Wyoming QB Josh Allen rises to possible No. 1 NFL draft pick

From unnoticed in high school and nearly completely passed over in junior college, Josh Allen now can’t walk many places without eyes all over him.

He is the marquee Mountain West Conference player entering the season, someone talked about as possibly the No. 1 overall pick in next year’s NFL draft.

These are heady times for the Wyoming junior quarterback, or at least they would be if he let the hype and publicity he has received affect him.

“He ain’t going to change, he’s got his Dodge pickup,” Cowboys coach Craig Bohl said. “When I see him walk in the weight room and there’s a freshman defensive back that can’t get the dumb bells up, he’s helping the freshman guy. Those are indications to me that he hasn’t forgotten where he’s from.”

Allen insisted at Mountain West media days at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas that he will play with the same attitude that brought him to this point.

The same attitude that drove him to show coaches they were wrong when he received no scholarship offers coming out of Firebaugh (California) High School in 2014.

And the same one in which Wyoming was the only offer following his one season at Reedley (California) College.

“Last year was a vengeance trail for me,” Allen said. “I was trying to prove everybody wrong and show you why you screwed up by not offering me (a scholarship).”

Bohl was looking for more than athletic ability when he recruited Allen, though the 6-foot-5-inch, 233-pound player has plenty of that. Allen not only passed for 3,203 yards last season in taking the Cowboys to the Mountain West championship game, he also ran for 523 yards.

Just as he did in leading North Dakota State to three consecutive FCS national championships, Bohl focuses on recruiting players whose talent isn’t so obvious to others. That was the formula in landing Allen.

“I think we’ve done a good job in our homework, and I think we got lucky,” Bohl said.

Allen received valuable experience this past spring when he and a handful of others worked with quarterback guru George Whitfield Jr. in San Diego. Then in June, Allen took part in the Manning Passing Academy in Thibodaux, Louisiana, working alongside other top prospects such as Southern California’s Sam Darnold and Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson of Louisville.

“The Manning family was one of the greatest families I’ve ever met,” Allen said. “They really cared about the kids there. Just asking Peyton his routine and how studious he was toward the game and what he did to prepare for games every week was cool to listen to. I’ll hopefully be able to take some of that and apply it to how I prepare.”

Allen comes from a city in central California of less than 9,000 residents, so playing in a college town in Laramie with a population of about 32,000 feels familiar. He grew up on a farm and carries the small-town approach of not taking himself too seriously while remembering the value of hard work.

Those values will serve him well as the spotlight of a season approaches and everything he does will be magnified and dissected.

“It’s hard to push everything to the side,” Allen said. “I try not to read any articles. I try not to read any tweets about me because I frankly don’t really care. I don’t mean any disrespect to anybody when I say that, but I’m a Wyoming Cowboy football player. When everybody talks about the NFL, it doesn’t make any sense to me because I’ve got 14 games to play this season.”

Contact Mark Anderson at manderson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @markanderson65 on Twitter.