Analyzing the Bears with the help of 22 names, starting with …
Michael Penix (1), who will be the rarest of Bears opponents on Sunday — a left-handed quarterback. The Bears have faced one lefty starter in the last 15 years — Tua Tagovailoa (2) in Week 9 of 2022. Even if Penix somehow doesn’t start — the Falcons say his ribs are fine — his backup is, you guessed it, Tagovailoa.
About one-in-10 people are left-handed. Yet just 11 of the 426 regular-season games the Bears have played since 2000 have had an opposing lefty under center. That’s 2.6% of their games.
League-wide, only three lefties have started at quarterback since 2020: Penix, Tagovailoa and the Browns’ Dillon Gabriel (3). Falcons coach Kevin Stefanski (4) has coached all three. Five other lefty quarterbacks started a game in the 2010s.
Bears defensive backs coach Al Harris (5) and nickelbacks coach Cannon Matthews (6) were watching film this week and commented on how strange it was to see a lefty passer.
“The ball just comes out different. …” Harris said. “Just the way the ball spins.”
A football spins about 600 times per minute. The gyroscopic torque of the ball pushes the ball right when it is thrown by a right-hander and left when thrown by a left-hander.
“Everything just looks foreign — it looks weird,” Matthews said.
Falcons offensive coordinator Tommy Rees (7), the former Lake Forest High School and Notre Dame star, flipped his standard plays this offseason to make them more lefty-friendly.
The Bears’ reeling defense won’t do the same.
“We’re not spending a ton of time talking about, scheming up, for a left-handed quarterback,” defensive coordinator Dennis Allen (8) said.
The team has focused on adjusting to angles of the lefty passes this week, though. They have a secret weapon. Assistant linebackers coach Kevin Koch (9) was a left-handed quarterback at Immaculate Conception High School in Elmhurst, the College of DuPage and Minnesota-State Moorhead. He’s thrown passes during practices all year — and particularly this week.
“We get those simulations in walk-through,” Matthews said.
Someone familiar with the left-hander’s spin is …
Rome Odunze (10), who spent the last two years of his college career catching passes from the same man the Bears face Sunday. Odunze and Penix formed one of the best pass-catching duos in recent college football history in 2023, when the latter led all FBS receivers with a University of Washington-record 1,640 receiving yards. Odunze was Penix’s leading receiver in the Huskies’ national championship game loss to Michigan in January 2024.
Odunze learned to adjust for Penix’s spin on the fly. A lefty passer was rare, even in college — in 2024, the year after Odunze went pro, only five of the 131 qualifying quarterbacks in FBS threw from the left-handed side.
“It’s a little different,” the Bears receiver said. “There’s a little bit different torque on the ball. … There were times in windy games at [Washington] it did tail differently.”
Odunze said he was proud to see Penix return from his third torn ACL to boost the Falcons, starting in Week 3. The Falcons were 0-2 before his return but are 2-1 since, with their lone loss coming after Tagovailoa threw an overtime interception in relief of Penix on Sunday night.
“That’s been the story at different levels of his career …” Odunze said. “People were writing him off after this last injury as well, but I’m like, ‘Man, that’s when Penix shines — when people are doubting him and he’s coming off that injury.’ Because people have doubted him before.”
Friday is the 20th anniversary of …
Dennis Green’s (11) “crown their ass” speech, minutes after the Bears rallied from a 23-3 deficit with the help of two defensive scores and one special teams touchdown to beat the Cardinals 24-23. Devin Hester (12), then a rookie, returned a punt for an 83-yard touchdown with about three minutes to play to seal the win. The Cardinals’ starting quarterback: southpaw Matt Leinart (13). In the 20 years since, the Bears have faced four other lefty starters: the Eagles’ Michael Vick (14) twice plus the Chiefs’ Tyler Palko (15), the Broncos’ Tim Tebow (16) and Tagovailoa.
The last Bears lefty to start at quarterback was. …
Cade McNown (17), who went 3-12 in two dreadful seasons here. Their most established was Bobby Douglass (18), the run-first quarterback who played for the Bears from 1969-75.
But were any of them left-handed?
Sunday will be the third time the Bears have ever played at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The other two, fittingly, have marked changes in the Bears’ quarterback saga. I was the only Chicago media member in attendance in 2020, when Mitch Trubisky (19) was benched in the third quarter in favor of Nick Foles (20), who famously told receiver Anthony Miller (21) to “run to the L” in the end zone for the game-winning touchdown pass. Quarterback Justin Fields (22) hurt his shoulder late in his 2023 homecoming and was forced to miss the next game.