Draftables: Trey Lance
Trey Lance is largely considered the most difficult evaluation among quarterback prospects in this year’s draft. I’d tend to agree, in part because I haven’t been able to find any All-22 film of him! Therefore, this breakdown is going to be built mostly off of (sigh) broadcast cut-ups. That means there are a few things—like route combinations and the ensuing progressions and anticipation paired with them—that I just won’t be able to see clearly.
Oh, well. Let’s give it a shot anyway.
*Shoutout to whoever the hell zzLIAMzz11 is on YouTube because I lifted 90% of all the game footage I watched from his uploads (marked with the ZZ logo in the clips below). You the real MVP 👌
![One day he’ll be able to legally drink [Sam Wasson/Getty Images]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1618794150026-9KTG5CH8LPUCDVMQ43X6/Lance.jpeg)
One day he’ll be able to legally drink [Sam Wasson/Getty Images]
Ht: 6-4
Wt: 224 lbs.
Age: 20(!)
School: North Dakota State
Stats
Build: Basically the physical prototype of a modern quarterback, Lance’s 6-4 224 pound frame may actually fill out more, as he will be only 20 years old (!) by the time the draft rolls around. For all you math majors—that means that Lance wasn’t even born when Tom Brady was drafted, and—unless he sees a precipitous fall on draft day—Lance will be the first person born in the 21st century to be drafted into the NFL. Yes, we are that old. 👵🏻
Experience: Lance has two major knocks on his game and this is one of them. While he’s been the Bison’s starter for the past two years, NDSU’s entire fall season (except for one game) was delayed until spring due to COVID. Thus, Lance has only 17 college starts under his belt. This is actually the same number as Mac Jones, but due to the Bison’s level of play—they’re FBS and Lance has never faced an FCS school—and the fact that Lance only played a single game of football in the past calendar year, the lack of starts is a bit more concerning.
What is NOT concerning is Lance’s absurd production. As a redshirt freshman, Lance threw for 2,786 yards and 28 scores on 66.9% completion percentage, rushed for an additional 1,100 yards and 14 scores on a healthy 6.5ypc (remember, this includes sacks as they’re counted against rushing yards in college), and had ZERO(!) interceptions. This while leading the Bison to an undefeated national championship season and winning the Walter Payton Award given to FCS’ top player. He was 19 at the time. Lance finishes his college career 17-0 as a starter and 32-0 including his redshirt freshman year. After he left school to prepare for the draft, the Bison lost their very first game of the spring season by 24 points.
Injuries: Lance had a “lower body surgery” in the spring of last year to address something from high school (I know it’s vague, it’s all I got), but it didn’t affect him come fall and he seems plenty durable. Similar to how Auburn used Cam Newton, the Bison (pronounced BI-Zuhn for some reason) often used Lance as their defacto fullback on inverted veers and quarterback powers. He is the rare quarterback who can threaten both as a short-yardage runner and with big runs down the sideline. Granted, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to regularly use your quarterback as an interior runner in the NFL, so like other dual-threat quarterbacks before him, Lance will need to learn when to avoid taking unnecessary hits.
Scouting Report
Bombs Away: When we talked about Zach Wilson, we compared his arm talent to Mahomes or Rodgers, but that was more in regards to the ability to improvise and throw off-platform. While Wilson has plenty of arm strength, the pure velocity that the ball fires out of his hand isn’t on par with the two names above. Lance on the other hand will have an arm that is as good as anyone in the league’s from the second he steps into an NFL locker room. Kid has a hose-and-a-half.
The ball absolutely launches out of his hand on underneath passes with tremendous velocity…
Yet he also shows the natural touch to throw catchable deep balls over defenders.
*If you’re wondering why three of those four clips are incompletes, let’s just say Lance wasn’t working with the best receiver corps in Fargo, North Dakota. More on that later. In general, the cut-ups for this write-up aren’t particularly eye-opening as only a handful show anything that broadcast cameras don’t. That said, I would highly recommend checking out the highlight video at the top to get a sense of his pure physical talent. If we go with Lance we’re going for the upside.
