Devon Allen’s Balancing Act: ‘Speed & Toughness’

Devon Allen crossed midfield when a funny thing happened to the two-time Olympian. His legs turned to granite.

“Adrenaline’s crazy,” he said. “My legs felt super heavy at the end of that run. I feel like I couldn’t move.”

That run was a 73-yard kickoff return that opened the final preseason game for the Philadelphia Eagles against the Indianapolis Colts on Thursday night at Lincoln Field. It was Allen’s first kickoff return he said in about seven or eight years, and it began auspiciously when he dropped the kick at the goal line before setting sail in his return.

“A little bit of nerves,” he said of the botched catch. “It ended up being OK. I’m not going to hear the end of it from some of my track friends, you know, getting caught.”

Maybe not.

One of his teammates, undrafted free agent Eli Ricks, went stride for stride with Allen and delivered a key block along the way and he was impressed by the return.

“That was my favorite play of the day,” said Ricks, a cornerback by trade. “Even though PBUs are great, that was my favorite play. I heard the crowd screaming louder and I said, 'If they’re screaming louder that means he’s still up,' so just keep blocking my man."

Allen, who believes he is the fastest player in the NFL, also showed gunner skills on the punt return team, flying down the field to make a tackle on one punt and force a fair catch on another.

“Devon is tough,” said head coach Nick Sirianni. “He shows his speed a lot, right? Shoot, when you’re as good at track and field as he is everyone thinks about the speed, but he has toughness, too. That’s why he’s able to make those plays on special teams. …The speed is real and the toughness is real.”

So, does Allen have a real shot to make the roster once the field of 90 has to be trimmed to 53 by Tuesday at 4 p.m.?

“It’s tough,” he said. “I’m trying to do my best in the job description given to me, then when I get the opportunity, and I think (Thursday) obviously helped, but I think my goal is to just continue to get better and I think with more reps and stuff like, that, I think I can do that.”

Allen had a 55-yard touchdown catch last summer in a preseason game against the Cleveland Browns, which may have helped him get to the practice squad. This summer, that could once again be his ticket to trying to resurrect a football career that was put on hold for six years while he pursued track and field, specifically the 110-high hurdles.

A three-time U.S. national champion and two-time Olympian who reached the finals of his event in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and the 2020 Tokyo Games, Allen is trying to balance both sports.

He said Eagles general manager Howie Roseman and Sirianni support his ambition of doing both, and that they will often text him prior to track and field events to wish him luck.

“Obviously, it's not easy to make an NFL team doing football half the time,” said Allen. “And I understand that. So my goal is to kind of continue to grow my football load offseason, during the season, and just keep getting better.

“Athletically, I think I can play in the NFL, just with my skill and attributes, but these guys are beasts in the NFL. They spend their whole life training and working. You watch A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, they're top 100 players in the NFL for a reason. To say I'm there is not, I can't say I'm there, I'm not even close.”

Allen suffered calf injury during a track event earlier in the summer that delayed the start of his return to training camp, but he is back on track (pun intended), and he hopes to continue to remain on the track as he will likely attempt to qualify for the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

Right now, though he is focused on football, whether it’s on the practice squad again, the final roster, or with another team.

“It's a business and we're trying to put the best team on the field at all times and you know your goal is to play well for the Eagles and that's my goal but also put some good film out there for the other 31 teams if I'm not here," he said, "and there's a lot of guys from the Eagles last year that were released and started in the NFL for a lot of teams last year, and that in that kind of bodes to the culture here and how intense we are in terms of training and how good we are as a team.

“We made the Super Bowl. That's why. There's a ton of guys that didn't quite make the team here, including myself. And some of those guys did great on other teams.”

Ed Kracz covers the Philadelphia Eagles for SI's EaglesToday.

Please follow him and our Eagles coverage on Twitter at @kracze.