Atlanta spent the offseason building a bridge at quarterback. Two days before the bridge was supposed to carry anything, it started creaking.
Tua Tagovailoa was limited at Thursday’s Falcons practice with an oblique injury, and the way it happened is not the kind of thing that calms anyone down. During the media portion of practice he threw a pass, immediately grabbed at his back, and sat down on the grass. He got up quickly and jogged off, which is the only encouraging detail in the whole sequence.
Ian Rapoport reported Tagovailoa is day to day and his status for the opener against the Steelers is to be determined. That is NFL-speak for nobody knows, including the people who get paid to know.
Here is the part that should worry Falcons fans more than the injury itself. Cooper Rush told reporters he took every rep with the first string on Thursday. Teams do not hand a 32-year-old backup all the starter work out of politeness. They do it when they are building a real contingency.
And remember why Rush is in Atlanta at all. Tagovailoa had a separate back injury at the start of training camp, which is exactly when the Falcons went out and added a veteran they could trust to not lose games by himself. That signing now looks less like depth and more like foresight.
Michael Penix Jr. was supposed to be the answer to all of this. He needs more time to recover from last season’s knee injury, so the job fell to Tagovailoa, and now the job may fall to Rush. Kevin Stefanski is about to start his first season as Atlanta’s head coach with a quarterback room held together by hope.
Stefanski is the reason I am not fully panicking. He has built functional offenses around quarterbacks nobody believed in, and Rush has played meaningful September football before. Atlanta’s plan against Pittsburgh was probably never going to be Tagovailoa throwing 40 times anyway.
But obliques are miserable injuries for throwers specifically. Every rotational motion runs through that muscle. You can play through a sore shoulder by changing your arm slot. You cannot play through an oblique strain by deciding not to rotate your torso.
The smart move for Atlanta is to sit him, and I think they should even if he clears Sunday morning. Tagovailoa’s value to this team is as a competent, accurate, 17-game stabilizer while Penix heals. Rushing him back for a road test against an Aaron Rodgers team, in a game Atlanta is not favored to win, risks turning a one-week problem into a six-week one.
There is a version of this where Tagovailoa warms up, feels fine, and throws for 250 yards. There is another version where he aggravates it on the fifth drive and Atlanta is down to Rush anyway, except now Tagovailoa is out until October.
Atlanta already lost its preferred starter to a knee. Losing the backup plan to an oblique in Week 1 would be the kind of start that defines a season before it begins. Play the long game. Hand Rush the keys, keep it conservative, and get Tagovailoa back when he can actually turn on the ball.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.