What If: The Denver Broncos had taken Josh Allen and NOT Bradley Chubb?
By Adam Uribes
· Opinion
·
· 2 min read
How would the fortunes of Denver be different had Allen heard his name called that night?
Picture this: Roger Goodell walks up to the podium. The ticker announces, “The PICK is IN.” All of Broncos Country waits for what the team will do with its highest draft pick since Von Miller went 2nd overall in 2011.
“With the 5th pick in the 2018 NFL Draft, the Denver Broncos selected…Josh Allen. Quarterback. The University of Wyoming.
While fun, this is revisionist history at its worst. How was (Player A) taken ahead of (Player B)? But this still comes up quite a bit, considering the atrocious luck the Broncos have had drafting and developing quarterbacks. Seeing the player that Allen has become, a potential league MVP candidate, and comparing that against who was taken in his place, Chubb, it's easy to get swept up in believing that Joe Schmoe knows just as much as NFL front offices.
Understanding what we know now about the state of the team at that moment and it’s hard to see Allen being anything other than an abject disaster in Denver. Consider this, the starting quarterback for the Broncos that year would have been Joe Flacco. Not unreasonable to think that Allen may have been a rookie starter. While there is a sink-or-swim element to being a rookie in the NFL, especially at QB, Allen was allowed a ton of leeway for errors in his first year with Buffalo. This is the strongest piece of evidence to point to as to why Allen would have flamed out in Denver.
A mid-market team in size, but not in how it treats its quarterbacks, Denver is notoriously toxic if you are a bad quarterback. Or even a pretty good quarterback that had one bad game (you deserved better Jake). Where Elway and Manning once stood casts a large shadow on the rest of the franchise. A strength AND a weakness, it is a fair point that the front office gets too swept up in the general vibe of the team, and that leads to short-sighted roster moves.
While Elway should get his due as a front-office leader for landing Manning and a host of other players that brought Denver its 3rd Super Bowl, he never managed to hit on that position for the rest of his tenure. He tried the draft (Lock, Lynch, Siemian) free-agency (Flacco, Keenum, Bridgewater, Sanchez) he even drafted AND brought a guy back in free-agency (Brock Osweiler) but he never found The Guy. The end of the Elway Era left a lot to be desired when it was compared to the start of it and it wasn’t fitting how someone on the level of an Elway in Denver should have gone out.
That alone should be enough to say that Elway got it wrong. The great thing about hindsight is that we can see what was going on and say with a good degree of certainty, that Allen succeeded in part to being allowed to fail in his rookie season. Even then, Allen was considered a VERY volatile prospect and would need some time to get used to the speed of the game. What also gets forgotten is how SAFE a pick Chubb was at the time and how fortunate Denver was to see him fall to them on Draft Night.
Based on what #7 has said in the past, he prefers playing rookies early; a bonus for Allen if he were to succeed. We also know that swinging and missing at the quarterback spot was Elways “thing” during his time as the head of football operations, and we know that Elway and his people did visit Laramie to see Allen throw privately. So “he wasn’t on the radar” or whatever the narrative is going on these days among the fan base is ignorant. What Elway did not possess, and neither does the rest of Broncos Country in all honesty, was the patience to let Allen learn on the job. That was seen countless times in free-agent and draft moves.
Not having a “Plan B” is a great catchphrase but it’s not a model of successful drafting and developing talent, at least long-term. Elway’s biggest strength was also his biggest weakness and his chase to find the next generational Broncos savior never panned out. While it’s fantasy history to wonder what could have been, it had a highier likelihood of Josh Allen being another Jake Locker or Christian Ponder.
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