When I was writing my most recent post about the blindside and how this impacts the quarterback, the article was focused on the quarterback being right-handed. It got me wondering about left-handed quarterbacks, how many are there, do plays change, and more importantly does it make any difference?
As we get closer to the 2026 season start, the two most talked-about left-handed quarterbacks in the NFL play for the same team. Atlanta signed Tua Tagovailoa in March to compete with Michael Penix Jr., and in doing so became only the third team in league history to carry two left-handers at once. The others were the 1991 Cincinnati Bengals and the 1997 Jacksonville Jaguars.
That is how rare a lefty is. Two on one roster is a talking point.
Just how rare is a left-handed QB
About one in ten people are left-handers. In the NFL it is closer to none.
In 2020, the year Tua Tagovailoa came into the league, not one of the 107 quarterbacks signed to NFL rosters threw with his left hand. Across the league’s whole history only around 30 have ever played the position. ESPN puts the count at 33 since 1950. The last one to start a game before Tua was Kellen Moore, back in 2016. That is a decade ago!
Why the NFL has so few left-handed QBs
The scarcity is not an accident. The game is built around right-handers, and left-handers reach the top of it rarely.
The former quarterback David Carr described coming into an offense as a lefty as “like handing them a pair of right-handed scissors.” When plays are drawn up for a right-handed thrower, a left-hander arrives to find the whole design mirrored.
It shows up in the draft too. When Atlanta took Michael Penix Jr. eighth overall in 2024, he broke a long drought. The last left-hander drafted in the top ten before him was Matt Leinart, in 2006.
Do left-handed QBs actually have an edge?
This is the myth worth checking, because you will hear it often. The theory is that a left-hander is harder to face.
There is a grain of truth in it. A left-hander’s ball spins the opposite way to the one defenders and receivers see all week, and some say that makes the deep ball harder to judge and harder to catch.
But it is not really an advantage. That same reversed spin troubles the left-hander’s own receivers just as much, and there is no scientific case I could find that left-handers perform better as a group. The difference is real. The edge is mostly folklore.
The one difference that is concrete: the blindside flips
There is a single, clean way a left-hander changes a team, and it is the one we met last time.
A right-handed quarterback cannot see the left side as he throws, so the left tackle guards it. Flip the thrower and you flip the danger. A left-hander’s back is turned to the right, so his blindside is on the right, and the right tackle takes on the job the left tackle usually owns.
I explained the whole idea in what the blindside is.
The greatest left-handed quarterback there has been
If you need proof a left-hander can be the best in the league, then look no further than Steve Young.
Young was the first left-handed quarterback in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Ken Stabler joined him in Canton in 2016. Young was the league’s Most Valuable Player twice, won the Super Bowl and its MVP award, and took a record six passing titles. By the time he retired he had the highest career passer rating in NFL history.
Passer rating is the standard score for a quarterback’s passing, and I unpack how it works here.
One per era: the lefties worth knowing
The NFL has had a defining left-hander in most eras, even when it never had many at once.
- Ken Stabler, “The Snake”, the Raiders’ great of the 1970s.
- Boomer Esiason, the Bengals’ MVP of the 1980s.
- Steve Young, the Hall of Famer, through the 1990s.
- Michael Vick, the most electric runner the position had seen, in the 2000s.
- Mark Brunell, Tim Tebow and Kellen Moore among the rest.
- And now Tua Tagovailoa and Michael Penix Jr., both in Atlanta.
Roughly one memorable left-hander a generation, rarely two.
The left-hander who was born right-handed
Here is the odd part about the most famous left-hander in the game today. Tua Tagovailoa is naturally right-handed. He writes, eats and golfs with his right hand.
He throws left-handed because his left-handed father put the ball in his left hand as a toddler, so his dad would not be the family’s only left-hander. It stuck.
Why they stay rare
Left-handers will stay rare for as long as the game is drawn for the other hand.
What Atlanta has done is put two of them in one room and dare the league to work them out. Neither Tua nor Penix is Steve Young, at least not yet. But for a position that usually allows the league one memorable left-hander at a time, having two worth arguing about is its own small piece of history.
Do left-handed quarterbacks have an advantage?
No scientific case I could find says left-handers perform better. A left-hander’s ball spins the opposite way, which some receivers and defenders find harder to read, but that also troubles his own receivers, and NFL playbooks and blind-side protection are built for right-handers. The clearest real effect of a lefty is that the right tackle, not the left, protects his blindside.