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I can remember being in Santa Clara in early August 2021, sitting across from Kyle Shanahan and hearing the 49ers coach starting to slightly back away from the team’s plan to redshirt Trey Lance for his rookie season, four months after a blockbuster trade set up his selection with the third pick.
Lance had returned from summer break and, 10 days into camp, he was rolling.
“I can tell he put himself in position to play this year with what he did in the 40 days away,” Shanahan told me. “You get a guy for OTAs, they come in after rookie camp—and OTAs wasn’t like past OTAs, we didn’t do 10 practices, we didn’t do the minicamp, the reps we had were all cut in half because of [COVID-19]—and he was just trying to take everything in. He looked like a rookie quarterback. You could see the talent. Then they get away for 40 days and you wonder how he’d use that.
“Did it overwhelm him? Did he go over the right stuff? We didn’t see him at all, but I know he was working his butt off. And you come in and you want to see how efficient he was and how he was working. And the crispness in him picking up stuff compared to OTAs, it was like, All right, this guy can take it all in. He can learn. And now each day, we keep adding more stuff, and we’re doing it to the whole team, but he’s handling it a lot better than OTAs.”
Shanahan emphasized in our conversation that the path to Lance starting that fall was narrow—but the fact that it was even there was news. Soon after that, Lance plateaued, the Niners decided to go with Jimmy Garoppolo and the rookie got his redshirt after all.
Little did I know, back on that August day at the Niners’ 2021 training camp, that I was witnessing Lance’s high point in San Francisco.
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Let’s get the obvious part out of the way first: The trade for Lance was an unmitigated disaster for Shanahan and GM John Lynch. There’s no sugarcoating giving up three first-round picks for a quarterback who played in just eight games and started only four before being jettisoned for a fourth-round pick. It makes him one of seven QBs drafted in the first round over the last quarter-century to not get to a third year with their original team. And the other six weren’t the prize on the other end of blockbuster trades involving multiple first-rounders.
So now that we’ve got that on the record, there are a few other things that should be known about the situation and how it unfolded.
• The initial decision on who to take at No. 3 came down, indeed, to Lance and Mac Jones. (We can argue the Niners should have considered Justin Fields, but that’s another discussion for another day.) San Francisco made the call to take Lance based in large part on what it would mean for Shanahan’s offense. By 2021, a good percentage of the league was running a form of his offense, which meant defenses were practicing against it. Thus it became important for the Niners to develop it. Jones, of course, could run Shanahan’s offense. Lance could evolve it. And that, in the end, was the biggest differentiator in the decision.
• The Niners planned on letting Lance ride out the bumps last year. In fact, the belief that summer was still that Garoppolo was the better quarterback, but that Lance, with game reps, could pass him by the end of the regular season and then grow toward his athletic ceiling from there. At that point, Lance had started just 19 games (17 college, two pro) since graduating high school in the spring of 2018. He just hadn’t seen enough, and the thought was the drink-from-a-firehose approach would help him turn the corner.
• To make it work early on, the offense would lean on Lance as a runner a little more, which was necessary to keep the ball moving and get the quarterback some confidence. But then Lance got hurt in Week 2, and Garoppolo (who returned at the end of camp as an insurance policy) started until December, before Brock Purdy, the final pick in the 2022 draft, entered the lineup and opened a lot of eyes in the organization. More than one former Shanahan colleague mentioned to me this offseason that the coach’s confidence in Purdy was obvious in his play-calling, something Shanahan himself conceded as true to me, too.
• The Niners went to a third NFC title game in four years, falling short of the Super Bowl for the second straight year, this time thanks to implosion-by-injury at the quarterback position. San Francisco proved again to have one of the best—if not the best—rosters in football.
• That roster clearly remains in a championship window, and the Niners acknowledged that with last year’s acquisition of Christian McCaffrey and this offseason’s addition of Javon Hargrave. As such, it would have been very difficult to build a young quarterback’s needed development into the goals of that roster. Simply put, you try explaining putting a title shot in peril by not playing the guy who’s best—in the here and now, at the most important position—to Fred Warner, Nick Bosa, Trent Williams, Deebo Samuel and George Kittle. Purdy, in his short time starting, showed everyone he was the best option at least for now and probably for the future. So given the place the team is in, you play him.
• The job of backup quarterback isn’t the same as starting quarterback. The No. 2 needs to be able to run an offense built for someone else, and based on what’s being built for Purdy, Sam Darnold is best equipped to serve in that role. It’s also one that, given how last year went, and that Purdy’s coming off elbow surgery, is rightfully seen as very important in San Francisco.
• Along those lines, Shanahan built a different type of offense for Lance last year. When Garoppolo took his spot, they reverted to the more traditional scheme, and Purdy took the baton from Garoppolo in that system in December. With Purdy entrenched, to carry Lance as a backup would mean either having a significant scheme adjustment in their back pocket all year, or potentially having to play Lance in an offense he’s not fit for.
• Lance’s confidence needs to be restored, and he needs game reps. That’s a tough tightrope for a team to walk while developing a young player, and one reason it was tough for other teams to reckon with trading for him. One AFC exec who studied him ahead of the trade texted Sunday that Lance “still has salvageable talent (arm strength, size, athleticism), but looked completely unsure of himself and rattled” this summer, and his “accuracy started being affected because of it too.” Another AFC exec who looked at trading for Lance said you could “still see physical ability, athleticism, movement, arm strength, operating on the move to keep plays alive,” but that he “will need to continue to develop reading coverages.”
• The other issue the Niners ran into in trying to move Lance was a financial one. While San Francisco paid a $2.82 million roster bonus already (and that leaves just a $940,000 on the tab for this year), Lance is also owed a fully guaranteed $5.31 million for next year, which more or less locks you in for a second year and makes it harder to get another backup quarterback if he doesn’t work out.
• The Cowboys got him because they came in at a price point no else would—that price, of course, being just a single fourth-round pick. They’ve got Cooper Rush on their roster as a backup, so their depth will allow for them to develop Lance without having to be overly worried about putting him out there, which would be a factor for teams (and there are plenty of them) that plan to go with just two quarterbacks on the 53-man roster.
• So how do Shanahan and Lynch skate on this? They don’t. But the If this were so-and-so, he would be fired for this dialogue is absurd. Again, a big swing and a miss. Huge one. And yet, the roster in place is still good enough to compete for a championship again, and the Niners were able to get a quarterback with the last pick of the seventh round, capable of approximating what Jones would’ve given them (or maybe even better), had they drafted the Bama star over Lance. I swear, it really isn’t any more complicated than that.
And honestly, the person I feel bad for in the end is Lance. He just needed to play. He got hurt, and his timeline simply doesn’t match up with the team’s. He wound up losing confidence, and that’s tough for any young quarterback to overcome. What he needs, mostly, is a team that will give starts and patience.
Unfortunately, whichever team that is (it won’t be Dallas unless Dak Prescott gets hurt) won’t have given up a first-round pick, let alone three of them, to land him.
So it’s hard to see a scenario where he’ll get both those things.
Which, really, isn’t anyone’s fault, in the end. It’s bad luck, plain and simple.
