'Ugh,' a lefty QB: How the Falcons are defying NFL history

FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. -- Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator Tommy Rees had never coached a left-handed quarterback before this season, and suddenly he had two in Michael Penix Jr. and Tua Tagovailoa.

He also had a problem.

"Do we flip the drawings [of plays] so they don't look right-handed all the time, and leave them as lefty?" Rees asked. "Poor Mike Bearden, our [coaching fellow], he starts flipping all these things [to be] left-handed-friendly."

But the Falcons had a bigger problem. They couldn't leave the diagrams lefty-friendly because neither Penix nor Tagovailoa was healthy heading into the regular season. Righty Cooper Rush started the first two games, both losses.

The Falcons finally get one of their lefties back this week, and the stakes are high. Penix will start in primetime Thursday on the road against the Green Bay Packers (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video).

Only 33 left-handed quarterbacks have made an NFL appearance, and just two -- Steve Young and Ken Stabler -- are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. What makes the left-handed QB unique isn't just which side he passes from, but how the ball spins and curves. Teams have to draw plays differently and make sure the right tackle -- as opposed to the left for righties -- is ready to protect the blind side.

"If you think about the number of lefties in NFL history, abnormally few," Young told ESPN recently. "Just from a data perspective, it doesn't make sense how few quarterbacks are lefty.

"And one of the main reasons I can say why is because of the coaches. I think they're very right-handed and they don't encourage it. They see a lefty and they're like, 'ugh.' As if it's going to be more work."

Having two left-handed quarterbacks on the roster is rare, and it has demanded extra measures.

The Falcons have done everything they could to make things easier for their top quarterbacks, including QB coach Alex Van Pelt flipping how he teaches footwork and changing receiver routes.

Since 1991, when Elias began tracking such things, only two teams have started more than one left-handed quarterback in a season, per ESPN Research. The Jacksonville Jaguars had Mark Brunell and Steve Matthews in 1997, and the Cincinnati Bengals played Boomer Esiason and Erik Wilhelm in 1991.

Will the Falcons be the third?

"I love that Michael and Tua are together," Young said. "But I think all of us [lefties] feel like there's nothing about me that's different. Throwing the football, dropping back, it doesn't matter.

"It's a thing because coaches, they don't affirm it. If coaches would just say, 'Sweet, I got a lefty,' boom, you get all the benefit and none of the negative."

YOUNG WAS A  freshman at BYU in 1980. Doug Scovil was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach and as Young tells it, he had an aversion to left-handed QBs.

"[Scovil] told me midseason that he hated coaching lefties and that he wasn't going to coach me," Young said. "So, they literally moved me to defense because I was lefty."

Despite the position change, Young continued to throw with the quarterbacks whenever he could. The following season, Scovil left for San Diego State and Ted Tollner became BYU's quarterbacks coach. Tollner saw Young throwing one day and wondered why his position on the roster was different.

"[He] stopped me and said, 'I thought you played quarterback,'" Young said. "And I go, 'I do, but they said I'm lefty, they won't let me play quarterback.' And he's like, 'That's ridiculous.'"

Young said it wasn't until he got to the San Francisco 49ers under head coach Bill Walsh when he felt truly welcomed as a left-handed QB. Walsh, Young said, didn't just tolerate that he was a lefty; Walsh told Young it was an advantage.

Former Falcons great Michael Vick had similar experiences to Young coming up as a left-handed QB, but not to the same extreme.

"Most offensive coordinators are right-handed, so you naturally gear everything up to go right or from a right formation," Vick told ESPN recently. "For a lefty, [some coaches] feel like they got to change everything around and go left.

"But at the end of the day, it really don't matter. I was a left-handed quarterback who liked rolling right and throwing across my body, but you got to express that to your coach."

What Kellen Moore expressed to his quarterbacks coach was almost an apology for being left-handed. Joe Lombardi was used to calling plays for right-handed Drew Brees in New Orleans, so when Lombardi came to Detroit and coached Moore -- a third-team undrafted lefty -- things got awkward.

"For Joe it's just like, 'I've never called it this way.' I said, 'Just call it as you're a righty and I'll flip it. It's my job, it's my fault,'" said Moore, who is in his second year as the Saints' head coach.