I don’t like to spend too much time on pro day workouts cause you’re literally throwing scripted against air, but since we don’t have any All-22 film and Lance couldn’t play except for one game in the fall, I’ll include this embed here.
Lance’s ability to put the ball anywhere on the field is tailor-made for today’s NFL.
Dual-Threat: Given his rushing stats, it should come as no surprise that Lance is an excellent athlete. While his athleticism is harder to gauge against FCS competition and it would have been nice to see him run the forty-yard dash during the pre-draft process, GPS tracking during the 2019 FCS Champ game clocked him at 21.54mph on the touchdown scamper that kicks off the clips below.
That time would have been good for 12th-best in the NFL last year and definitely seems faster than he truly is, that at least validates some of his speed. He has good burst and is faster than you think, but also runs with a ton of power and is hard to bring down.
As has been the warning given to Cam Newton, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and every other dangerous dual-threat quarterback, these are not the kind of collisions we want to see in the NFL. But it is nice to see that he has the strength to escape sacks in the pocket and can lower a shoulder when need be.
Work Ethic / Experience: I know I already touched on Lance’s experience, but I wanted to elaborate just a bit more. His lack of games played and passes thrown has a lot of evaluators frightened because quarterback is typically a position where guys with fewer college starts do worse once they get to the NFL.
Quarterbacks like Dwayne Haskins and JaMarcus Russell—who narrowly beat out future seventh-rounder Matt Flynn for the starting gig entering his final year at LSU—are just two examples of one-year starters who quickly flamed out in the league. That said, Blake Bortles, Josh Freeman, and Josh Rosen all started upwards of 30 games in college and none of them panned out or were “pro ready” as they entered the NFL. Conversely, there was another dude in Haskins’ draft class with even fewer college starts (Kyler Murray), and he seems to have turned out alright.
In the 2017 draft I compared one-year starter Mitch Trubisky—who was getting tons of draft love over accomplished long-time starters DeShaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes—to a dude at a bar with a beard. He may have the shittiest jaw line ever, but since you haven’t yet seen it, you just pretend it’s not a problem and hope for the best. The same goes for quarterbacks with only a single year of film. It’s easy to ignore the warts because you haven’t yet seen them on tape while propping up what’s missing from their game by saying the quarterback “will get there with time.”
Ultimately, the red flag of “lack of experience” is both the worry that a prospect will be bypassing important developmental steps as well as the fact that you have less evidence to make a decision on whether they can take those steps once they reach the NFL. Teams adapt to quarterbacks after having an off-season to look at film and figure out tendencies (just ask Freddie Kitchens-era Baker Mayfield), so everyone wants to see that second starting season to take out some of the guess-work from their evaluations.
All this to say, experience is absolutely a red flag for Lance—both in the number of games he played and the level of competition he was playing against. If he’s handled incorrectly and put in the wrong scheme with the wrong supporting cast, maybe he never develops to reach his potential. That said, people absolutely RAVE about his work ethic, leadership, and locker room presence, despite him being—once again—only twenty years old. He also ran considerably more pro-style concepts than any of the other top-billed quarterbacks in this draft as NDSU asks a lot of its quarterbacks mentally. Lance was tasked with adjusting protections, making checks at the line of scrimmage, and running play action from under center—all traits that will serve him well in the league—and he’s already shown the ability to go through his progressions and process the field quickly.
TLDR, Lance’s lack of experience is a very real worry, but it’s likely an overblown one. And due to his high marks in regards to character and work ethic, I am less worried about him developing than most.
Wavering Accuracy: This, however, is my big worry with Lance. He simply loses the strike zone too much, and—like anticipation and processing speed—consistent accuracy is a trait that some quarterbacks simply never grasp. Obviously, if you can’t be consistently accurate, you cannot succeed in the NFL, and you especially can’t succeed in Shanahan’s offense, which places a high priority on ball placement.
Lance’s misses vary from deep balls that sail to theoretically simple underneath passes.
