NFL teams and NFL players are not famously open and transparent about injury timelines, but Michael Penix Jr. was an exception today.
Per the team’s 2025 starting quarterback, his recovery from his November ACL injury is progressing nicely, but it still could be a month until he’s fully medically cleared. If all goes well, Penix noted, it could be a little sooner. Because the long end of that estimate would put us at August 29, that likely means the most hotly-anticipated battle of camp is all but over.
So long as Tua Tagovailoa’s back tightness is indeed minor, he’ll be starting in Week 1.
When Penix suffered his ACL injury and had surgery, insider Ian Rapoport initially reported that it would carry a nine month recovery at minimum. Since then, both the team and Penix have avoided putting concrete timelines on his recovery, but mid-August would be around nine months and Penix now seems unlikely to be cleared by then.
Fans inserted their own timelines into the vacuum between Rapoport’s initial report and the months that have come. Some very optimistic souls believed he could be cleared for minicamp, but that time came and went. Others hoped we might see Penix cleared in time for the start of training camp, a more reasonable guess but still a bit of an optimistic one.
On the first day of training camp, Penix was out there moving and throwing, but he still has not been fully medically cleared and cleared for full team work. The long and short of it is that Penix can do some work and give the coaching staff a measure of his ability, but cannot fully participate in training camp and almost certainly will not appear in preseason action. He’ll get to build rapport with receivers because he’s there and throwing—and he chucked a long touchdown to Zachariah Branch Wednesday—but obviously the work of running the offense and participating in scrimmages and the like is still a ways away.
This is not the ideal outcome by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s also not one that should completely blindside us. Recovery from ACL surgery is slow and Penix is on his third ACL reconstruction, meaning the Falcons were never going to rush him back. The hope was that he’d be way ahead of schedule and able to go head-to-head with Tua, and it was a battle I very much wanted to see given that Penix winning the job and excelling would be my preferred 2026 outcome. It is much better to have Penix giving a refreshingly honest look at his recovery, nonetheless, so we can adjust our expectations accordingly.
If all goes well from here, Penix will be healthy enough to enter the season as the team’s backup and will be able to step in if Tua is injured or falters. As Penix himself noted, his injury history means there’s no sense in pushing too hard, too fast to get back and risking the entire 2026 season. The most important outcome now is having both him and Tua ready to go for Week 1, lest the team enter a critical season with yet another full-blown quarterback crisis.
