PITTSBURGH — The coaches were huddled around one of the tables at Johnny J’s in Medina, Ohio, a pub where a Cleveland Browns flag dangles above the bar.

They were there, the seven of them, to cheer on the Pittsburgh Steelers in their first preseason game on Aug. 13 — particularly Drew Allar, whom they coached years ago just a mile and a half away at Medina High School. It was there Allar transformed from a gangly freshman with a whip of a right arm into one of the nation’s prized recruits.

The Steelers’ rookie quarterback checked in for his first taste of pro action late in the third quarter. He connected with fellow rookie Kaden Wetjen on his first throw, a slant that resulted in a 74-yard gain. A few plays later, Allar plunged into the end zone from three yards out.

“We’re screaming and yelling, and all the people in there were looking at us like, ‘What are we going crazy for?’” said Bill Turner, Medina’s offensive line coach who arrived before Allar’s sophomore season in 2019. “Then they realized who was playing quarterback.”

The 22-year-old threw for 153 yards against the Green Bay Packers that night, completing 10 of his 13 passes and totaling three touchdowns.

Allar only really started playing quarterback as a sophomore in high school. His raw talent and physical traits have always been tantalizing. Now, as he fulfills his NFL aspirations with the Steelers, he has a chance to learn from the four-time MVP whom he admired and aimed to replicate as a teenager.

Regardless of the stakes and the competition in the second half of that preseason game against the Packers, Turner and the other coaches agreed on something as they marveled watching the 2021 Ohio Mr. Football on the television.

They’d seen that same decisiveness, that command, those throws on time and on target before.

Turner said what they were all thinking.

“It looks like he’s playing at Medina right now.”

Changing mechanics?

“There’s always that narrative …” Allar told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after a recent practice.

As he paused before finishing his sentence, you could sense a twinge of irritation. Rosy-cheeked and wearing a black Steelers headband under his floppy curls, Allar chuckled and continued.

“There’s always that narrative,” he said, “that they uninstalled a lot of things.”

He’s been asked plenty since OTAs, through training camp and into the preseason about his mechanics and footwork — both widely marked as inconsistent by draftniks following Allar’s career at Penn State.

This winter, he spent time in Southern California with former NFL quarterback John Beck and a training group called 3DQB.

“Definitely footwork, and just fine-tuning a lot of things,” Allar said of the program, which also included visits with an orthopedic specialist for his left ankle, which required season-ending surgery in mid-October.

So, the narrative.

Steelers coach Mike McCarthy — who has long been lauded for his ability to develop quarterbacks — previously mentioned “teaching [Allar] different than the way he’s played before” regarding playing under center more often.

Still, Allar and those around him reject the notion that the fundamentals and mechanics he worked on under former coach James Franklin at Penn State are being entirely scrapped and rebuilt in the pros.

“That can’t be further from the truth,” said Brad Maendler, Allar’s quarterback trainer since 2019.

“It’s more like we uploaded more things,” Allar said. “Coach McCarthy’s teaching is a little different than what I had at Penn State. That doesn’t make what I learned at Penn State bad or anything. It’s just different.”

Allar wasn’t one of those lab-made quarterbacks, molded since pee-wee with rigorous, specialized training and rigid dieting.

He played basketball and baseball until his sophomore year of high school. As for football, he was primarily a linebacker and tight end through middle school before eventually sharing time at quarterback on the freshman team in ninth grade.

Entering his sophomore year, he had sprouted to 6 feet 2 and about 200 pounds. He started taking snaps every third series on the varsity squad.

The starter in front of him was good. The Medina Battling Bees were 4-2 by October 2019, and the first-stringer had thrown for some 1,800 yards. That was when head coach Larry Laird sat with Allar in a film session, called attention to an outstanding throw” of his on the screen and pressed pause.

He looked Allar in the eyes.

“When are you gonna decide that you’re gonna be the f— man?” Laird barked. “We’re waiting for you to take this job.”

Medina employs a five-wide, up-tempo offense that relies on its signal caller to be a general, someone who can make adjustments at the line and confidently spread the ball around. Most games, the quarterback throws somewhere between 35-50 passes. Once as a junior, Allar threw the ball 73 times in one game.

“You can’t be a wallflower and play quarterback in our system,” Laird said. “You just can’t.”

Allar was, and still is, reserved — but he had to be the guy.

And almost instantaneously, in matters of leadership and ability, he was.

Rising to stardom

A few months into 2020, confined by the pandemic after his sophomore season, Allar was spending time in front of a mirror in his family’s house, gripping a white towel in his right hand and throwing it like a football to work on his rotation.

By now, he was serious about the quarterbacking business.

“That’s when it really started clicking for me,” Allar said.

