Another lefty is joining the Atlanta Falcons’ quarterback room.
Tua Tagovailoa will sign a one-year deal with the Falcons after the Miami Dolphins release him later this week, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter. Tagovailoa will now compete for the starting job with Michael Penix Jr., the team’s incumbent starter, who is recovering from a partially torn ACL that required season-ending surgery last year.
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Specifics of Tagovailoa’s one-year deal with the Falcons are not yet known. Miami still owes Tagovailoa $54 million in guaranteed money this upcoming season.
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Although Atlanta drafted Penix No. 8 overall out of Washington just two years ago, it’s leadership has since changed. The Falcons fired general manager Terry Fontenot and head coach Raheem Morris back in January. Plus, the 25-year-old Penix is working his way back from his fifth season-ending injury in the span of eight seasons between his college and NFL careers.
Now Matt Ryan is running the Falcons as their president of football. He brought aboard former Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski to replace Morris and Ian Cunningham to fill the GM vacancy.
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After the Browns traded Joe Flacco early last season, Stefanski notably went with then-rookie Dillon Gabriel as the team’s starting quarterback. Gabriel, also a lefty who’s shorter than the prototypical NFL signal-caller but known for his pinpoint accuracy like Tagovailoa, started six straight games before suffering a concussion and then taking a backseat to Shedeur Sanders.
As for the 28-year-old Tagovailoa, he scattered 15 picks across 14 starts this past season. When he lost his job to seventh-round rookie Quinn Ewers, he was leading the NFL in interceptions. Tagovailoa went four straight outings from Weeks 10-13 without registering more than 173 passing yards in a game.
In Weeks 6 and 7, he tossed three interceptions in back-to-back games.
After the first of those two performances, Tagovailoa called out teammates for showing up late and not showing up at all to players-only meetings during their 1-5 start to the season. While he soon apologized for his postgame comments, they were a stain on an increasingly head-scratching 2025 résumé that warranted skepticism about his viability as a long-term starting quarterback in the league.
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Tagovailoa’s concussion history is concerning as well.
Following a concussion that the one-time Alabama national champion sustained during a “Thursday Night Football” defeat to the Buffalo Bills in Week 2 of the 2024 season, he consulted neurologists about the risks of continuing his football career.
He ultimately decided to carry on, just as he did in the wake of a 2022 campaign that saw him land in the league’s concussion protocol twice. Back then, he was also knocked out with a scary head injury on “Thursday Night Football,” that time against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Tagovailoa has played a full slate of regular-season games just once in his six-season career. That was in 2023 when he threw for a league-high 4,624 yards and made his lone Pro Bowl. The season prior, he led the NFL in passer rating (105.5) and touchdown percentage (6.3%), albeit in only 13 games because of the aforementioned injuries.
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And then in 2024, he was first among all qualifying quarterbacks with a 72.9% completion percentage, yet he played in just 11 games that season.
The talent that made Tagovailoa a top-five pick event showed up from time to time last season, like when he threw for 315 yards against the New England Patriots while completing 81.3% of his passes in Week 2 and when he tossed four touchdowns and no picks in a road win over the Falcons in Week 8.
Stefanski and his staff will try to harness that talent, regardless where Tagovailoa ends up on the depth chart in Atlanta.
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