Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect Friday’s news that the 49ers traded Trey Lance to the Dallas Cowboys.
Two years after the San Francisco 49ers traded four picks (including three first-rounders) to draft him, Trey Lance was demoted to QB3 and shipped out of town, and that’s about all anyone can know for sure about him—because we sure don’t know much about him as a football player.
San Francisco head coach Kyle Shanahan named Sam Darnold the backup quarterback to Brock Purdy on Wednesday, ending a competition between Darnold and Lance that had been going throughout training camp. By Friday, the Niners had an offer from Dallas: The Cowboys get Lance on the final two seasons of his rookie deal, the 49ers get a fourth-round pick in the 2024 draft, and Lance gets a fresh start away from San Francisco, where his career ended before it ever truly began.
“We took our shot and it didn’t work out,” Shanahan told reporters Friday night after his team’s preseason game against the Chargers. “That’s on us for that.”
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With Lance’s time in San Francisco now over, the predraft trade to acquire him will go down among the worst in NFL history purely by outcome. Because Lance has been more absent than bad, and because the 49ers have been a good team since drafting him, it’s easy to gloss over how much San Francisco lost by using three high picks on a quarterback who has given it 102 pass attempts over two years. Hindsight is not the fairest way to evaluate draft choices, but it is reality, and that reality is pretty brutal for San Francisco. Lance trails all four of the other quarterbacks drafted in the 2021 first round, plus third-round pick Davis Mills, by a margin of over 3,000 passing yards in career production. Zach Wilson has been five times as productive as Lance.
The opportunity cost also looks massive. The 12 players drafted shortly after Lance include seven Pro Bowlers, including wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase, tight end Kyle Pitts, offensive tackle Penei Sewell, cornerback Patrick Surtain II, linebacker Micah Parsons, offensive tackle Rashawn Slater, and quarterback Mac Jones, whom Shanahan was rumored to be interested in leading up to the draft. The Dolphins used the three picks they got from the 49ers to draft a productive and dynamic receiver in Jaylen Waddle and as trade compensation for two star veterans in wide receiver Tyreek Hill and pass rusher Bradley Chubb. The Eagles, tangentially involved after Miami traded them San Francisco’s original no. 12 pick to go up to no. 6 for Waddle, traded in turn with Dallas to move to no. 10, where they selected receiver DeVonta Smith, who has 2,112 receiving yards through two seasons. The Cowboys took Parsons, probably the best non-quarterback of the first round, with the 49ers’ original pick at no. 12. It’s ugly.
Lance was missing from practice as the 49ers began their camp session on Wednesday afternoon. He’s likely to want a fresh start somewhere else with a more meaningful path to playing time, but that’s easier said than done. Lance isn’t getting cut; he has $5.3 million in guaranteed salary due next year that would accelerate onto this year’s salary cap if he were released, which the 49ers can’t afford. Besides, did you see the NFC championship game?! San Francisco knows better than any team in the league the value of a third-string quarterback. The 49ers might prefer to keep Lance on the roster, but his willingness to be QB3 could complicate that.
So it probably comes down to a trade and what the 49ers can get for him. If we’re being honest, that is anyone’s guess, for the same reason it’s hard to totally blame the 49ers for trading up for Lance in the first place, regardless of how badly it worked out. Two years into his NFL career, Trey Lance is more of an idea than a player. We shouldn’t ignore that Lance couldn’t win a quarterback competition with Darnold, but that battle was more about who’d offer a solid floor as a backup than about who has the highest ceiling, something another team might be more interested in. He was an FCS quarterback who played one full season at North Dakota State and entered the NFL having thrown 640 passes since middle school. He chipped a bone in his finger during his rookie preseason and couldn’t throw normally all year, then broke his ankle in his second start in 2022. You can see pretty much whatever you want in that, whether it’s untapped potential in a player who’s still about a year younger than Will Levis or a total bust drafted in the hubris of believing it’s possible to mold a player like a ball of clay. That makes trade talks fairly tricky.
The Athletic’s Dianna Russini reported that the Vikings were interested in a potential trade earlier this offseason before talks fell apart. With Kirk Cousins on the last year of his deal and head coach Kevin O’Connell’s offensive background, it’s hard to find a better would-be destination for Lance than Minnesota. But until Dallas emerged as a surprise suitor, no other interested parties with a pathway to immediate playing time seemed interested in trading much for Lance. Shanahan told reporters on Friday that getting a fourth in return was “better than we anticipated.”
Trading up for top quarterback prospects is always a high-risk, high-reward game. That’s magnified when the prospect in question is especially talented and especially unproven, and when the cost is as high as it was for San Francisco. Either you roll the dice or you don’t, and if you do, getting the kind of raw deal the 49ers and Lance have gotten during their time together just might be the cost of doing business. I don’t think history will look too kindly on the decision to trade so much for someone who’d played so little, but I also think that Lance had two injuries in two years and if the 49ers hadn’t drafted him, someone else would have. Perhaps if they hadn’t made the trade with the Dolphins, Lance would have been available for them to take at no. 12 and this wouldn’t look anywhere near as bad, but that seems unlikely. We’re now 742 passes into Lance’s post-middle-school football career, and there’s no lesson here. Just a trade that worked out very, very badly and a player at the end of a very, very unlucky chapter.
