Wyoming quarterback Josh Allen has been a divisive NFL Draft prospect for some time due to his on-field productivity. Allen is in the mix to be the No. 1 overall pick on Thursday night, but there are plenty of questions about his accuracy as a passer and productivity when playing against quality opponents.
Allen struggled against Power 5 opponents and Boise State over his career at Wyoming and his stats don’t jump off the page as a top pick. However, he has an incredibly strong arm and the “prototypical” quarterback build, aka, he’s 6’5 and white. That last part is important when considering what resurfaced on Wednesday night when Twitter went into a frenzy after a number of Allen’s old tweets from his high school days got brought up and passed around due to their racially-insensitive nature.
The tweets have since been deleted by Allen, but the internet is forever and the embeds from this Yahoo Sports story on them still show what they said, even if the formatting has been thrown off by their deletion. Fair warning: he uses the N-word a good bit.
So, yeah, these are not good. The timing of their resurfacing has caused some to question who had the motive to do this right before the draft. According to Adam Schefter, there’s buzz that it might have been an NFL team that dug them up in hopes that it would hurt his draft stock and cause him to slide to them in the draft.
A theory two people in the past hour now have floated: another team plotted to have Josh Allen’s racially insensitive tweets put out just before the draft in order to increase the chances he would fall in the draft to that team.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 26, 2018
I guess that’s possible, but I’m going to guess it was more fans looking for something on Allen because he is not exactly a popular prospect for many in Cleveland and elsewhere. In any case, Allen has since apologized for the tweets by telling ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith he was “young and dumb,” which is very possibly true. Tweets from 2012 and 2013 when he was 15 or 16 don’t necessarily indicate who he is today, but the question, as Bomani Jones posed on Twitter on Thursday morning, is what has actually changed in his life to make him understand why these tweets are, at best, insensitive.
i got but so much energy to get mad at what high schoolers say. that said, the "i was dumb then" story…i mean, what'd you do to get smarter? that seems like an important question to ask if he's saying he's past it. what'd you learn in wyoming that brought you past that? https://t.co/c4cjh5z2GT
— bomani (@bomani_jones) April 26, 2018
It’s a fair question to ask and one that Allen quite possibly has a legitimate answer for beyond him simply pulling the innocence of youth card for using the N-word. Some willing to accept Allen’s apology have also indicated that Allen may have just been trying to “be cool” by saying these things, which speaks to a larger problem that permeates through certain areas of white American culture where saying racist things is something people think is “cool.”
How this will effect Allen’s stock remains to be seen and in all honesty we won’t ever really know if a potential slide down the first round was caused by these tweets coming up or if teams just didn’t like him as much as some of the draft’s other top quarterback prospects as a player.
More so, how Allen addresses this with his new teammates will be critical to his success as a quarterback, who is supposed to be the leader of the offense, because he’ll be interacting with a locker room that is predominantly African-American and will have to convince those players that he has truly changed from when he was, as he put it, “young and dumb.”