Moore had a similar experience when he was playing for the Dallas Cowboys.

"They never ran a play-action -- it's called naked where you keep the ball away from the outside zone," Moore said. "It was always naked right. They've never even called naked left before.

"And so, while I was battling for the QB position, it was still naked right no matter what. They said 'until you win the job, we're never going naked left.'"

There are more significant differences for left-handed quarterbacks than footwork and receiver routes. The spin on a left-hander's pass is different, and it does take some getting used to for receivers.

"Maybe you don't think about it right away, but you just have to think all the time, when it comes from a left-handed quarterback it's going to kind of spin away from you," said Denver Broncos wide receiver Jaylen Waddle, who played with Tagovailoa on the Miami Dolphins. "And then when you [have] a righty, you're going to have that feeling like it's spinning toward you."

When Young played with HOF wideout Jerry Rice, the spin was such a change that Rice had to do something completely outside the box. San Francisco had an equipment manager, Ted Walsh, who was a lefty. Rice would have Walsh (no relation to Bill) throw to him countless times per day. Every practice, every defensive drill. Rice told Young that Walsh must have thrown him 10,000 balls over his first few years with the Niners.

"Ted Walsh said he wore his arm out," Young said. "His arm just collapsed."

JAHAN DOTSON PLAYED with a left-handed quarterback in high school and did not think there would be anything different when he got to the Falcons. But the former Washington Commanders and Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver had a rude awakening during OTAs.

"One day Tua, he threw me a ball, and it was midair, I was like, what the ... ?" Dotson said. "It felt like slow motion. It was just turning the complete opposite way. But yeah, it's something you just got to adjust to."

Now, there are Jugs machines that can be switched to throw balls with the opposite spin, simulating left-handers. Dotson and his Falcons teammates have spent a fair amount of time after practice working with the machine in addition to catching passes from Tagovailoa and Penix.

"It's just reps," Dotson said. "Reps on top of reps on top of reps catching from those guys."

This is Penix's third season with the Falcons, so many of his teammates are used to the spin. Plus, Atlanta star wide receiver Drake London is left-handed, as is All-Pro running back Bijan Robinson. That makes things easier. But for newcomers such as Dotson, Olamide Zaccheaus and Zachariah Branch, it has been an adjustment.

Chicago Bears receiver Rome Odunze played college ball at Washington with Penix, and he said: "It's a little bit different. I like it, honestly because the way the lefty hand spins, the torque of the ball is spinning into my right, dominant hand."

Young encountered another issue as a left-handed quarterback. Either he had to adjust his hands taking snaps from a right-handed center or the center would adjust and snap the ball with the laces down. The latter was an issue at times depending on weather. Young sometimes received the ball with the laces, which were placed downward on the grass, covered in mud and wet.

"That just tells you just the world is right-handed and that just sucked for me," Young said.

That is not an issue for the Falcons, because, in another oddity, their center Ryan Neuzil also happens to be left-handed. One thing several former left-handed quarterbacks also noted is their right tackle, rather than the left tackle, has to cover their blind side. That will be an extra responsibility for Falcons right tackle Jawaan Taylor when Penix starts Thursday.

These are all things the Falcons' staff -- which was overhauled this offseason when head coach Kevin Stefanski and Rees replaced Raheem Morris and OC Zac Robinson -- considered when it built this offense. The Falcons are perhaps the first true left-handed dominant offense in the NFL in 29 years. And Penix and Tagovailoa are not complaining about it.

"With me and Tua, [the coaches are] like, 'All right, we are teaching it this way,'" Penix said. "... So, everything that we're hearing, everything that we're seeing on the board, whenever they're talking to us, you kind of see Coach [Van Pelt] automatically [using] a left hand without even thinking about it just because of that."

Young believes Bill Walsh would have been pleased.

"I think Bill was right," Young said. "I think it's an advantage and I love that he leaned into it.

"Then, to his dying day, he told me that he loved that I was lefty. I love that there's two lefties together."

Sarah Barshop, Courtney Cronin, Jeff Legwold and Katherine Terrell contributed to this report.