Josh Allen is uniquely tethered to the Bills and to Buffalo’s elusive goal of winning a Super Bowl. ESPNTim KeownSep 17, 2026, 08:30 AM ETCloseSenior Writer for ESPN The Magazine Columnist for ESPN.com Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsTHEY ALL HOLD their breath when Josh Allen goes rogue. They can always see it coming. He’ll be a little laggy at the start of a game, his legs twitchy and his brain unfocused, and that’s when they know – and fear – what’s coming next. He’ll stand before them in the huddle and get a certain look in his eye or a tone in his voice. They just shrug inside and think, Oh, well. Here we go.Maybe he’ll call a play and then change the protection at the line to make sure he puts himself one-on-one with a defensive end. Maybe he’ll drop back and hold on to the ball a split-second longer than necessary. Maybe he’ll run around like a flag in a hurricane and stay in bounds one or two strides beyond comfort, just long enough to take a hit.
Whatever form it takes, they’ll watch it unfold and think, Uh-oh. Good luck, Josh.Everyone has their motivations. Some guys like to close their eyes and envision the game unfolding in their mind. Some scream and yell and listen to music that sounds like a bandsaw going through sheet metal. Some, like Allen, simply need to take a hit, to feel alive and engaged, to give the game its shape and life its purpose.”Does it scare me, his running around?” asks Bills left tackle Dion Dawkins.
“Hell yeah. Hell yeah. When we see Josh taking off and hurdling people and running over people, it’s a scary thing. He’s a big kid, but sometimes that kid stuff doesn’t transfer. Yeah, you’re a big kid. We get it.
But if you fall, we all fall. It’s scary as hell, and we can’t hit him and say, ‘There, you got your hit in.’ Because what if we hurt him?”Even in our quarterback-centric universe, Allen is uniquely tethered to this team, this region, the elusive goal of winning a Super Bowl. ”He’s everything,” Dawkins says, and general manager Brandon Beane says his quarterback “wants to show his teammates he’s willing to do anything.” The trick is to determine, often in a split-second, the moments when those two concepts collide, when doing anything gets in the way of being everything.It’s a lot of psychic responsibility, all this shouldering of hopes and expectations. ”He’s here for a reason,” Dawkins says, “they want him to hold that trophy up.” The anything and everything of it expands every year, a tide threatening to breach the banks. The Bills have a new, Allen-friendly head coach in 36-year-old Joe Brady, a sparkling new $2.1 billion stadium, and the same unshakeable shadow of history pressed against them. Every year is The Year They Finally Win a Super Bowl, until it isn’t. This year, however, feels different, like an inflection point, not now-or-never, but close.Fairly or not, the final judgment will land on one man: Allen. It’s the world he has created.THERE IS DEFINITELY a love-hate thing going on with the Bills and Allen when it comes to his insistence on affirming humanity’s reckless potential. Dawkins adopts a low, conspiratorial tone and says, “I got to admit: I love to see it.” Whenever Allen gets popped, his linemen sprint to be the first to pick him up, all the while hoping he remains able to be picked up. This is their guy, and if he’s going to run over a linebacker rather than step out of bounds, who are they to argue?”It gets me going,” guard Alec Anderson says.
“I’m like, Yes! He brings the energy and the rest of us have to say, ‘Oh, s—, Josh is into it, so I have to step my game up.’ Yes, quarterbacks are supposed to be the trophy of the team, but I like the face of my franchise to have a little dirt on it.”And so he’ll take off, eliciting whatever range of emotions occur within each man, running in that upright, draft-horse way. His speed, even nine years into this, retains its ability to surprise. It’s a little like watching a fish swim through refracted water, his 6-foot-5, nearly 240-pound body always just a stride or two ahead of where your eyes think it should be – right up to the point he slams his body into another human.”It drives us guys up front,” center Connor McGovern says. ”If you see all the stuff he does, like how fearless and what some people might call him stupid for wanting to take hits. We love it.”Allen is trying. Lord knows he’s trying. It’s just … it’s just hard. There’s a constant playfulness in his dark brown eyes, like he’s aware that he has conquered the world and he’s just trying to figure out how far he can take it. Sometimes long-term consequences and deductive reasoning can hold his beer. He’s 30 now, a big kid with the face of an older man beginning to push its way through, and he knows NFL indestructibility is both myth and lie. He’s heard it from all of them — Brady, Beane, most of his less-enthused teammates: Don’t risk it. Don’t risk us.”I think I might be past that point of needing to be hit,” Allen says, not at all convincingly. ”I might just have my linemen push me around a little bit, maybe hit my pads.
I’m trying not to get hit as much as possible now. I know it jazzes them up, but yeah — gotta get up.”But here’s the problem: This is who he is. If the things we love tell us what we are, Allen is a guy who happens to love running into linebackers and telling off-color jokes and pulling pranks on everyone in the organization. He’s a risk-taker who, remarkably, has not missed a game since 2018, a former league MVP who still plays and acts like he’s stuck somewhere between seventh and 10th grade. He’s a guy who played through a partial tear of the UCL in his throwing elbow in 2022, a guy who missed two plays with a broken nose last season, a guy McGovern says has played through “stuff” that nobody outside the locker room will ever know. ”As long as 17 is out there, I’m going,” McGovern says. “Nothing else matters.”Allen’s blend of fearlessness and recklessness — for better, for worse — is part of what endears him to his team and its fans. There are 53 Buffalo Bills, large men and fast men and men whose athletic talents reside in the top .01% of the roughly 8.3 billion people on the planet, but they are mere extras in a larger drama. Allen is the enduring hope for an entire region, the superstar who carries their hopes and dreams and burdens around as lightly as a child skipping through a park.”He’s the king of Western New York,” McGovern says, “and he wears the crown well.”TO UNDERSTAND THE kingdom he has created, it’s necessary to understand the kingdoms that created him.It’s jarring to drive around western New York and behold the pervasiveness of Bills paraphernalia, and difficult to convey the level of fame Allen has attained within it.
It’s not so much a fandom as a cultural force. Flags on cars, flags on houses, flags on businesses. Lawn buffaloes painted in Bills’ colors, lawn buffaloes draped with No. 17 jerseys, an untold number of posters hanging on an untold number of walls. A free public practice in mid-August attracted more than 41,000 fans on a Tuesday morning at 8:30, the traffic backing up through and around the residential streets surrounding Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park.
It only seemed like 40,999 of the attendees were wearing either a T-shirt or a jersey bearing 17.It’s a heavy load to bear, regardless of how lightly the crown sits, and Allen showed as much last year when he broke down in tears after the AFC divisional overtime loss to the Broncos. The Bills are not simply an activity in Western New York, they are perhaps the area’s l
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