*For context, Lance has a worse supporting cast than the other guys in contention but is also given fewer easy passes in NDSU’s offense. Plus, his receivers rarely get much separation or come down with tough contested catches. So a wheel route thrown behind a receiver on Lance’s film may tumble out of bounds and incomplete while the same pass in Mac Jones’ film—as we literally saw in his cutups—becomes a casual highlight-reel catch from this year’s Heisman winner.
There were times where I was watching film and thought he put the ball in the right place to keep his receiver from running into coverage or where he underthrew a deep ball specifically to get PI (his wideouts were very good at drawing these calls). Without access to All-22, it becomes even harder to tell who was right, and that doesn’t even take into account the inherent issues with not knowing how each program coaches these routes differently.
As for Lance’s consistency issues on ball placement, I don’t know nearly enough about quarterback mechanics to make a claim as to what’s causing these streaks of inaccuracy. His stroke itself looks pretty good, so if anything I’d assume his accuracy problems have more to do with his shoulders, alignment, etc. To me, that means the potential for fixing the problem is much greater than—for example—someone with a Tim Tebow-esque release.
Will it be fixed? Again, I’m not the guy to make that call, but one would think the coaching staff would be able to assess the likelihood of it after seeing him in person, and his work ethic and coachability will certainly help his cause.
Summary
NFL Comp: Josh Allen
Allen was massively criticized coming out of Wyoming because—in many ways—he went against many of the old-school teachings about what makes a successful NFL quarterback. He was inaccurate, his play dropped off during his last year in college, he didn’t dominate despite playing at a small school, he had poor numbers against Power 5 competition, and people questioned his maturity and leadership skills. But good lord did he have physical tools. And now, three years removed from being picked #7 by the Bills, I’d easily take Allen over any other QB in that draft class.
The Bills had a plan to surround Allen with talent, to let him grow into the position, and to give him extensive one-on-one tutoring in regards to his mechanics. Now, he’s an MVP candidate that just led his team to the AFC Championship game. But his success was due in large part to a wholesale restructuring of the roster and offensive scheme to fit his talents and the ability to lean on a dominant defense until he became the focal point of the team. The Niners seem dead-set on competing this year before having whoever we draft take the reins a year from now. With a roster built to compete now, will we have the patience to invest in what could be a developmental project?
I don’t know if anyone has the physical tools of Allen, but Lance is close, and I think he is more intelligent and mature than Allen was coming out of college. He also lacks any of Allen’s “character concerns”—which, to be fair to Allen, seems to have stemmed from nothing more than high school tweets. It’s also worth noting that we’re evaluating Trey Lance based on his 2019 season while everyone else has the luxury of leaning on their 2020 tape. If we were to compare Lance’s 2019 film to Zach Wilson’s or Mac Jones’ from the same year, Lance would come out on top without question. If his team had a season this fall, he could easily be the favorite to go #2 overall to the Jets.
That’s a lot of “ifs,” even if they’re entirely out of Lance’s control, and the accuracy concerns worry me. What Shanahan’s looking for in a quarterback may have evolved over the years, but it’s never going to migrate away from accuracy as a vitally important trait, and if the Niners think Lance will never become consistent with his ball-placement, they’ll take him off their board. However, the Niners’ current interest is very real—so much so that Lance started working with John Beck—the mutual connection QB coach to Shanahan—a few weeks ago per the Niners’ request, and today (Monday, April 19th), Lance will have his pro day shaped specifically to cater to the Niners’ offense. This gives the Niners’ another trusted eye in the evaluation process and is a borderline brilliant means of getting a lengthier, hands-on evaluation of a prospect who has been hard for scouts to nail down.
Ultimately, I’m bullish on Lance’s potential. He seems to have the mental makeup to overcome the lack of experience, and I think if the Niners—as experts on quarterback coaching and mechanics and with the help of Beck—come away from Lance’s second pro day confident that they can clean up his accuracy, that he could absolutely shred in our system for years to come.
Either way, someone on the Niners is gonna owe John Beck—who also works with Justin Fields and Zach Wilson—a beer. That is unless he doesn’t drink beer (he did go to BYU after all). Or if we draft Mac Jones…
Go Niners 👍🏈