Amid all the hand-wringing over Trey Lance’s failing to beat out Sam Darnold for the 49ers’ No. 2 quarterback spot and, thus, placing himself on the trading block, we are failing to recognize the root of the problem.
After the football world largely graduated intellectually from a phase in which we all blamed the lack of a draft pick’s success on the players themselves, holding them up to numbers and round standards they didn’t choose for themselves, we seem to have bolted feverishly in the other direction. Now, we’re more regularly blaming the general manager and the coach for failure to develop, which, while closer to the central truth, is still missing the point.
Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch’s drafting of Lance (and trading a massive haul of picks for the privilege) was supposed to be a slam dunk because Shanahan is a “quarterback guru” or “quarterback whisperer.” I am as guilty as any person on this earth in perpetuating that myth, when the developments of this week serve only to underscore the only tangible fact about the draft (and maybe the NFL in general): No one is infallible. There is no such thing as a guru, or a sage, or maybe even a certified “genius” in our sport. There are people who are sometimes, more often, better than others. There are windows of time when one person’s scheme is uniquely effective against a certain trend of defensive schemes or the current build of this generation’s defensive personnel.
