Cooper Rush is starting at quarterback in Week 1, and the least surprising part of that sentence is that a 32-year-old career backup with 16 starts to his name is Atlanta’s answer at Pittsburgh on four days’ notice.
Tua Tagovailoa’s oblique injury is technically what opened the door, but the door was already cracked before that. Tua Tagovailoa beat out Michael Penix Jr. for the Atlanta Falcons’ Week 1 job on Monday, capping the quarterback competition Atlanta spent all camp hyping. By Thursday practice, he was grabbing at his side after a throw, limited on the injury report, and ruled out before he ever took a regular-season snap in the job he’d just won.
That’s one hell of a return on an offseason quarterback battle. Atlanta hyped a two-man race all summer, and the guy taking snaps Sunday is the one who wasn’t racing.
And Penix isn’t walking through that door either. He’s still working back from the torn ACL that ended his November, and he told ESPN he didn’t feel ready for live snaps even after Tua went down. Coach Kevin Stefanski says Penix will play “when he’s ready,” which translates to not this week, and probably not for a while. So the guy who lost the competition isn’t walking into it, and the guy who won it can’t — which leaves Cooper Rush.
To be fair, Rush isn’t chaos incarnate under center. He’s 9-7 as a career starter across 16 starts and 42 games, which is more organized-competence than the horror stories fans of other rebuilding rosters have lived through. Last season in Baltimore didn’t go well: four appearances, zero touchdowns, four picks, benched for Tyler Huntley by Week 6. But “has started NFL games and not burned the building down” is a real bar, and Rush clears it.
Rush’s own read on getting the news was about as understated as you’d expect from a guy who’s done this before. He told NFL.com practice “has to go on, and so you’re up next”, which is either the most professional response possible or the saddest sentence a Week 1 starting quarterback has said all century, and I go back and forth on which.
Adam Schefter had the injury news out before Atlanta finished updating the depth chart:
https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/2098467950894186739
That tweet did more damage to the Falcons’ quarterback room in one scroll than anything that’s going to happen on the field in Pittsburgh.
Undrafted rookie Jack Strand is QB2 behind Rush now, with Penix fully inactive — a preseason unknown is closer to playing than the guy Atlanta handed the competition to a week ago. I play in a rec league on Tuesday nights, bad knees and all, and even I get more than four days’ notice when I’m subbing in for someone. The Falcons gave their starting quarterback job a four-day ramp-up and called it a plan, and it should worry you more than anything else in our NFL Week 1 coverage this weekend.
The real story here was never which of the three guys is best. It’s that Atlanta spent an entire offseason staging a two-man quarterback fight and needed a third guy’s whole unglamorous career of being available on short notice just to survive its own Week 1. Cooper Rush didn’t win this competition. He just showed up when nobody else could.
