The crossroad moment beckons -- every coach, every level. Indiscriminate.
Fortunate coaches might encounter it just once, but a doubt-injecting, self-introspecting juncture point finds the hole in a coach’s path same as a linebacker in the gap on fourth-and-goal.
Tyler Allen, 27-year-old former junior college nomad quarterback already a part of two staffs being ushered into nebulous uncertainty despite vastly different circumstances, leans into these moments.
Absorbs them; metabolizes them into plucky resilience.
Fired at LSU, despite being an unpaid – volunteer – student-assistant coach who came from nothing to carve roles under former Tigers offensive coordinators Cam Cameron and Matt Canada, but not good enough to stick around for free?
No big deal. This is the kid who, diagnosed with mononucleosis during his junior high school campaign at St. Stanislaus (Mississippi), coaches remember having to enlist the help of Allen’s parents to keep him from playing.
On a winless team, mind you.
“We were already 0-6, 0-7, when he got mono that year and the doctor told him, ‘You can’t play in the game with mono, your spleen is enlarged and you could die,’” says Gabe Fertitta, current senior offensive analyst at Florida State and Allen’s former head coach at St. Stan. “He said, ‘Coach, I don’t care, I’m playing in the game. I’ll die out there.’ We had to literally call his dad and his dad came to school and took his pads and helmets out of locker so he wouldn’t play in the game.
“There was never a question in my mind if he decided that he wanted to be a football coach, he was going to be exceptional.”
Country roads? Sunday driving for West Virginia’s new wunderkind quarterbacks coach after collecting more than $25,000 in undergraduate loans at LSU and later being shown the door as part of the Jacksonville State staff of John Grass that beat Florida State in 2021.
“I’m very blessed to be a Power 4 (conference) quarterback coach, just honestly blessed and humbled,” Allen tells FootballScoop of his recent anointment to tutor the signal-callers for Neal Brown’s Big 12 West Virginia Mountaineers. “I went $25,000 into debt to coach. I made $7,500 a year at Troy to be a GA with no housing, no meals. You come off the huge high as a 23-year-old D1 quarterback coach at Jacksonville State and the week after they fired you they give you your conference championship rings from the spring (2021 COVID season) before.
“But my approach has been if you work really hard around really good people, and you do everything you can do and learn to make it to where there’s no job you can’t do, and learn and listen, you have a chance.”
Jason Phillips remembers Allen leaving very little to chance. Then Allen’s position coach and offensive coordinator at tiny Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, Phillips not quite a decade later remembers this scrawny, 170-pounder refusing to give up; a guy hearing the word “no” for the first time in his life, every time.
“Tyler was one of those players who came in and you knew immediately, ‘This guy is going to be a coach one day,’” Phillips, now offensive coordinator at Norfolk State, tells FootballScoop from the NCAA-NFL Coaches Academy. “He was with us there at Gulf the same time as A.J. Erdley, who’s now an offensive analyst at Georgia Tech.
“We had a rare quarterback room for a JuCo with that level of football intelligence. Where Tyler is, he’s gotten there with hard work, and A.J. is going there, too. Hopefully they’ll remember their old junior college coach.”
Allen remembers perhaps the most miserable two-and-a-half months of his life, those agonizing 70 to 80 days following the staff change at Jacksonville State when there was no coaching.
Along the climb, there’s an offer to be a high school offensive coordinator. A G.A. position at Rice pulls him to Texas.
After initially calling Allen and bringing him to West Virginia for the first time, shortly after Brown departs Troy to take over the Mountaineers on the heels of Dana Holgorsen’s departure to Houston, Brown calls to bring him back from Rice in a quality control position assisting the offense.
Two years later, Brown is turning over the quarterbacks room to Allen following Sean Reagan’s return to Troy to serve as offensive coordinator for first-year head coach Gerad Parker.
Now, Allen figures he knows what to expect from detractors.
“You have to set the standard from Day 1,” he says. “The whole deal, what I think is the best thing about people saying, ‘Oh, he’s 27, he’s too young.’ One of the things I’ve taken advantage of is being young. I can relate to guys and think maybe I can get to them in ways some other people can’t. I am within 10 years of these guys, and I’m going to tell you how I’m going to develop you and the why to it all.
“Even when I was at LSU, Danny Etling was the quarterback and older than me, but my whole thing from the beginning was he wanted to be good, so how can I help make him better and how can I help these guys crave the things I know in coaching so that they want to come learn from me.”
Fertitta’s lasting belief in Allen derives fuel from all the memories.
That winless junior year of high school? Allen & Co. deliver an unbeaten regular season the next fall, Fertitta wants you to know.
The closest game in-season comes against Poplarville High School (Mississippi), and Fertitta, Allen and the Rock-a-Chaws win by a touchdown.
Late in the game, punting deep in his own territory, Allen unilaterally calls a fake-punt pass on a go-route. The logic remains unassailable to this day.
“Coach, they had a 5-8 corner on our gunner and he’s 6-4,” Fertitta remembers Allen explaining. “I wasn’t going to let them get away with that.”
No, that would have been the easy path. To that, Allen doesn’t relate.