The Era That Never Was
Perhaps this write-up is premature.
After all, we quite literally just watched a third string quarterback take over a team mid-season and then string off seven straight victories to take us deep into the playoffs. In six years under ShanaLynch, backup quarterbacks have made 38 regular season starts—good for a depressing 38.7% of all games. Only once—in 2019—did our starter make it through the entire season, and only twice—in 2019 and 2021—did we need less than THREE quarterbacks to get through the year. Unfortunately, injuries have been synonymous with our quarterbacks. That said, this week’s news of Sam Darnold winning the backup QB spot over Trey Lance makes it highly likely that any future successes—or lack thereof—of the former No.3 overall pick who we moved mountains to draft will happen somewhere outside of Santa Clara.
As we’ve seen (too many times) before, anything can happen when it’s us and the quarterback position. But with the Niners fielding trade offers, it seemed like the right time to talk Trey Lance and the many moving parts that have led to where we are today.
What Happened Developmentally?
Brock Purdy is the simplest answer here, but the real answer is far more complex.
When the Niners traded up to the third overall pick in the 2020 draft, they did so specifically to target their quarterback of the future. Coming off the heels of a disappointing 2020 season in which Garoppolo was in and out of the lineup and started only 6 games (this just one season removed from a year when he blew out his ACL and started only 3 games) the Niners knew that they needed more consistency and upside at the quarterback position. In Trey Lance, they saw someone whose escapability and durability would raise the offense’s floor and whose dual-threat potential and strong arm would increase its ceiling. Their contention window was firmly open, and they felt like they couldn’t waste their opportunity relying on the oft-injured Jimmy G.
That said, a healthy Jimmy G won a lot of games with the Niners, and—given he was set to return to health in 2021—the Niners found themselves in a unique position. Unlike most teams, the Niners did NOT have to play their developmental quarterback right away because they were actually more viable contenders under their incumbent. It’s easy to tell a rebuilding team, “hey, let’s go through the lumps together to let this kid grow” when you’re topping out at six wins and another top ten pick. Much harder when your veterans have just been to the Super Bowl and you’re ready to contend now.
So the Niners sat Lance. He played sparingly (2.5 games as a starter), and we were once again some passing game deficiencies and a banged-up Jimmy G away from another Super Bowl appearance. Theoretically, nothing during that 2021 season altered Lance’s early development. But that’s not entirely true.
Lost in the shuffle and excitement of the crazy multiple-quarterback shredding of the Raiders in the last preseason game of 2021 was the fact that Lance smashed his finger. After a few weeks off, he returned to play in spot duty, but his throwing motion was off, and—as he admitted this summer—this set him back to the point where fixing it became his primary focus of the following off-season. What we also lost when Lance’s finger hit the helmet of that Vegas defender was any real potential for a dual-quarterback system, and thus—any chance for Lance to get meaningful snaps as a rookie. While there were a number of issues that would have made such a system far from a slam dunk—including issues of offensive flow that we saw in the early parts of 2021—the likelihood of Lance getting a handful of snaps here and there on designed runs and option plays was much higher if he was actually available early in the season. But he wasn’t. Perhaps we would have tried it again after Lance got his first injury-replacement start against the Cardinals in week 5, but Lance sprained his knee in that game and didn’t play another meaningful snap until his next injury fill-in start in week 16. For a player who needed reps, tightening of his throwing motion, and better lower body mechanics, finger and knee injuries that kept him from seeing relevant snaps were a tough developmental blow. But at this point, Lance was still 100% our guy.
With so few reps in his first year, and having spent much of the off-season fixing his throwing motion rather than fine-tuning his quarterback skills, Lance entered last year’s training camp as a glorified rookie. Due to his college shutting down football during COVID, he had started only three games of football in two whole years, and now was the time to binge those reps that he so desperately needed. With Jimmy G’s contract up, this was always the chunk of time that the Niners had set aside to let Lance grow, make mistakes, and—hopefully—improve enough by the end of the season to make us dangerous in the playoffs. After starting the opener in a monsoon, Lance broke his ankle on the first offensive drive of week 2, and his season was over. This setback was devastating. Three years of football. Just over four starts. But it wasn’t by any means the nail in the coffin. Until Brock Purdy happened.
