Josh Allen is not practice Wednesday with the Bills, and the elbow injury he sustained against the Jets has his Week 10 availability in doubt. This matter has certainly overshadowed everything else Bills-related over the past few days, but the MVP candidate may not need to miss any time.

Allen is believed to be dealing with a UCL injury, according to ESPN.com’s Chris Mortensen, who adds potential nerve damage is also an issue here (Twitter link). UCL injuries are commonly associated with Tommy John surgery, a procedure known to shelve pitchers for more than a year. But that is not believed to be in play here.

This is a UCL sprain, Ian Rapoport of NFL.com notes (video link), and not believed to be a major setback. Allen has dealt with this before, and NFL.com’s Mike Garafolo tweets the fifth-year passer is confident he will be available to face the Vikings in Week 10. That said, Rapoport adds this current issue could affect Allen’s ability to grip the football. That certainly throws a wrench into plans on an immediate return, and the Bills are proceeding cautiously to start their practice week.

Allen has not missed a game since his 2018 rookie season, but those four absences were due to a UCL injury. The Bills have Case Keenum in place as their backup, having traded a Day 3 pick to the Browns for the veteran signal-caller. Considering Allen’s history, it would not surprise if the Bills were forced to start Keenum for perhaps multiple games.

When Allen last dealt with this issue, it hovered as a much lower-profile NFL storyline. The former No. 7 overall pick has since vaulted into one of the league’s top players, doing the most to elevate the Bills from a rebuilding team into a Super Bowl frontrunner. A wide talent gap exists between Allen and Keenum, but the 34-year-old backup has played the replacement role to notable acclaim. Keenum led the NFL in quarterback DVOA in 2017, replacing Sam Bradford and piloting a strong Vikings roster to a No. 2 seed and the NFC championship game. The recent Browns backup, who went 2-0 as a Cleveland starter in his two Ohio seasons, likely still represents quality insurance should the Bills shut down Allen for a bit.

This could still obviously impact Buffalo’s pursuit of its first No. 1 seed since 1993. The Chiefs moved into a tie with the Bills in Week 9, though Buffalo holds the tiebreaker here. The Bills face the Browns and Lions in Weeks 11 and 12, with the Detroit game coming on Thanksgiving.

It took a little while, but the Bills have locked up Josh Allen for years to come. On Saturday, the young quarterback agreed to a six-year contract extension worth $258MM with $150MM in overall guarantees. Perhaps more importantly, Allen got $100MM fully guaranteed at signing — the highest in NFL history. 

[RELATED: Bills, Allen Agree To $258MM Deal]

“I felt like at some point soon we were either really going to push to get this done or it was going to be a standstill,” GM Brandon Beane told Matthew Fairburn of The Athletic. “You can hit some points where you both just step away and say, ‘We’re not going to talk about this for a little while.’”

The most recent standstill occurred less than a week ago. On August 1st, it was reported that the Bills and Allen had zero momentum towards a new deal. Then, on August 6, Allen put pen to paper. Under normal circumstances, Beane says, the contract would have been inked much sooner.

“We built a team that was planning on the cap being 215 or 220 (million), but the cap went back to what it was two years ago when (Carson) Wentz and (Jared) Goff were done,” Beane said. “They might have been able to do something in the first year that we couldn’t do just because of where we’re at. If COVID hadn’t happened, I truly believe this would have gotten done before we started training camp. I just think there were some things that were hard for them. They’re a big firm. Anything they do, they’re worried about precedent. And anything we do we’re worried about our precedent. That can get sticky.”

As head coach Sean McDermott puts it, the deal was “a leap of faith” for both parties. Allen will carry $40MM+ hits against the Bills annual cap, but that’s the price they had to pay for one of the game’s most promising young QBs. Besides, he’ll be joined at the top by his counterparts — Baker Mayfield and Lamar Jackson may soon knock Allen off of his highest-paid perch.

The Bills and star QB Josh Allen are talking extension, but as of right now, there is no momentum towards an agreement, as Kim Jones of the NFL Network reports (Twitter link). However, Allen himself is not sweating it, calling his contract situation the “least of my worries.”

