Herb Adderley died last Friday at the age of 81. Adderley and Willie Wood were the cornerbacks on the great Packers’ teams in the 1960s; they had not yet invented the term, “shut-down corner”, but that is what Herb Adderley was. Adderley won 5 championships with the Packers and another one with the Cowboys during his Hall of Fame career.
Rest in peace, Herb Adderley…
Yesterday, Tua Tagovailoa made his debut as the QB of the Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins won the game notwithstanding a lackluster performance by Tua – I will have more to say about that later this week on Football Friday – but there was something else interesting about his play yesterday. Tua Tagovailoa is left-handed and it has been a while since there has been a left-handed starting QB in the NFL.
Statistically, about 10 percent of the population is left-handed. The NFL has 32 teams and each team has 3 QBs somewhere in their organization; round that up a bit and at any given time, there ought to be 10 QBs who are left-handed; three of them ought to be starters. That simply is not the case and I am not sure why that is the case.
Over the history of the NFL, there have been some excellent left-handed QBs. Steve Young is of course the first one that leaps to mind but with about 5 minutes of thinking, I came up with this list:
- Mark Brunell
- Bobby Douglass
- Boomer Esiaison
- Matt Leinart
- Ken Stabler
- Tim Tebow
- Michael Vick
- Steve Young
- Jim Zorn
Bobby Douglass and Ken Stabler were playing about 50 years ago and in the intervening time, that list of 9 left-handed QBs is all that I can drag from my memory. That list of nine is smaller than the number you would expect to be on NFL rosters this morning just by random chance. A discrepancy that large should have an explanation – – but I am not sure I can provide it.
My first guess would be that the pool of young athletic left-handed boys is tilted in favor of baseball where certainly more than 10% of MLB pitching staffs are comprised of left-handers. The problem with that “hypothesis” is that I do not think that many kids sufficiently analytical at a young age to make the determination that “playing baseball” might be more career-friendly twenty years in the future than “playing football”. I guess that some parents might make that sort of “calculation” and steer their sons toward baseball, but I do not find that whole line of thinking satisfactory.
Also in baseball, there are a few positions where left-handedness(with regard to throwing not batting) is a disadvantage. A left-handed second baseman would have difficulty turning double plays; left handers at shortstop or third base would have awkward throwing positions on many plays at first base. In the history of baseball, there have only been 5 players to have caught more than 100 games. Therefore, left-handed kids who show a proclivity for baseball would not be equally distributed among the positions on a team so more of them might gravitate toward pitching.
There are probably a few PhD dissertations in anthropology and/or psychology contained in the reasons why so few left-handers become NFL QBs and I will not pretend to be able to evaluate them once they have been published. Rather, I will offer a simplistic hypothesis here because it is the best I can come up with.
- In youth sports, there are camps and coaches that focus on teaching specific skills to elite young players – – the ones who are identified at an early age as “special players”.
- Many of the “pitching coaches” or “pitching gurus” for youngsters were pitchers themselves and there are plenty of left-handed pitchers out there to teach a left-handed kid how to pitch.
- Many of the “QB coaches” or “QB whisperers” for youngsters were QBs themselves and there just are not as many of them walking the streets to be available to teach a left-handed kid how to play QB.
Sticking with football, there is a minor benefit that derives from the ongoing pandemic. There are 5 of the meaningless college football bowl games that will not be played this year. They are:
- Bahamas Bowl – normally played before Christmas. The game matches teams from the MAC and the Sun Belt Conference.
- Hawaii Bowl – normally played on Christmas Eve. Not too surprisingly, Hawaii has been one of the teams in this bowl game 9 different times.
- Holiday Bowl – normally played between Christmas and New Year’s Day. This year’s game would have matched a PAC-12 team with an ACC team.
- Quick Lane Bowl – normally played on December 26th. Teams involved here appear to be randomly chosen from the Big-10, the ACC and the MAC.
- Redbox Bowl – normally played between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The game matches also-rans from the Big-10 and the PAC-12 – sort of a poor relative of the Rose Bowl.
Finally, here is an observation by Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times about futbol – – not football:
“Phil Foden and Mason Greenwood were dropped by England’s national soccer team for breaching quarantine rules by bringing women to the team hotel in Iceland.
“That’s what you call playing the wrong kind of friendly.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………