{"id":135,"date":"2022-03-17T08:20:46","date_gmt":"2022-03-17T12:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/?p=135"},"modified":"2022-03-20T20:45:32","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T00:45:32","slug":"masters-of-the-craft-found-in-firebaugh-the-josh-allen-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/masters-of-the-craft-found-in-firebaugh-the-josh-allen-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Masters of the Craft: \u201cFound in Firebaugh – The Josh Allen Story\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Masters of the Craft is a series of stories in which students talk to working professionals about some of their best work, finding out just what went into creating it. This is from Spring 2021)<\/em><\/p>\n

By Kevin Siracuse<\/b><\/p>\n

Have you ever done something where you look back on it and you\u2019re completely happy and would not change a thing? That\u2019s how 13WHAM Sports Anchor Dan Fetes felt after he produced the story of how Josh Allen went from a zero-star recruit to an NFL Pro Bowl quarterback.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first story where I\u2019ve felt good enough to put it up for awards,\u201d Fetes said. \u201cThis is one of the few stories that when I go back and watch it, I think \u2018that\u2019s pretty (expletive) good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story centers around Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen and the path he had to take to get to where he is today.<\/p>\n

Allen is from Firebaugh, a small town in California with two traffic lights. It\u2019s in the central part of the state, about an hour outside of Fresno and two hours from San Jose.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/fb.watch\/bOU2cVgIZY\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Though it may be in the middle of nowhere, that did not stop Reedley Junior College offensive coordinator Ernie Rodriguez from driving an hour to find his guy.<\/p>\n

Allen ended up going to Reedley for one year, but only started six games. He then transferred to Wyoming and quickly became a top draft prospect after only having offers from Wyoming and Eastern Michigan. After getting drafted seventh overall by the Bills in the 2018 draft, the rest is history.<\/p>\n

Fetes said that the idea for this story came towards the end of the 2019 season. He saw that Allen was playing so well and thought it would be interesting to show people a side of him that they have not seen before.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just kind of a story where I was like, \u2018How can I do a story on Josh Allen that already hasn\u2019t been done a lot? We\u2019ve all kind of known who Josh Allen was at Wyoming, but how did he even get to Wyoming? What was he like in high school?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Fetes knew that the story would be something that Bills fans in Western New York, Wyoming, and Firebaugh would want to see.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was something I felt visually would be appealing to viewers,\u201d Fetes said. \u201cThe Buffalo News can go there and say, \u2018Hey, yeah it\u2019s a small town with (two) stop lights,\u2019 but I figured if you could show people, it would be another level.\u201d<\/p>\n

And not to mention, the Bills clinched a playoff berth after defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday Night Football late in December. After the game, Allen ran around the field high-fiving fans with his head down. But for some reason, he happened to look up, only to find Rodriguez in a sea of Bills Mafia.<\/p>\n

Fetes knew that he had <\/i>to make this story.<\/p>\n

He had originally planned to fly out to Firebaugh to get footage and conduct the interviews, but then the pandemic hit, forcing Fetes to do everything from home.<\/p>\n

The Rochester reporter said that he spent hours Googling information, looking people up and searching on social media to try to find contacts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tracked down and got in touch with the athletic director of Firebaugh and from there, it was, \u2018Okay, can you get me in touch with his high school football coach?\u2019 And once I got in touch with him, it was, \u2018Hey, can you get me in touch with his junior college coach?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, Fetes found drone footage of Firebaugh on YouTube and had to track down the guy who took the footage on Facebook to get his permission to use it.<\/p>\n

And last but not least, Fetes had to contact the Bills in order to speak with Allen, as the Buffalo quarterback has his own public relations guy that you need to reach out to if you want to speak with him.<\/p>\n

Fetes said that he wanted to talk to Allen last so that he could speak to him on more of a personal level.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had reached out to his Wyoming offensive coordinator and I had talked to his Wyoming head coach, and they all had great stories. So I talked to other people first; Josh was the last person I talked to which really gave me more things to bring up to Josh. \u2026 It loosened him up. You want Josh to respect you and to (give) good answers, and that was part of what made this story so good was Josh being so candid,\u201d Fetes said.<\/p>\n

After months of research, interviews and editing, Fetes came out with the story in mid-June. It came out at a great time since people were desperate for sports.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, Bills Mafia loved the video, just as Fetes had thought. And who was one of the first ones to like and retweet the video?<\/p>\n

Josh Allen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Masters of the Craft is a series of stories in which students talk to working professionals about some of their best work, finding out just what went into creating it. This is from Spring 2021) By Kevin Siracuse Have you ever done something where you look back on it and you\u2019re completely happy and would … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[23,7,20],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-masters-of-the-craft","tag-buffalo-bills","tag-journalism","tag-sports"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7oNOS-2b","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fredstories.com\/thebest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}