That is because Allen knows it’s a question of when, not if, he gets his mega-deal. Jones suggests that, if a new contract is not in place by the middle of August, the two sides could table negotiations until next offseason, but that scenario would hardly threaten Allen’s future in Buffalo. Because the Bills have exercised Allen’s fifth-year option, the big-armed passer is under contract through 2022, and the franchise tag is a theoretical option for 2023 if it comes to that (of course, the Cowboys’ protracted talks with Dak Prescott demonstrated the danger of that approach).

Allen has expressed a willingness to give the Bills a team-friendly structure on his second pro contract, but that doesn’t mean he will be willing to take a discount. He is in line to eclipse Prescott’s four-year, $160MM pact, which includes $126MM in guaranteed money. A deal of that magnitude certainly is a complex undertaking, though the Bills and Allen have plenty of time to continue discussing it.

As our Ben Levine detailed last month, Allen might prefer to get something done sooner rather than later. After all, it’s hard to imagine him improving on his incredible 2020 campaign, and while draftmate Lamar Jackson might drive Allen’s price a little higher if Jackson signs his extension first, it’s unlikely to make too much of an impact. And an earlier report noted that Allen is willing to operate independently of Jackson and Browns’ QB Baker Mayfield, suggesting that Allen is indeed prepared to put pen to paper before his fellow young signal-callers.

On the other hand, we don’t know the type of offer the Bills have on the table at this point — maybe they’re trying to keep the price down by pointing to Allen’s inconsistencies in 2018-19. And if they’re not willing to give up Prescott money just yet, Allen could continue to wait them out.

The three most recent monster quarterback extensions broke down into two categories. Dak Prescott and Deshaun Watson agreed on shorter-term, value-maximizing deals; Patrick Mahomes signed a 10-year extension that reached unprecedented total value but aided the Chiefs in structure. Josh Allen may be willing to take the latter route.

An Allen-Bills deal has hovered on the NFL radar since second-place MVP finisher became extension-eligible in January, and some buzz has emerged indicating Allen might be open to working with the Bills on a friendlier extension structure, Jeremy Fowler of ESPN.com notes (video link). This does not mean a discount, Fowler adds, but a contract structure that would help the Bills more than a traditional quarterback contract would.

Of the three quarterbacks who have landed on the extension radar this offseason — Allen, Lamar Jackson, Baker Mayfield — Allen is coming off the best season and may have the most incentive to sign a deal this year. Allen did not start his career as well as Jackson or Mayfield, but he has steadily improved — leading up to a dominant 2020 showing.

In April, it did not sound like the Bills and their franchise QB were close on a deal. But Sean McDermott expressed confidence recently while praising the Wyoming product’s fit in western New York.

“Josh and I have spoken,” Bills GM Brandon Beane said in April. “We’d love to get Josh extended, but it has to be a number that works for him and us. We’re all on same page. Josh wants to be here. That gives me hope we’ll get something done at some point. Can’t guarantee it’ll be this year.”

Thanks to picking up Allen’s fifth-year option, Buffalo has him signed through 2022. This will allow the Bills to take a slightly firmer stance in negotiations, even as the salary cap is set to rise to nearly $210MM next year. Allen, 25, battled inconsistency in 2018 and ’19 but led the Bills to a 13-3 season and their first AFC championship game in 27 years. The cannon-armed passer agreeing to a Bills-friendly structure would help Beane and McDermott keep the team on this level.

Mahomes’ 10-year, $450MM contract came in the same offseason in which the Chiefs extended Travis Kelce and defensive tackle Chris Jones. The Chiefs have since restructured Mahomes’ deal, dropping his 2021 base salary to $990K, and the through-2031 contract will provide the team more flexibility than the Prescott’s four-year, $160MM extension will give the Cowboys. Allen agreeing to a 10-year extension would be surprising, but he and the Bills finding a structural middle ground would certainly be an interesting development for the quarterback market.