09/20/2026
Tonight Josh Allen became the first player in the history of the National Football League with five passing touchdowns and three rushing touchdowns through the first two games of a season.
Not the first in fifty years. The first.
Here's where he came from.
Firebaugh, California. A farming town in the Central Valley with about 7,600 people in it. His family grows cotton. His dad Joel was Firebaugh High School's starting quarterback in 1982.
Josh threw for 5,269 yards and 59 touchdowns there. As a senior he had 25 touchdown passes and over 500 yards rushing.
He graduated with zero scholarship offers.
Not zero from the big schools. Zero, total. No FBS program called. No FCS program called. He didn't even get preferred walk-on offers. A couple of Division III schools floated academic money so he could come play for them. San Diego State said he could walk on, but couldn't promise he'd ever see the field.
His father once played in a charity golf tournament with the head coach at Fresno State, the closest big program to home, and mentioned that his son wanted to play there. The coach decided he wasn't the right fit.
Late in his senior year, Allen's high school coach pulled him out of class and drove him over to watch Fresno State's spring practice, just to see it.
Allen watched their quarterbacks throw for a while. When practice ended, he tapped his coach on the shoulder.
"Coach, I'm better than these guys."
"You're what?"
"I'm better."
Nobody agreed with him. So he enrolled at Reedley College, a junior college 65 miles from home, where one of the assistant coaches happened to be married to his cousin.
He didn't even start there at first. He sat for three games. In the fourth he came off the bench and ran for four touchdowns.
His coordinator told him the offers would start rolling in now.
They didn't.
So Allen did the only thing left. He sat down and sent a mass email to every head coach, offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in Division I football. More than a thousand of them. Just his stats and a link to his highlight tape.
Out of a thousand emails, he got a handful of replies.
Out of those, two schools offered him a scholarship. Eastern Michigan and Wyoming.
Then he took a visit to Wyoming, and Eastern Michigan pulled their offer.
One. He had one.
And Wyoming had only found him by accident. Their coaches had driven out to Reedley to scout a completely different player.
"I truly felt like I was a Division I quarterback, and I'd felt that way for a long time," Allen said. "I just wanted other people to see it."
He took the one offer. At Wyoming he threw for 5,066 yards and 44 touchdowns and turned a two-win team into an eight-win team. Buffalo drafted him seventh overall in 2018, the highest a quarterback had ever gone in franchise history. He won MVP in 2024.
Last October, Firebaugh High School named its football field after him. His mother and father stood there for it. His grandfather had been one of the people who pushed for that town to have its own high school and its own field in the first place.
The kid nobody wanted just put his name in a place in the record book where nobody else has ever been.
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