We’ll talk more about Purdy later, but when the guy who replaces you (or, technically, replaces your replacement) strings off seven straight wins (including two in the playoffs) that guy is gonna have the inside track to the starting job moving forward. But it’s not just Purdy’s presence that supplanted Lance. It’s how what Purdy does so well meshes naturally with what our offense wants from our quarterbacks.
Purdy, a four-year starter in college, doesn’t need a lot of practice reps and can start games fast. He excels at the quick game—which is the proverbial bread-and-butter of our passing attack—and he’s just slippery enough to extend plays and nullify negatives. Lance, both in practice and in games, is a slow starter who takes a while to get in rhythm. His speed and big arm can threaten defenses in a way that Purdy can’t, but he hasn’t been quick, accurate, or decisive enough on the underneath passes to be consistent in setting up those chunk plays. In the simplest of terms, Lance was drafted to eventually raise the ceiling of our offense with his legs and his strong arm, but —in Purdy—the Niners stumbled upon a quarterback who instead has raised the offense’s floor right now. And for a team that went to the Super Bowl in 2019 and has been knocking on the door every season since the right now of it all is vitally important.
It pains me how much Lance’s journey with the Niners parallels James Wiseman’s with the Warriors. This is the drawback of the “two timelines” strategy but on a smaller scale. It’s not that it can’t work, it’s that your margin for error has shrunk exponentially. Wiseman’s rookie year—when Klay was out and the team was basically running tryouts for who could hack it alongside Steph and Draymond for their championship run the next season—was his time to make mistakes and grow. But it took him a while. Then he got banged up. Then he missed the entirety of his sophomore year. Months later, the ever-closing nature of championship windows meant the Warriors’ patience was up, and Wiseman had to be traded. It didn’t matter that the idea of a 7-3 pogo stick as a rim runner and post protector was exactly what the Warriors needed to elevate their system and cement their status as a front-line contender because that was still just an idea. And the future had finally become too far from the present.
I don’t blame either franchise for either pick. You take your swings, you trust your scouting departments, and you aim for stars at positions you’re lacking in when you’re picking high because you never wanna be picking that high again. The teams that have been lauded for being frugal with their spending and accumulating picks always get back slaps from the analytics bros, but they also don’t win anything. I love draft picks more than most, but when you putter around trying to be conservative and waiting for things to fall into your laps at the behest of “market value spending,” you quickly become the Colts—a team that always had the most cap space and great draft capital but collapsed like a house of cards before ever threatening contention and are now in a top-down rebuild. At the time, the Chiefs “overspent” when they moved up to #10 to draft Patrick Mahomes. So too did the Bills when they hopped to #7 for Josh Allen. You take your swings and you live with the consequences.
But in Wiseman—and now in Lance—we’ve seen two supreme athletes with truncated college careers (Wiseman’s by the NCAA, Lance’s by COVID), who were brought in to revolutionize a system that is already humming at a championship level, but whose lack of immediately meshing play styles and terrible injury luck made them miss the window they were afforded. Because when you’re on a rebuilding team, you can fuck around in the back of the class and eventually figure your shit out. After all, part of this time is for roster culling and everyone else is figuring their shit out with you. But when you’re learning on a contender, you’re in an advanced placement class, and you can get left behind in a hurry. That window for you to prove yourself is minuscule.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from both of these cases is that when you’re swinging for a home run-type player, you’d better make sure that what he can do now has a role in the system you already have in place. If Wiseman excelled as a pick-and-roll target off the jump, he could have at least settled into that particular role as the rest of his game came along. There would have been more patience for his future development because he had a function in the present rotation. Likewise, if Lance was comfortable executing the short game, then the Niners could let him take his time sharpening the physical tools that they drafted him for in the first place. Reps would lead to more reps, which would in turn lead to more development and a better chance of each player reaching their sizeable potential.
I don’t think this means Lance’s career in the NFL is over, and I’m much more bullish on his prospects than Wiseman’s. Lance is still only 23 and younger than nine of the rookies currently on the Niners’ roster. He’s a smart guy and a strong locker room presence who seems to approach the game the right way. And he still has all those physical tools that made him so impressive out of college. But this dude needs reps. We knew that when he was drafted, yet for some reason people are shocked by his lack of development without them. 19 starts into his NFL career, Jalen Hurts was still a guy completing 17 passes a game and turning the ball over on low volume and low efficiency. Josh Allen—the poster child for strong-armed mobile developmental QBs—had 27 NFL starts before his runner-up MVP year. In the last game before he broke out as one of the best QBs in the league, Josh Allen did THIS. With one minute left in the fourth quarter! In the playoffs!
