
Now, understandably, you may wonder if a half-second is that big of a deal. And on a play-by-play basis and in isolation, it probably isn't. Although margins are thin in the NFL, open receivers tend to stay open a half-second later. We can even extend that idea a touch further and say that the extra two yards per attempt in Intended Air Yards isn’t much riskier than the average pass on any given play.
The problem with that analysis is that Allen isn’t actually holding the ball for a half-second longer or throwing two yards further on every play. What is happening over the course of the season is that most of the time, Allen is getting the ball off in a very average amount of time (TT) for a very normal amount of yards (IAY). However, every once in a while, Allen holds the ball for a really long time and throws it really far. We can get a more concrete sense of this idea by looking at the Time-to-throw of Allen’s interceptions last year. The average Time-to-throw of Allen’s miscues was around 3.3s, but the median Time-to-throw was 3.1s. The average being higher than the median supports the notion that a few extreme data points skew Allen’s average Time-to-pass upwards.
A handful of plays skewing the average are what we’re observing in Allen’s above-average Intended Air Yard and Time-to-pass metrics. These are also the plays that have come to define Allen in the NFL, and the outcome of any Josh Allen game tends to follow the outcome of these Josh Allen plays.
Take, for example, this 2022 play against the Patriots. Allen takes the snap and starts feeling a little pressure up the middle. He scrambles towards the right sideline, keeping his eyes up, surveying the field for receivers. A Patriots defender grabs Allen, but he easily shrugs him off, keeping his focus on the receivers in the endzone, who have, at this point, finished their respective routes long ago and are improvising ways to get open. As he is about to step out of bounds, Allen unleashes a laser across his body right into the chest of Gabe Davis. Touchdown. Time from snap to throw? 5.98s, much larger than any NFL player’s average Time-to-throw. The Bills go up 17-7 and go on to win the game. This is the Josh Allen experience.
But while you’re here, watch this one, too. Allen takes the snap and gets flushed out of the pocket to the right. He is scrambling toward the right sideline, and three Vikings are in aggressive pursuit. This is a broken play. The receivers are running all over the endzone, trying to buy a yard for Allen to rip a pass toward them. A step from the sideline, Allen zips a pass back across his body (we’ve seen this one before), right into the hands of Vikings corner Patrick Peterson (oh). Time from snap to throw? 5.98s. That interception comes with the Bills up 27-17 in the fourth quarter. The Vikings score on their next couple of possessions, and the game goes to overtime. The Bills lose 30-33, the game expiring on a second Allen interception to Peterson. This is also the Josh Allen experience.
Tame the Gunslinger?
Watch the Josh Allen film, and this same scenario pops up time and time again. Allen escapes the pocket on a broken play, keeps his eyes downfield, and fires the football to somebody. Very few quarterbacks have the athletic ability to extend these plays and prevent a sack or a throw-away. Once he escapes the pocket, Allen is one of a handful of quarterbacks in the league with the arm talent necessary to sling footballs just about wherever he wants on the field. A 60-yard laser down the sideline, with a 300-lb defensive end pulling him down? Sure. Forty yards, across his body, from the right sideline back to the left hash? No problem. Here lies the crux of the Josh Allen problem: Just because he can, should he? And if so, when?
The answer to the first part of that question is easy: Yes. Part of what makes Josh Allen special is that he can extend plays and throw the football places where almost nobody else can. The proof that this skillset is valuable to winning Super Bowls is Allen’s peer, Patrick Mahomes. Mahomes, like Allen, holds the ball on average for a long time, largely during these broken plays where he is improvising. These situations are inherently risky; the play's structure has broken down, defenders are in pursuit, and the receivers’ routes are all expired. However, these plays also present enormous opportunities. It is hard for defensive backs to cover wide receivers for five seconds, and the odds of a broken coverage that could lead to a huge touchdown increase substantially. These plays are boom or bust, and their outcome is also very much determined by the instincts of these quarterbacks.
The question of when Allen is making these plays is where the real debate begins. Take, for example, the week one game against the Jets. Allen threw three very Allen-esque interceptions; plays were extended, eyes were kept downfield, and footballs were thrown at superhuman speeds and distances. That day, all three of these signature Josh Allen moments ended in interceptions, but on a different one, they could have also been touchdowns. The duality of Allen! Take the good with the bad! Except, on that evening, the Bills had much more to lose than to gain on these throws.
The game started with Aaron Rodgers, one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history (and another master improviser in the tradition of Favre, Allen, and Mahomes), leaving the game after tearing his Achilles tendon. The Jets were shell-shocked and had to turn to quarterback Zach Wilson, who is historically very bad at football. The Jets struggled to generate any kind of offense all evening. This game should have been an open-and-shut case for Allen and the Bills: Take the easy throws, heck, even kick some field goals, and you get out of there with a comfortable win. But that is not what Josh Allen did. Up a touchdown, he forced passes over and over again, giving the ball back to the Jets and giving them more chances to score. Suppose Allen extends none of those plays, giving the Bills no shot at a miraculous touchdown, but also not giving the Jets any chance at extra possessions. In that case, this is an easy Bills win. Yet on that Monday night, Allen couldn’t quiet that gunslinger devil on his shoulder.
Is the gunslinger within Allen something that he can switch off? Can Allen weigh the risks and rewards of a given play while it’s happening, within the context of what is required of him to win the game? If we take a final glance at the G-Index data, there is hope - and we can find it in the last of those Super Bowl winners, Matt Stafford.
Stafford, as we noted earlier, has the highest G-Index of any player in the sample during his 2019 season. That campaign came during his time on the Lions, where, on a bad team, Stafford had to make something out of nothing to keep them in games. He threw a lot of touchdowns and a lot of interceptions; he was a gunslinger.
And after 12 years of toil, Stafford finally went west to seek his fortune (a Super Bowl). The Los Angeles Rams traded for Stafford ahead of the 2021 season. In LA, Stafford partnered with a coaching prodigy who had revolutionized the NFL offense: Sean McVay. It was a match made in heaven. McVay harnessed Stafford's talent inside his brilliant offensive system. Suddenly, more than ever in his career, Stafford had easy throws to open receivers. He posted the lowest Aggression Percentage of any of his years on record. Yet he also had the latitude to make game-winning plays. The gunslinger didn’t leave Stafford; he threw a ton of touchdowns and interceptions along the way, and in the Super Bowl, he even threw a Josh Allen-esque jump ball that ended in a pick. But at the end of the game, down 20-16, Stafford controlled his inner gunslinger, operated within the McVay system, and hit open receivers play after play on the way to a game-winning drive. Stafford capped a masterful season with his first Super Bowl by finding when to operate within the system and when to let the instincts take over.
Whether Allen ever finds that ability to turn off his gunslinging tendency is probably the key question for the rest of his NFL career. If Allen can find a way to bring out the gunslinger when it’s called for, and quiet it when it's not, he has all the tools to surpass Favre. Can he find that balance on his own? Will he need a guru like McVay to help him learn to channel his powers like Stafford? The jury is still out; however, the data suggests the story of Allen’s career may not be the story of the throws he does make, but the ones he doesn’t.
Edited excellently by Greta Gruber
This is brilliant Alex! One question on the G-Index - have you standardised this so that 100 is league-average?
* Actually assuming the answer is no, given you say Allen's seasons around ~100 are 70th-percentile