‘Did that really happen?’ An inside look at Kyle Allen’s meteoric rise as Panthers QB
Kyle Allen comes full circle Sunday — playing Atlanta, in Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, just like he did in his first-ever NFL action 11 months ago.
But while the opponent and the venue will be the same, almost everything else has changed. Allen, the 23-year-old Panthers quarterback, will start his eighth consecutive game Sunday. He is not only this team’s quarterback of the present; he might well be its quarterback of the future.
In that Atlanta game Dec. 23, 2018, however, Allen had just been called up from the practice squad. When he suddenly entered the game because Taylor Heinicke got hurt, he was so new to everyone that TV play-by-play man Dick Stockton introduced him like this: “So Kyle Allen — who played in five games for the Houston Texans last year and started three of them…”
That wasn’t true at all. Allen had never played in a single NFL game, in Houston or anywhere else. Stockton was mistakenly reading off Allen’s college stats from the University of Houston — one of two Texas colleges where Allen had first won the starting QB job and then lost it.
“I think I threw a stop route to Curtis, maybe?” Allen guessed while recalling his first-ever NFL pass.
Not quite. The throw to Curtis Samuel was his second of the game. His first was a safe, short pass to Christian McCaffrey, followed by one to Samuel, followed by the first big throw of his career when he hit Jarius Wright for a 24-yard gain.
“The one I really remember is I threw a seam route to Jarius,” said Allen, going on to explain he had been giving himself a pep talk on the sideline shortly before that play. “I was like, ‘All right, you’ve just got to go play. You’ve got to go trust what you see.”
On the throw to Wright, Allen looked at two other covered receivers first, then found the veteran on his third read. “This is what it’s like in practice,” he thought to himself. “It’s not much different.”
Allen threw only one more pass that day — he went 4-for-4 for 38 yards — before Heinicke returned to play the rest of the game with an injured left elbow. Carolina lost, 24-10. At the end of the contest, Allen found his father and tossed him his No. 7 jersey.
“He said, ‘Here you go, Dad,’ ” Mike Allen remembered. “It was quite a moment.”
That night, when the Allen family gathered at Kyle’s apartment in Charlotte, the quarterback told his father he had found out something about the season finale at New Orleans.
“What are you doing next weekend?” Kyle asked his dad. “Because I think I’m starting.”
Cut from the practice squad
Since that day, Allen has started eight of the past 10 Panthers games, going 6-2. His rise has been meteoric. Remember, not only was Allen only on the Panthers’ practice squad last year, but Carolina actually cut him from the practice squad in favor of Connor Cook.
Cook has never stuck for long anywhere in the NFL and was recently was drafted by the XFL’s Houston Roughnecks. Allen, meanwhile, lived back at home in Arizona for much of the 2018 season before returning to the Panthers’ practice squad once Cam Newton’s injured shoulder necessitated getting another QB to throw the ball around during workouts.
It’s not like the Panthers had much clue as to what Allen could do, even after he won his first NFL start in that New Orleans game. After all, Carolina selected Will Grier in the third round of this year’s draft, giving Allen another strong competitor for the backup role behind Newton.
Grier and Allen had known each other for years, even attending a UNC quarterback camp at Chapel Hill in 2012. (Both got scholarship offers that day, Mike Allen said, although neither wound up going there).
Allen went to Texas A&M, won the starting job, lost it, transferred to Houston, won the starting job, lost it and declared early for the 2018 NFL draft. He wasn’t drafted — unsurprising given his off-and-on college career — and the Panthers picked him up just for depth as a rookie free agent.
What has happened since is Allen has succeeded almost every time he’s gotten a chance — the biggest coming after Newton’s Lisfranc foot injury sidelined him for 14 of this year’s 16 regular-season games.
He’s drawn praise from some big names along the way.
“He’s a heck of a quarterback,” Panthers running back Christian McCaffrey said of Allen, who he first met at a high school all-star game. “The only (negative) thing people say about him is that he’s undrafted. But you look at his 7-8 starts and he’s been very good … People don’t give him enough credit.”
“Kyle impressed us with his demeanor and the way he plays,” Carolina offensive coordinator Norv Turner said. “You know, he doesn’t change. He doesn’t get all hyped up when he gets in there.”
“He’s more athletic than people give him credit for,” Panthers defensive tackle Gerald McCoy added. “Kyle is so poised. He’s not rattled by anything. To take a rookie quarterback and put him in the environment we were just in (in Green Bay) — weather conditions, stadium, everything, and for him to have the poise he had on that last drive? I’ve seen vets crumble in that situation.”
No time to blink
Allen hasn’t been perfect. He has fumbled seven times in his seven starts in 2019 and lost five of them. He threw three interceptions in Carolina’s blowout loss at San Francisco. For all the compliments he garnered after leading two drives of 80-plus yards in the fourth quarter at Green Bay, the Panthers still lost. He has underthrown a couple of deep balls that could have gone for touchdowns.
“I think at times he’s trying to be too perfect,” Panthers coach Ron Rivera said.
Still, Allen has made quite a journey over the past 11 months. When he talks about that Atlanta game last season, when he made his NFL debut, he sounds like he’s talking about something from 10 years ago.
“That was my first week even being active,” Allen said, “and I was stoked just to be in a uniform, honestly. And then Taylor (Heinicke) went down in the second quarter and I didn’t even have time to blink. I just had to go in and play. And it was cool.”
It was indeed cool, and it has remained that way since.
Mike and Jonna Allen are Kyle’s parents — he is the youngest of their three children. They live in the Phoenix area. They aren’t coming to this week’s game in Charlotte because Kyle’s older brother Nick and his wife are expecting a child any day.
But the Allens watched the Green Bay game from the front row at Lambeau Field last week, bundled up against the snow. With the game so tight, the amazement of how far their son has come didn’t hit them right away. In 11 months, Kyle Allen had gone from undrafted to unheralded to, at least temporarily, Carolina’s unquestioned starter.
“You really don’t understand it until afterward,” Mike Allen said. “But when it was all over in Green Bay, we kind of looked at each other and said, “Did that just all really happen?”
This story was originally published November 15, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
