Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen recently participated in a roundtable discussion hosted by Sports Illustrated along with the other four quarterbacks drafted in the first round this year. During that discussion, Allen shared the best piece of advice he received during the pre-draft process.
The source of that great advice turned out to be none other than New York Giants great Michael Strahan, who warned the incoming rookie of the perils of paying too much attention to the things being said about him in the media.
“Being in the New York market, 90 percent of it was going to be negative, no matter how great he was going to be doing,” Allen said per Jay Skurski of Buffalo News. “So he told me, ‘I stopped reading all that stuff. I just tuned it out completely, kept to me, my family and my teammates and I felt like a different man.’ ”
There’s no question Allen will be under intense scrutiny to perform in Buffalo since he’ll be expected to be the franchise quarterback the Bills have been desperately seeking for decades. The steep price the Bills paid to trade up in the draft just to take Allen has also upped the stakes significantly.
The challenge for Allen will be to prevent all that external pressure from getting to him. That’s why it’s a good thing that he’s seemingly taken Strahan’s advice to heart. He just needs to focus on himself and improving his game, not the criticisms from others that are likely headed his way.
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