A year ago today, some were thinking of Drew Allar as a first-round candidate coming out of the draft. For a myriad of reasons, that didn’t happen. Some of those reasons are Allar’s fault, as he made plenty of key mistakes over the course of his Penn State tenure. But he shouldn’t get all of the blame, according to former NFL quarterback Phil Simms.
“It can only get better, because the Penn State offense, it was awful,” Simms said Friday on his Simms Complete podcast. “I studied Drew Allar hard, I just would go, ‘What was the design of this play? And what is he supposed to do?’ I think that happens to a lot of college quarterbacks. You get in the pros and you just go, ‘Damn, they just paint a picture that makes it so clear of what I gotta do.’ And I never felt like that when I watched Penn State.”
Allar has gotten a lot of criticism for his decision making, especially in key moments at Penn State. In arguably Penn State’s biggest game in recent history, he made a terrible decision on an interception that lost them the College Football Playoff semifinal against Notre Dame in the 2024-25 season.
But those Penn State losses were a team issue. It’s why Allar’s former head coach James Franklin is no longer there. The team as a whole just could not get over the hump. To Simms, the fault for that shouldn’t fall solely on Allar’s shoulders.
That said, there are plenty of things he’s going to have to clean up. And working with Mike McCarthy should really iron out the mental part of his game. For one, Allar’s career completion percentage was just 63.2 percent. And in his first year as a starter, it fell below 60 percent. That’s a sign of him simply not being able to take what the defense gives him at times, and trusting his arm too much.
It’s an arm that Drew Allar is right to trust. It might be the best in the entire draft class, and he can make some jaw-dropping throws. But his processing needs some work, and he needs to learn to take the checkdowns more often. And in crunch-time scenarios, he’s simply got to make better decisions.
The good news is, Allar’s in a place where he can patiently develop that aspect of his game. With Aaron Rodgers likely coming back, plus Mason Rudolph and Will Howard, Allar isn’t going to get thrown into the fire. He’ll be working with McCarthy, who has an impressive history at the quarterback position. Maybe sliding into the third round and receiving more of a patient NFL upbringing could work out better for Allar in the long run, after all.
Only time will tell if he develops into a successful NFL quarterback. The tools are certainly there. And Simms thinks some aspects of the game may actually come easier for Drew Allar at the NFL level.