The Trey Lance Saga Is a Football Bummer

Let’s rewind the clock. It is December 7, 2020, and Kyle Shanahan’s San Francisco 49ers are getting smacked around by Josh Allen and the Bills. Buddy, they’re getting smacked around real good. You know those games when Allen seems like a bulldozer with a laser beam and a permanent Mario super star? This was one of those nights.

This version of Allen (or Patrick Mahomes or Jalen Hurts or Justin Herbert or Lamar Jackson, as the night may have it) is the worst opponent to have. There’s nothing to do. You just kinda sit there and take it, praying for a drop, a fumble, a penalty, anything that can create a stop for your otherwise powerless defense.

After sitting there and taking it to the tune of 34 points, Shanahan was asked about how he evaluates quarterbacks—whether it had changed at all over recent seasons as a head coach. He gave an important quote.

“How I evaluate everything is always changing. … You start to see you can win football games with any type of quarterback as long as they are good enough and you can be good enough in hundreds of different ways. So I evaluate quarterbacks in terms of trying to find people who can have a chance to be one of those elite-type guys, and there’s lots of different ways to do it. … You’re just trying to find a guy who is better than about 98 percent of the people on this planet or in this country, and when you find that, you get him and you adjust to him.”

The idea of just trying to find the guy is not an unfamiliar one for Shanahan. Turn back the clock another couple of years, and Shanahan’s fielding an offseason question about the zone read—particularly, whether defenses have figured out how to contend with it.

“No, there isn’t anything to figure out. [The zone read] is a very sound scheme. It’s how do you want to attack it? What do you want to do off it when they 100 percent commit to stop it? … Is your quarterback good enough at running with the football to make them commit to stop it? And once they do, is he good enough to make the passes that he has to that they just opened up? And if he is, that’s a huge issue. It’s tough to find that guy. And if you don’t protect him right, if you don’t do the right stuff, it is tough to stay healthy.”

Again: finding that guy. Since at least 2018, but probably longer, there’s been a guy in Shanahan’s head. A guy who can run the football well enough to incorporate the zone read into the offense and play some 11-on-11 football, but who can pass it well enough to execute Shanahan’s West Coast play-action passing game. Not an easy guy to find—as Shanahan said himself.

Well, we all know when Shanahan thought he had found the guy. It was in 2021, when the 49ers traded up for Trey Lance.

Now, I’ll skip to the end of the story, for the one person reading who doesn’t know it: It went terribly. Not just bad, but really bad. I mean, one-of-the-worst-trades-in-modern-NFL-history bad.

The 49ers ended up trading the 12th, 29th, 29th, and 102nd overall picks in three separate drafts for the third overall selection that they used on Lance. As Bill Barnwell summarized for ESPN, that alone is a big overpay. Then you start putting names to the picks. The Dolphins, who traded with the Niners out of that third overall pick, packaged their haul of picks into various deals: the trade up for Jaylen Waddle, the trades for Tyreek Hill and Bradley Chubb. The Eagles then owned that 12th overall pick and traded up as well, for DeVonta Smith. The Cowboys ended up with the 12th overall pick and spent it on Micah Parsons. Every single team involved in the Niners’ line of trade dominoes got hilariously good players—save for the Niners themselves.

Lance did virtually nothing to help the 49ers win games during his two years with the team. He appeared in eight games, first as a sneaky gadget backup to Jimmy Garoppolo, then as a spot starter following a Garoppolo injury, and then as the preordained starter to begin the 2022 season. But just three snaps into Week 2 last season, Lance broke his ankle. That would end his 49ers career—2-2 as a starter and 102 passes and 54 carries to his name. Last week, San Francisco cut its losses with Lance, trading him to Dallas for a single fourth-round pick.

There are so many reasons why Lance did not work out for the Niners, and the first among these is injury luck. On top of the season-ending injury in 2022, Lance broke a finger on his throwing hand during the preseason of his rookie year and sprained his knee during the season. But there’s really nothing to be learned from bad injury luck (unless you subscribe to the theory that Shanahan is a doomed coach, forever cursed to get close to a Super Bowl championship he can never possess, which, I’m kinda there with you).

It accordingly becomes difficult to talk about Lance’s developmental arc and the mistakes made along the way. The 49ers chose to sit Lance for his entire rookie season, believing his development would be better served on the bench than on the field. And Lance needed development. He was a uniquely inexperienced prospect. A one-year college starter who played just one game in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lance had 318 career passes in college, all at the FCS level.

With hindsight clearing our vision, it seems obvious that Lance should have gotten live-game action earlier in his career with the 49ers, even at the expense of short-term team success. But Lance’s finger injury, which affected him for the entire 2021 season, likely made the idea of starting him even shakier than his rawness did. The Niners were painted into a tough corner.

