Jalen Ramsey might want to revise his 'trash' opinion of Josh Allen

Through the first two games of the 2020 season, Bills quarterback Josh Allen had done as much as he possibly could to revise the opinions of him as a big, physically gifted running quarterback who couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat. To be fair, when you can’t complete more than 58.8% of your passes in either of your first two seasons, there’s probably something to that.

But in 2020? Fuhgettaboutit. In his first two games of the 2020 season, Allen became the fourth quarterback in NFL history to rack up at least 700 passing yards, six touchdown passes, and zero interceptions in his team’s first two games.

The other guys? Peyton Manning in 2013, Tom Brady in 2015, and Patrick Mahomes last season. Still, those numbers came against the futile defenses of the Jets and Dolphins. The Rams would provide a sterner test with their zone-based defense, and offensive coordinator Brian Daboll would be challenged to some up with route concepts for less susceptible cornerbacks, right?

Uh… not so much. By the time the following play happened, Allen had already rushed for one touchdown, and thrown for two more.

A little background here. In August, 2018, then-Jaguars and now-Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey gave an interview to GQ Magazine’s Clay Skipper in which he had nothing good to say about Allen, who was then in his rookie year.

“Allen is trash,” Ramsey said, back then. “I don’t care what nobody say. He’s trash. And it’s gonna show too. That’s a stupid draft pick to me. We play them this year, and I’m excited as hell. I hope he’s their starting quarterback. He played at Wyoming. Every time they played a big school—like, they played Iowa State, which is not a big school in my opinion because I went to Florida State, and he threw five interceptions, and they lost by a couple touchdowns or something like that.✞ He never beat a big school. If you look at his games against big schools, it was always hella interceptions, hella turnovers. It’s like: Yo, if you’re this good, why couldn’t you do better? He fits that mold, he’s a big, tall quarterback. Big arm, supposedly. I don’t see it, personally.”

Allen never played Iowa State, though he did throw two picks to Iowa once. In any case, Allen’s third touchdown pass of the day against Ramsey’s Rams made the cornerback look like the one who didn’t see it all over again.

Allen did a great job of hanging in there under pressure on this touchdown pass to Stefon Diggs, who motored right around Ramsey for the score. Ouch.

To be fair, Ramsey has had nicer things to say about Allen of late. Per Eric D. Williams of SI.com:

“He presents challenges. Every week you have to face a new challenge, and this is our third week so we have to face the challenge of him and that Bills’ offense. He has some weapons around him. He can make plays running the ball and extending plays, etc, etc. … Kind of the things everyone knows about him. “But I’m confident in what I can do and this Rams’ defense can do, and that’s kind of what matters the most to me and the guys around here.”

So far, the Rams have had no answers for Allen and the Bills.