Why aren’t there any left-handed QBs in NFL?
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 lefthanded, then you’re probably going to get overlooked.”
Left-handers make up roughly 12 percent 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, lefthanders have contributed roughly 5 percent to 10 percent of the league’s passing yards. Yet, after Kellen Moore retired to coach for the Dallas Cowboys following the 2017 season, the percentage of lefthanded 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 left-handers 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 first-round pick of the Arizona Cardinals, he focused on baseball. The 36-year old now maintains that he would have “100 percent” 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 percent were left-handed — more than double the population.
The left-handed advantage is a concept that traces back centuries to when the Kerr clan of Scotland supposedly taught their soldiers to swordfight left-handed, and it’s still in play today. Studies show that a lefty’s societal weakness can become a situational strength in an array of arenas, including boxing, cricket, fencing, tennis and wrestling.
Some baseball players, like veteran reliever Tony Sipp, focused on the sport early, understanding that a kid’s infinitesimal odds of becoming a professional athlete grew significantly if he winnowed the competition to lefthanders who pitched. Sipp was never a star, but he turned a consistent ability to get left-handed hitters out into more than $20 million over a decade in MLB.
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 wellrespected tacticians, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, has employed a left-footed punter to trouble unfamiliar opponents.)
Brian Xanders, a senior personnel executive with the Los Angeles Rams, became a lefthanded 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.
“If [two quarterbacks] are totally equal in everything, [teams will sign] the righthander,” Xanders said. “Everyone is more used to it.”
Leinart was deemed to be worth the extra effort. The same was true for Vick and Tebow, who either won or finished as a finalist for the Heisman Trophy. Alabama’s lefty-throwing quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, considered a likely top pick in the 2020 draft, also fits the mold.