There was a bit of a stir in Bills training camp over the weekend when quarterback Josh Allen got into a mini-scuffle with defensive lineman Jordan Phillips.
Allen was shown in video footage from Saturday shoving Phillips a bit after a play where he may have gotten too close to the signal-caller. Allen hadn’t spoken to the media since then, so when he was asked about it on Thursday, he coyly said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But then he provided a longer explanation.
“Tempers fly, it was the first day of pads. Camp’s long. I was probably in the wrong there,” Allen said. “But, again, just trying to get some guys juiced up ready to go. It’s football. Yeah, so that’s all it was. It was nothing. I got him a box of Pro V1 [golf balls] for pushing him, I felt bad. But it’s all in love. We’re just trying to push each other, trying to be great.”
Allen said there are other ways to bring up the intensity when he needs to. But he also thinks that given what Buffalo wants to accomplish in 2022, things getting chippy in practice isn’t always bad.
“Sometimes it’s necessary,” Allen said. “Good teams sometimes fight. Guys want it so bad, guys are very competitive, guys push each other. So you saw a little tempers flare again today, and again, that’s all because we want to win. We want to work really hard. We want to beat the guys across from us and it doesn’t matter who it is. But it’s good to see the intensity right now coming out from both sides of the football and the whole team because we just want to win football games.”
Allen noted head coach Sean McDermott has said he’d rather have to tell the team to tone it down than to pick it up.
“Things get chippy when guys are working hard and trying to beat the other guy across from them,” Allen said. “I think that’s kind of just the spot where we’re at. Guys want to win. Guys want to beat each other. We’ve got a lot of talkers on this team, too. So it’s been a fun camp, it really has been. And I appreciate the intensity from both sides of the ball.”