Josh Allen’s rise to NFL MVP status started in a place few college programs bothered to look.
The Bills quarterback said recently that he came out of Firebaugh High School in California with no scholarship offers at all, and that the chase for an opportunity turned into a numbers game. Allen said he ended up sending about 1,000 emails to coaches across the country, attaching his highlights and hoping someone would bite.
“I played in a small town called Firebaugh, California,” Allen said. “I had zero offers out of high school.
I had no preferred walk-ons. A couple Division III schools were trying to give me academic scholarships so I could go play there, but I didn't want to make my parents pay for me to go somewhere.”
With nowhere else to go, Allen enrolled at Reedley College, a junior college less than 40 miles from his hometown. From there, he started firing off messages to programs everywhere, laying out his size, his film and his case for why he belonged.
“The email said something like, ‘Hey, I'm Josh Allen. I'm 6-foot-5, 220 pounds.
I feel like I’d be a great fit for your program. Here's my Hudl.
These are my stats,’” Allen said. “I literally just went copy, paste, copy, paste and sent it to every single coach I could find an email for.”
Allen made those comments during a recent appearance on Bussin' With The Boys, where he also talked about how different his path was from the modern recruiting machine. He graduated from Firebaugh in 2014, before social media became such a central part of college football recruiting, when highlight clips, camps, showcases and 7-on-7 events became the easiest way for players to get seen.
Even so, Allen’s experience still says plenty about how messy recruiting can be. Exposure matters.
Geography matters. Competition level matters.
Physical development matters. Sometimes the right quarterback is hiding in plain sight, and nobody’s looking in the right place yet.
Allen also used the conversation to make a point about something he still values: playing more than one sport. At Firebaugh, he was a three-sport athlete, and he believes that shaped him in ways quarterback camps never could.
“I was a three-sport guy, so I didn't spend my summers going around to every quarterback camp,” Allen said. “I got the chance to play different sports, feel different emotions, meet different types of people and learn how to deal with all of it.”
“I think that's something a lot of kids need to continue doing, play more sports,” Allen said. “Every sport teaches you something that you can ultimately use later in life.”
The rest of the story is the part everyone knows now. After one season at Reedley, Allen landed at Wyoming, grew into one of the nation’s top quarterback prospects and was taken by the Buffalo Bills with the No. 7 overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft.
Firebaugh High School later made sure that journey was remembered. In 2025, the school renamed its football field Josh Allen Field, a fitting nod to a player who once left there with no Division I scholarship offer and ended up as one of the biggest stars in the sport.
Allen’s path is not some easy formula for every overlooked player. Sending 1,000 emails doesn’t promise a scholarship, and playing three sports doesn’t guarantee an NFL career. But his story is a sharp reminder of how hard it can be to judge teenage talent, and how far a player can go after starting with nothing more than a pile of unanswered messages.
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