If I told you three years ago that Lance wasn’t going to be a plus-level NFL quarterback four starts into his career, you would have said, “Well, yeah, obviously.” The problem is that you would have hoped he was queuing up his fifth start sometime in 2021, or—at worst—September of 2022. Instead, we’re rapidly approaching September 2023, and Lance is stuck at four career starts for the foreseeable future.
In a system like the Falcons’—where he could realistically start right now—it’s not hard to imagine Lance piloting Arthur Smith’s run-first deep play action offense with bombs to Pitts and London while working off the gravitational pull of Bijan Robinson. Due to that, a Ryan Tannehill-esque mid-career emergence is far from out of the question. In fact, both Tannehill—a converted wide receiver—and the 49ers’ own Alex Smith—who had a bumpy transition as the first modern shotgun spread quarterback to make the move to the NFL—share a number of developmental traits and hurdles with Lance. But the only way Lance fulfills his potential is by playing meaningful snaps in games that matter. And the only place he can get those snaps is outside of Santa Clara.
So What Happens Next?
Despite all this, I think there’s a likely chance we just keep him. Whether that means we move him before the trade deadline when teams are desperate or starting to “evaluate young talent” (aka phone it in) or after the season, I don’t know, but the “move him already!” crowd should chill for a number of reasons.
First off, cutting him is out of the question, as it would mean releasing an asset for no reason at the sport’s most important position AND it would actually lose us money because of the massive dead cap infraction that we’d incur. You just don’t cut guys for no reason unless they are locker room cancers. Unless Lance just demands it—which doesn’t sound like something he’d do—words cannot describe how stupid this would be.
Next, there’s everything I already said about our terrible injury-luck at quarterback. We have an undersized quarterback coming off a major injury and a backup with a history of minor injuries. Having a good third quarterback is evidently much more important to us than everyone else. Brandon Allen is an excellent fourth quarterback. He’s also worse than Trey Lance. And we needed five quarterbacks last year. I’m not pretending we’ll be able to stash Allen on the practice squad as our fourth quarterback, but I’m also not pretending he’s better than Lance.
Early reports on the finances of a trade have been erratic, to say the least, but I believe trading Lance would save us less than $1M this year—since he’s already been paid out his training camp roster bonus—and $5.31M next year. So it makes a lot of sense that Lance—if he’s still QB3 by the end of the year—won’t be on the team a year from now, but the push to move him immediately is lessened due to how little money we’d save this season.
But what does his trade market look like? I’m not sure anyone knows. How little he’s played and how late we are in training camp certainly knocks his current value. Basically, every team—even those with terrible QB rooms (Falcons, Bucs)—have recently named their 2023 starters, and going back on that immediately with a trade for a dude who doesn’t know any of the offense is pretty sus. Additionally, anyone with a young QB who they want to be the face of their franchise won’t bring in Lance because the specter of his ability will be a bit too bright given the very unique circumstances that have led to this situation. Yes, Lance is a former high-draft pick quarterback who lost his job, but he lost it due to injury and hasn’t had time to develop. Unlike someone like Mitch Trubisky—who had four years of starting to show what he couldn’t do—or Zach Wilson—who got 22 starts before he was actively replaced by others on his team and then Aaron Rodgers—Lance hasn’t been able to prove what he can or can’t do. And, just like when drafting a quarterback in the first place, that means his value will vary greatly depending on who you ask.
