Who is going to start for the Atlanta Falcons at the quarterback position against the Pittsburgh Steelers? We still don't know, and with the Raiders making Kirk Cousins their official Week 1 starter, the Falcons are the last team still without a named Week 1 starter.
We will know soon, though. In remarks to the media on Wednesday, Falcons general manager Ian Cunningham said the Falcons want to see more from all four quarterbacks, but particularly Michael Penix Jr. as he is finally cleared and able to practice fully. The Falcons and Penix decided he wasn't ready to go for the preseason finale, but the hope is that he can show he's ready to go for the regular season.
Penix is competing with Tua Tagovailoa, with Cooper Rush and Jack Strand there as veteran insurance and a developmental option, respectively. The best outcome for the Falcons is Penix taking the job and never looking back, playing well enough to cement himself as the long-term starter for this team and helping to lift this Falcons offense to new heights. Is it the most realistic outcome, though? I'm not so sure.
I continue to believe that Tua will be your Week 1 starter, and reporting from NFL insider Cameron Wolfe suggests that Tua "helped himself" over the past two weeks, that Penix will start eventually, and the team's need to name a Week 1 starter will not translate to the team rushing Penix to be ready if he's not. The picture painted by that report, by Penix's timeline to this point, and the fact that he wasn't able to get into the final preseason game suggest heavily that Penix would need to make significant strides and impress to be out there against Pittsburgh. That's hardly an impossibility—Penix has real talent and has done a great job rehabbing to this point—but the breadth of everything we've seen and heard this summer suggests it's still less likely than a healthy Tua simply beginning the year as a starter.
I would draw your attention to Wolfe's "eventually" here, though. I firmly believe Tua has to be lights out to hold Penix off for any longer than the first month of the season, both because Tua is here for a single season and because Penix offers upside Tua simply doesn't. Penix also has a fifth-year option that the Falcons need to pick up in April, as the AJC's Daniel Flick wrote , and it would be very helpful for the new regime to get an extended look at him to figure out if they're going to pick that option up.
Cunningham also explained why the Falcons kept four quarterbacks, as AtlantaFalcons.com reporter Will McFadden relayed :
"To see Coop and Jack continuously to get better throughout, while Tua and Mike were getting healthy. Coming in with that, thinking, alright, there's some injury risk with those guys, trying to protect against that," Cunningham said. "There's a little bit of an insurance policy, but there's also these guys who have been productive during the preseason.
"And so, if you let a guy like Cooper go, there's a potential that he may be able to get an opportunity to go to another team. If you let a guy like Jack Strand go, he's subject to waivers. And the way he played. We talk about all the time draft, develop, retain—in his case, he was undrafted, but to develop. There's a chance that somebody could have claimed him. I think it's about living in the now but also living in the future with Jack. So that kind of went into the four-quarterback thought process."
The long and short of it is that for at least the early portion of the season, it seems likely the Falcons will carry four quarterbacks, and that Tua will be in the driver's seat Week 1 barring a terrific couple of weeks of practice from Penix. I'm still hopeful it will be Penix against Pittsburgh, but I'm not holding my breath.