But the most obvious reason Lance never realized his potential with San Francisco is the one that Shanahan has been telling us since the beginning. It’s really hard to find the guy, and even if you find him, it can be tough to keep him healthy. Had the 49ers passed on Lance in favor of the NFL draft intelligentsia’s favored quarterback prospect at the time, Justin Fields, the Niners might be closer to having the guy—but whether or not Fields is the guy remains undetermined. If they had traded up to the second overall pick, in position to take Zach Wilson, a huge riser in the predraft process who received comparisons to Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers? Yeah, probably still not the guy. It’s simply so, so hard to draft a quarterback, develop him into an impactful starter, and keep him there.

There is another alternative quarterback the 49ers could have selected: Mac Jones, the Alabama prospect who many insiders believed was San Francisco’s initial target following the trade up. Jones, who had a solid rookie season before Year 2 play caller shenanigans took some wind out of his sails, looks to be a functional NFL quarterback—something Lance has only flashed in the brief moments we’ve seen him play. Shouldn’t the Niners have taken Jones?

I mean, sure. The 49ers take Mac, he replaces Garoppolo, and they keep trucking along. They run an offense that minimizes what it asks a point guard quarterback to do. It asks him to be accurate, risk averse, and obedient. They win games on the strength of Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk, George Kittle, and now Christian McCaffrey. It’s the same formula that drove the 49ers to three NFC championship games in four years, and accordingly, it is a completely defensible strategy.

But Shanahan can get that production out of anyone. That’s the point. That’s why he got the job as the head coach of the Niners, why his offense has been the defining offense of the last five years of football. Because with it, you can take a second-round pick like Garoppolo or a fourth-round pick like Kirk Cousins, and you can produce an offense that would otherwise require a first-round pick at quarterback. To spend a first-round pick on a quarterback to run this offense would be wasteful. To spend three first-rounders? It would erase the whole advantage the offense provides.

That’s the thing about Shanahan’s system: It’s a floor raiser. It takes quarterbacks who would otherwise be fine but unspectacular and creates incredible offense with them. That’s why we call it QB friendly. Lance represented not just a change in the system—he represented a breaking away from it. Shanahan had spent all that draft capital because Lance was supposed to raise the ceiling of the offense, not the floor. The same logic was at the heart of the decision Rams head coach Sean McVay made to trade Jared Goff for Matthew Stafford (a quarterback Shanahan was also hotly pursuing).

Consider the offense that Shanahan ran with Lance in that brief flash of the quarterback’s career, in Week 1 of the 2022 season. It was a shotgun-heavy, option-heavy attack—nothing like the under-center play-action pass game that had long typified the Shanahan approach.

The variety of looks in the running game, always a feather in Shanahan’s cap, exploded because of the additional threat Lance provided with his legs. Wrenching open holes for explosive runs had never been easier.

And Shanahan could still, at any time, go back and press one of those familiar buttons in the passing game to create easy throws for his young quarterback.

This was how it was supposed to work, and it really sucks that we never got to see much of it. A huge and explosive quarterback with a big arm playing 11-on-11 football with all of Shanahan’s machinations and San Francisco’s playmakers at his disposal. It would have been an excellent thing.

We won’t ever see it again—at least, not with Lance. But I would argue that Shanahan’s search for the guy—the dude who won’t just execute his offense, but change it entirely—is still underway.

Consider the year that Brock Purdy had. At first blush, Purdy looks like an iteration of Jones or Garoppolo—not a huge guy, not a huge arm. It is easy to assume that Purdy got plugged into the same offense, benefited from the same cheat codes, suffered the same limitations. That didn’t happen.

Purdy is a scrambler and a gamer and is far more aggressive than Garoppolo has been over his career. Over 12 percent of Purdy’s pass attempts went more than 20 yards downfield last season; in his six years as the San Francisco starter, Garoppolo averaged 8.6 percent. Similarly, Purdy is a successful quarterback late in the down, either as a scrambler or on a designed boot. When Purdy holds the football for more than 2.5 seconds (a good benchmark for a play that’s transitioning from the quick game into something more), he has positive expected points added per play of .15—over Garoppolo’s career, he has a net negative (-.03).

Purdy does not represent the tectonic shift that Lance did, but he does bring a new flavor of mobility to what had previously been an inert quarterback room in Shanahan’s 49ers history: Brian Hoyer, Garoppolo, Nick Mullens, C.J. Beathard. Perhaps Purdy’s pocket management and escapability will be enough to vault this offense forward, push the ceiling to Super Bowl levels. Or perhaps it won’t be the mobility, but the unique arm talent of Sam Darnold, the new QB2 who ousted Lance. Pocket passers with high-end arm talent have found career resurgences in this offense (Ryan Tannehill, Stafford), and Darnold has remarkably more arm talent than any quarterback who has played in San Francisco during Shanahan’s tenure, including Purdy. Save, perhaps, for Lance.

Either way, while the gamble on Lance failed, the theory behind it is neither disproven nor abandoned. Shanahan’s offense must continue to evolve. And, as it does, new demands will be placed on its quarterback. The old prototype will fall away. Lance might be done as a 49er, but Shanahan’s experiment at the quarterback position is far from over.