Also, who are the Niners willing to trade with? They want to do best by Lance but they certainly won’t be trading him to anyone in-division—even if every single one of them would be interested. But what about someone within the conference? While the Falcons have Desmond Ridder—and won’t make a move due to reasons discussed above—Lance is kind of the perfect fit for what they want to do offensively. The Bucs? It would make sense to bring in a guy with better upside than the motley crue they’ve got at quarterback—even if it takes him a while to learn the offense—but they might be keen to #Collapse4Caleb on the back of FrankenBakerTrask before firing Todd Bowles and doing a franchise reset. Washington is probably in the same boat, although Sam Howell has looked surprisingly competent through the preseason. It would be very Washington of them to win just enough games to miss out on the one or two big-name quarterbacks in this upcoming draft. The Vikings? They have a single year left on Kirk Cousins’ deal and a Lance-friendly offense, and having a potential future starter learning under Cousins could be smart—especially after they already jettisoned theoretical incumbent Kellen Mond. And while I expect them to regress this year, they should certainly be competitive enough to be clear of the top handful of picks needed to acquire a bluechipper QB next April. Similarly, the Broncos could use some insurance in case Russ is as washed as he’s looked the past year, but his contract is so overwhelming they’re probably just content to blow up the stadium ala The Dark Knight Rises and rebuild it once the dead cap space clears. After all, we may adopted the darkness, but Sean Payton was born in it. That’s why he did that bounty scandal that everyone forgets about.
Realistically, I think the right situation could net as high as a second-day pick, but I don’t know if that situation exists at the moment. I’d say hold him—at least until the trade deadline, if not through the season. While his value could increase near the trade deadline and will almost certainly drop after the season, the market could still be healthier than it is right now. And you need a healthy market (or someone bidding against themselves) to increase return. The Niners have been very frank about wanting to do what’s best for Lance, so perhaps they move him for a late-round pick just to give him that change of scenery. But if we’re looking at a return in the 5th round or later, I don’t see how we benefit from moving him now versus waiting it out. For all the reasons I’ve already said, the kid can still get better. And while Purdy should 100% be our starter given what he’s accomplished, it seems foolish to move on from Lance for minimal gain.
It’s also worth noting somewhere here that if Purdy wasn’t around and this was a competition for the starting job, I think Lance would have an edge over Darnold. When it comes to the starter, you can take a bit more of a swing on upside and trajectory when everything else is relatively equal. But with a backup, you’re looking to mitigate damage and prevent the floor from falling out. At this point in their respective developments, Darnold is just much more experienced and the safer option.
If Lance is a guy who takes a bit of time to warm up and needs practice reps to succeed, he’s not getting those as the backup QB. Although I’m sure it’s far from most peoples’ minds at the moment, running the scout team once the season starts may actually be the best way for Lance to develop (other than starting, obviously). Backups don’t get many live reps in practice, and—if all goes according to plan—they don’t play at all in games. While QB3 plays even less in games, they get a ton of reps running the scout team through the week, and—as stated ad nauseam—anything that gets Lance more reps aids in his development. It’s the consolation prize of all consolation prizes, but it’s something.
While this is undoubtedly bummer news for our fanbase and for a dude who I think we’ve all been rooting for, try not to get too down on Trey or the Niners. It’s easy to poke holes at some of our high-profile misses when you forget how many lower-profile dudes we’ve unearthed and developed into All-Pros. There’s a very real chance we have the single most talented roster in the NFL this year, and—quite literally—you can’t have the most talented roster in the NFL and be as bad at talent evaluation as the comment boards say.
The last thing I’ll leave you with is this. Over the past six seasons—or the entirety of the time Shanahan and Lynch have helmed the Niners—these are the quarterbacks who have piloted their teams to conference championship games and the number of champ games they’ve played in:
5 - Patrick Mahomes
3 - Jimmy Garoppolo/Brock Purdy, Tom Brady
2 - Aaron Rodgers, Joe Burrow
1 - Drew Brees, Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Matt Stafford, Ryan Tannehill, Nick Foles, Case Keenum, Jared Goff, Blake Bortles
That’s four slam-funk first-ballot Hall of Famers, five of the past six league MVPs, and the top four MVP vote-getters of 2022. And Jimmy G/Brock Purdy have combined for more appearances than almost all of them. This is despite ShanaLynch taking over what was unquestionably the worst team and roster in the NFL when they arrived.
We have proven we can win without elite quarterback play. Perhaps we’re the only team that’s proven that in today’s NFL. And while Lance was meant to be that elite quarterback, break that habit, and make things easier for us, hopefully, that number next to Purdy can keep increasing. Maybe—a year (or ten) from now—his name won’t look so weird in the company he’s surrounded by. Only time will tell. But for now, we’re in good hands. So take a deep breath, relax, and get excited for September 10th.
Go Niners 👍🏈