Tua Tagovailoa earns early praise as Falcons’ starting quarterback competition heats up

FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. >> Two weeks into Atlanta Falcons OTAs, Tua Tagovailoa’s best trait has already popped for his new head coach.

“He’s working very hard, fits in really well with our guys. The skill set is what you see from his Miami days, very accurate,” Falcons coach Kevin Stefanski said Wednesday as his team worked through its second full week of organized team activities.

Tagovailoa, 28, came to Atlanta for his seventh NFL season as an afterthought in the NFL free-agent market. He’s playing on the veteran minimum salary after the Dolphins absorbed a dead cap hit of nearly $100 million to release him. But that one word from Stefanski makes him impossible to count out of Atlanta’s starting quarterback competition: accurate.

Only three quarterbacks (Drake Maye, Joe Burrow and Geno Smith) have a better completion rate than Tagovailoa’s 68 percent since he was the fifth pick of the 2020 draft, and Stefanski already has said several times in his short tenure in Atlanta that accuracy is the most important trait at the position.

“Some guys get better at it with tweaks to how they throw the ball, tweaks to their lower body, those types of things. But there is an innate ability — and all of our guys have this, all of the quarterbacks — to be able to let the ball go and (have) it go where you want it to go,” Stefanski said.

None of the Falcons’ quarterbacks have displayed it as well as Tagovailoa, though. Third-year QB Michael Penix Jr. is a career 59.6 percent passer, and third-stringer Trevor Siemian is a 58.5 percent passer.

“I’ve been very blessed, very fortunate growing up having a father that had basically told me you’ve got to throw it this way,” Tagovailoa said. “If I didn’t throw it this way to a certain part of the receiver, you just had to do it again and again. It’s just something that I’ve been blessed with through hard work and by the help of my dad.”

Tagovailoa was a 69 percent passer in three years at Alabama and has been above 64 percent in each of his NFL seasons. In his Pro Bowl campaign of 2023, he completed 69.3 percent of his passes for a career-high 4,624 yards, then completed 72.9 percent of his passes in a 2024 season that was limited to 11 games by a concussion and hip injury.

“I’ve just been impressed with everything he’s doing in the meeting room, on the practice field, and being true to who he is,” Stefanski said.

Tagovailoa is getting more work than Penix in practices so far, as Penix continues to rehab a 2025 knee injury that ended his season in Week 11. Penix hasn’t been cleared to participate in 11-on-11 work, and there’s no firm timetable for when he will be, Stefanski said Wednesday.