NFL set to start second straight year with no left-handed quarterbacks
At the three youth football camps Michael Vick has attended this year, he’s seen hundreds of kids. Of all the young quarterbacks he’s come across, maybe three were left-handed.
Vick is one of the most productive left-handed quarterbacks in NFL history, but like most lefty passers, Vick doesn’t like being viewed as different; he simply wants to be judged by gaining yards and scoring points. Yet he understands he might only feel this way because, unlike other lefties, his rare combination of foot speed and arm strength allowed him to transcend handedness.
“It’s not the same way for everyone else,” Vick said. “If you’re not a prototypical quarterback who can do some exceptional things, and you’re left-handed, then you’re probably going to get overlooked.”
Left-handers make up roughly 12 per cent of the United States population, and the NFL has had a defining lefty quarterback in each modern era. Ken Stabler, Boomer Esiason, Steve Young, Vick. Almost every year, left-handers have contributed roughly five to 10 per cent of the league’s passing yards. Yet, after Kellen Moore retired to coach for the Dallas Cowboys following the 2017 season, the percentage of left-handed quarterbacks dropped to zero. None of the roughly 90 signal-callers to crack an NFL active roster last season were left-handed, and this season looks like it’ll be the same.
“We’re an extinct species,” said Matt Leinart, a former lefty QB.
So where have all the left-handed quarterbacks gone? The most popular theory is that baseball steals away strong-armed lefties to pitch, but there are other factors at work. While handedness might not matter to the quarterbacks themselves, it does to many others.
Front offices hesitate to accommodate them by changing schematics unless they’re special. Receivers must adjust, too.
Youth coaches specialized in training quarterbacks struggle to adapt.
The implicit bias against lefthanders shrinks the margins, leaves no room for the average left-handed quarterback and stretches as far back as the origin of the word “left” itself: Old English’s “lyft,” meaning “weak, useless.”
In the last half-century or so, the once-pervasive left-handed stigma has largely dissipated from Western society.
Four of the last eight U.S. presidents were left-handed.
There are examples of elite athletes, like tennis star Rafael Nadal and baseball hitting savant Ichiro Suzuki, who were pushed by relatives to play left-handed to gain a competitive advantage. But at the most important position in America’s favorite game, lefthanders become liabilities.
The search to understand why left-handed quarterbacks have disappeared delves into the brain differences between the left and right hand, and reveals the position on the football field at which handedness might matter most and it’s not quarterback.
For Leinart, football was a happy accident. Before he won the Heisman Trophy at Southern California and became a firstround pick of the Arizona Cardinals, he focused on baseball. The 36-year old now maintains that he would have “100 per cent” played baseball were it not for a major shoulder injury before his sophomore year of high school. It caused him too much pain to pitch, but for whatever reason, he could still throw a football.
“Weird,” Leinart says now. Had Leinart chosen baseball over football, he would hardly have been the first hard-throwing lefty to do so.
Coaches from Little League to Major League Baseball prize southpaws because an opponent’s unfamiliarity against them offers a tactical advantage. Last season, of the 795 pitchers to appear in an MLB game, 26 per cent were lefthanded – more than double the population.
But while lefty arms are rewarded in baseball, football treats them like a burden.
The tail which once gave Leinart’s fastball nasty bite made his passes more difficult to catch, as left-handed throws look and spin differently out of the hand. (Kicks, too: for years, one of football’s most well-respected tacticians, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, has employed a leftfooted punter to trouble unfamiliar opponents.)
Brian Xanders, a senior personnel executive with the Los Angeles Rams, became a left-handed quarterback expert with the Atlanta Falcons during Vick’s tenure, and later drafted southpaw Tim Tebow as the Denver Broncos’ general manager.
In both situations, Xanders understood the implications: teams must prioritize right tackles because they, rather than the left tackle, protect a lefty’s “blind side.” Coaches must alter formations and flip plays, because lefties drop back and run play-action fakes differently.
Leinart was deemed to be worth the extra effort. The same was true for Vick and Tebow. Alabama’s lefty-throwing quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, considered a likely top pick in the 2020 draft, also fits the mold.
The NFL’s drought of left-handed quarterbacks could end as early as next season, when Tagovailoa becomes eligible to enter the draft.