Steve Beuerlein does not hesitate when asked which quarterback he loves watching most. “I always start with the guy that I have the man crush on. That’s Josh Allen,” he said.
Beuerlein, who played quarterback for six NFL teams and now serves as the Cowboys’ national radio analyst, has tracked Allen since before the Bills made him the seventh pick of the 2018 draft, the same class that produced Baker Mayfield and Lamar Jackson. “I tapped him as the guy even before the draft when he was coming out,” Beuerlein said. “When I saw the progression of his development in the NFL, I was like, this guy is just different.”
Beuerlein sat down with PFSN for an exclusive interview to discuss all things football. The former QB recently enrolled in Heartflow’s GAMEFILM Registry, a program analyzing the heart health of former professional athletes.
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The development is the part Beuerlein keeps coming back to. Allen entered the league as a big arm with shaky ball security and has turned into the 2024 MVP. To Beuerlein, the growth shows up in the small decisions.
“He’s made the progression each year. I think he becomes more and more higher IQ as a quarterback,” Beuerlein said. “When he recognizes a coverage and how he takes advantage of it, when he realizes situationally when it’s the right time to take a chance, when it’s not, when it’s better to just throw it away and punt the ball, he’s gotten better in all those areas.”
Beuerlein frames the leap as a matter of survival. “If you don’t learn how to protect the football, no matter how special your qualities are, you’re not going to have a job in the NFL,” he said. The flip side, in his telling, is durability. Allen has to protect his body as much as the ball, because “the cumulative toll of taking those kind of shots over the course of a season” shows up in January.
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January is also where the hurt lives. Allen has lost repeatedly to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in the postseason, most painfully in the AFC Championship Game after the 2024 season, and Buffalo’s 2025 run ended a step earlier, in a divisional-round loss to Denver. “I worry that they’ve missed out on some of the best potential opportunities to take it all the way,” Beuerlein said. “You got to give credit to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs for making those things happen.”
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The respect for Mahomes is unconditional, even with a caveat about the road back. Mahomes tore the ACL and LCL in his left knee in a Week 15 loss to the Chargers, ending Kansas City’s season and snapping its playoff streak. “Who knows how the injury will affect him long term,” Beuerlein said. “You can’t take away what he’s accomplished already. I know how hard it is to get it done one time, and he’s done it multiple times.”
Three Super Bowl titles back that up. Beuerlein’s bigger bet, though, is on a quarterback still chasing his first deep run. He named Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert as two more he loves watching, and he likes Herbert’s new setup in Los Angeles under offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel.
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“I’m really excited and ready for Justin Herbert to break out this year,” Beuerlein said. “I think Jim Harbaugh is finally coming around and realizing that to win at the NFL level, even though he’s a former quarterback himself, you’ve got to let the quarterback show why he’s special.”
That is the throughline in everything Beuerlein admires about the position. Let the special ones be special. For Allen, Mahomes, and now Herbert, 2026 will test whether the people around them agree.
