Josh Allen

Chase Johnson’s narration is a masterclass in making a biography feel like a huddle call: urgent when it counts, measured when it should be. His voice crackles with the kind of enthusiasm you’d expect from a die-hard Bills fan, which is either a bonus or a liability depending on your loyalty—but it works here because Allen’s story isn’t about hype. It’s about a kid from Firestone, Colorado, throwing passes with a football he’d salvaged from a Walmart parking lot, then spending his college years splitting time behind Blake Bortles at Wyoming. Johnson sells the small moments just as well as the touchdowns: the way Allen’s mom drove him to 5 AM workouts, or how he ate grilled cheese sandwiches in the locker room after being drafted 7th overall. My only gripe? The production occasionally chops off reverb tails too abruptly, leaving Johnson’s reads feeling boxed in during climactic plays. And while the book wisely skips the deep stats that weigh down most sports bios, it sometimes mistakes ‘brevity’ for ‘vagueness’—like when it glosses over Allen’s rocky NFL combine without context. Still, these are minor quibbles. The audiobook’s real win is how it frames failure as part of the process. There’s a scene where Allen’s high school coach benches him mid-game, and instead of dramatizing it, the book lets the silence linger. That’s the kind of nuance that sticks with listeners long after the final whistle.