He’d gotten in touch with Maendler in December 2019 to work on his mechanics. At the time, Allar brought his arm up over his head and threw with a long, elongated release.

Maendler installed a regimen aimed at changing that arm path to flatten the release, while also working on rotating his torso to generate “easy” power.

Any guesses on which QB Maendler would use as an example?

“I used a lot of Aaron Rodgers videos to explain what we were trying to accomplish,” said Maendler, who had a chance to visit Steelers training camp in Latrobe. “I’m watching Drew and Aaron Rodgers warm up together, talking to each other, and I was just getting goosebumps because of the amount of time that we used to talk about Aaron.”

Something that became part of Allar’s game is Rodgers’ “foot pop” — when he hops ever so slightly off the ground to build more rotational force, particularly for off-platform throws.

As Allar rapidly progressed as a passer, a transformation of mechanics that Maendler called the most “dramatic” in his two decades of quarterback training, he also put on about 20 pounds of muscle in a three-month span.

“He’s naturally just a big boy. He’s a specimen. He walked into the gym and it was like, ‘Woah, OK.’ He’s different, for sure,” said Brian Alberty, who trained Allar at the Functions of Life facility a little outside Medina. “He came in and put the time in and worked his ass off to be who he is.”

Allar helped lead No. 8 seed Medina to two considerable upset wins in the regional playoffs.

Pitt was the first power-conference program to extend Allar an offer following the season, and coach Pat Narduzzi delivered the message in person.

And by the time he was a senior — leading the Bees to a 13-1 record, ranking as the top QB in the nation and throwing for 4,444 yards and 48 touchdowns — the buzz was wild.

He was already committed to Franklin and Penn State. After games that season, Laird would set a time limit of 20 minutes for Allar to sign autographs and pose for pictures with fans before herding him away toward the team bus.

“It’s something you have to get used to, for sure, because it was just different,” Allar said. “Obviously, very blessed and fortunate to have that, but it can be overwhelming at times. Honestly, probably since my senior year of high school, there haven’t been many places where I could go and not be recognized, which is good and bad.

“For me, I’m definitely more introverted — especially out in public. I don’t like being in large crowds that often with people I don’t really know. But with that, it taught me at a young age to really keep the main thing the main thing.”

‘Student of the game’

After Allar slipped to the third round of April’s draft, the fourth quarterback selected at No. 76, Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt opined that, “I think he could be a better pro than he was a college quarterback.”

Allar sure has tools.

He measured 6 feet 5 and 228 pounds at the NFL combine. Maendler said he scored elite (above the 80th percentile) on the S2 Cognition test, a 45-minute exam that gauges, among various categories, processing speed and memory.

His high school head coach calls him a “thoroughbred” with a “howitzer” of a right arm.

Still, while all of that was on display with the Nittany Lions, his four years in State College culminated with a 1-6 record against top-10 opponents and an injury that truncated an already sour senior season.

Those days are behind him now.

His second NFL appearance didn’t feature the same magic as the first, as he completed 11 of his 23 passes for 110 yards while playing the second half against the New York Jets on Friday.

He flashed deftness off-script after maneuvering out of the pocket, rolling to his left and lofting a 38-yard completion to the sidelines — a highlight in a performance that otherwise featured some drops from receivers, plenty of pressures and, in Allar’s assessment, a couple of missed opportunities.

Riding the waves of his first preseason, Allar is chiefly concerned with soaking up information from McCarthy and the other quarterbacks in the room.

The relationship with Rodgers started on a … peculiar note.

“His first meeting and he’s got Aaron Rodgers asking him questions,” McCarthy said this past week. “I thought he was gonna [expletive] himself.”

Said Allar: “I think his first question was, ‘What do I call my haircut?’ I think it just caught me off guard more than anything.”

More importantly, from the salt-and-pepper-bearded QB two decades his senior, Allar is trying to learn all the tricks of the trade. Manipulating defenders with his eyes. Subtle mechanical changes. Even the simple act of watching film on the NFL’s tablets, which only show pictures instead of the full video like in college.

The Post-Gazette reported Friday that Allar and 2025 sixth-round pick Will Howard are locked into spots on the 53-man roster. It’s not exactly a surprise, with the Steelers preparing for life after Rodgers, who plans to retire at season’s end.

Barring dramatic circumstances, Allar will spend his rookie year, in the words of offensive coordinator Brian Angelichio, being a “sponge.”

He, of course, has aspirations of being the guy in the future, just like the one he became at Medina. But for now, he’s jotting down notes and asking questions of coaches and fellow QBs who boast a collective wealth of experience.

Not long ago, Allar’s old Medina coach asked what it was like being with Rodgers.

Allar told him he’s “like a walking encyclopedia of football.”

“And Drew,” Laird said, “is a student of the game.”

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