Tyler Allen can’t help but think how different his coaching path could have been.
Allen, a former junior college quarterback, injured both his elbow and his shoulder which forced him to think about his future options.
There were possibilities for him on the field if he could return healthy but there was always the draw of coaching in the back of his mind.
“What do I really want to do? Am I going to play in the NFL at 170-pounds?” he asked himself.
And instead of keeping his playing career alive, Allen elected to bypass surgery and jump headfirst into the coaching profession and leave his playing career in the rearview mirror. He had always enjoyed coaching even in high school, so why not get a jumpstart on his long-term career?
A native of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, near the state line of Louisiana, Allen grew up around an hour and 45 minutes from LSU and his family even had season tickets to watch the Tigers.
So it makes sense that his first opportunity would come with the Tigers. Allen interviewed with then-LSU offensive coordinator Cam Cameron for an undergraduate offensive assistant position. He essentially served as a quarterback graduate assistant but was still an undergraduate student.
“So that really jump started my career,” he said.
Eventually, Matt Canada moved into the offensive coordinator role at LSU and the two developed a very strong professional connection. In 2017 the Tigers lost to Troy and a young upstart head coach Neal Brown which eventually cost Canada his job there in December.
And when that occurred that also meant Allen was out, too.
“I was working for free and Ed Orgeron pretty much fired me. I got fired before I ever got paid a dime,” Allen said.
Allen then called Canada to ask if he would put in a good word if any opportunity became available. At the coaches' convention, Allen received word that there was a graduate assistant position coming open at Troy, the same program that had previously beaten his former team.
Canada called Brown on Allen’s behalf and after an interview he was hired. But just around a month later Canada was hired as the offensive coordinator at Maryland and offered Allen the chance to work with him once again.
It would have doubled his salary and given him Power Five experience, but the young coach felt that networking with other coaches would be important in his career.
So he remained with the Trojans.
“I was there for 11 months before we came up here,” he said.
Allen then moved to Jacksonville State as the quarterbacks coach and then a stop at Rice before returning to Morgantown as an analyst in 2022. That was until he got the promotion to be the full-time quarterbacks coach for the Mountaineers when Sean Reagan left for the coordinator job at Troy.
It’s been a long winding road for Allen but it’s one that could have been completely different had he not followed the unconventional path that he did.
“If I didn’t do that I wouldn’t be here today,” he said.
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