Josh Allen is in a very interesting position heading into these 2025 playoffs. For the first time, he is the only superstar QB to make it to the postseason. No Lamar, no Mahomes, no Burrow. Knowing just that, one would think this should be Allen’s year to finally get over that Super Bowl hump.
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And it is. But it’s not as straightforward as that one fact would make it seem. He comes in as a Wild Card seed for the first time in his career, meaning he will likely have to win three road games in a row to get to the promised land. Not so easy: only four teams have ever done it in NFL history.
His Bills are favored by 1.5 points over the Jacksonville Jaguars. But the Jags would feel hard done by this. They were 13-4 while the Bills were 12-5, and Jacksonville is coming into the playoffs on an eight-game winning streak. But despite that tall task for Allen (and we’re only in the Wild Card round right now), Cam Newton is not alone in believing the QB’s legacy could be on the line in this game. Newton said a loss would be “extremely” damaging.
“The people that he has to go against is potentially C.J. Stroud, Drake Maye, Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, Bo Nix, and the list goes on,” Newton said. “If you asked that in preseason or before Week 1, you would’ve said to yourself, Oh, they’re winning the Super Bowl. The same tension and the same risk is still there.”
Allen has more playoff experience than that list of AFC playoff QBs combined. And that’s not an exaggeration. Allen has played in 13 playoff games and won seven. That group of five has played in nine playoff games and earned just three victories, two of which belong to Stroud.
That’s why all eyes are on Allen during this postseason. And rightfully so. Newton continued:
“If he does not have a deep playoff push and in the famous words of Stephen Anthony, it better not be you. Because if it is you Josh Allen? Boy oh boy,” Newton exclaimed. “People are gonna side-eye you, people are gonna look at you and say, ‘You ain’t have nobody that we list as game-changers in this game to give you a threat and you lost or you came up short? That’s a legacy impact forsure.”
We’re not really sure he made the point he was trying to make properly at the end there, but you get the gist. A first-round loss to Trevor Lawrence and company while Mahomes and those guys are on their couches would really be a massive opportunity wasted.
