One lesson from 49ers’ Trey Lance saga: 2021 was a bad year to gamble on a QB

In acknowledging the franchise’s misfire on Trey Lance, 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch on Friday emphasized they were trying to be aggressive and proactive in drafting a young quarterback with little experience but plenty of upside.
“We took a shot and it didn’t work out,” Lynch said in a television interview during the 49ers’ preseason finale against the Los Angeles Chargers.
“Obviously we took our shot and it didn’t work out,” Shanahan said after the game. He used variations of “take a shot” two more times in discussing the Lance saga.
In hindsight, however, 2021 seems like a particularly poor year to take such a high-stakes gamble.
It was the year the pandemic virtually shut down the offseason. The NFL Scouting Combine was canceled. There were no pre-draft visits by prospects. Team officials like Shanahan and Lynch could attend pro-day workouts, but everything was done at a distance. There were no dinners or film sessions with prospects.
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The oddball circumstances had all sorts of repercussions.
1. The biggest was that Lance and North Dakota State played a single game in 2020, which left him with just one full season as a starter before heading into the draft. Lance’s lone game in 2020, against Central Arkansas in which he completed only 50 percent of his passes, may have been the worst of his tenure, one viewed by the 49ers as an outlier.
“There was probably as much pressure on him in that game as anybody in any game except for maybe the championship game,” assistant general manager Adam Peters said in 2021. “It was really a one-off. You can’t throw it out, but you can weigh it less, I think.”
Kyle Shanahan knew. Some of his players might have too. Sam Darnold had earned the No. 2 spot under center.
Which meant Trey Lance was out.
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2. Few 49ers officials ever saw Lance play a college game. Even in a normal year, North Dakota State doesn’t get much traffic from NFL teams, who will send several different scouts and front office officials, and sometimes the general manager, to bigger schools like Alabama, Ohio State and Michigan during a season.
The pandemic made it difficult to even attend Lance’s showcase game in 2020. Ethan Waugh, then the 49ers’ director of college scouting, was on hand. So was the team’s area scout. Peters, however, couldn’t be there because COVID-19 protocols were in place and he would have had to quarantine before returning to the facility.
3. The 49ers never saw Lance run. The combine was wiped out and he chose to do position work only at his two pro-day events in Fargo. As a result, he never ran a 40-yard dash, which now seems like a massive omission given how much the 49ers planned to use Lance as a runner early on.
Just a few hours after informing Lance he was the 49ers’ choice with the No. 3 pick in 2021, Shanahan first cited the quarterback’s decision-making and “his natural ability to play the position, which was very impressive.” Next he noted Lance’s running ability, which Shanahan saw as a way to counterbalance the quarterback’s biggest shortcoming, his lack of college snaps.
The strategy heading into the 2021 season was to sprinkle Lance into games while leaning on his legs. The idea was that it would keep defenses off balance while giving Lance valuable experience he could parlay into a full-time role the following season.
“I didn’t want to throw him into the heat of battle right away, but I thought he needed to play,” Shanahan said Friday. “So we tried to figure out every way to do that.”
The plan didn’t work. In his first NFL start in Arizona in Week 5, Lance ran the ball 16 times, nine of them inside runs, and he emerged with a knee injury. The following season he broke his ankle in the first quarter in Week 2 when he encountered a Seattle Seahawks linebacker on a designed run up the middle.
That injury wiped out the rest of the season. And in conjunction with a 2021 broken finger that muddled his rookie season, it meant Lance started his third year in essentially the same spot he was in after he was drafted — having had few in-game repetitions and badly in need of playing time.
With Brock Purdy and Sam Darnold ahead of him on the depth chart, it became clear those snaps would be hard to get. Which is why the 49ers opted to grant Lance’s wish and trade him to the Dallas Cowboys.
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The play on which he was injured against the Seahawks — up the middle out of the shotgun — had been a bread-and-butter play for Lance at North Dakota State, one in which he’d routinely either ran past or ran over would-be tacklers in the Missouri Valley Football Conference. He looked entirely different against NFL defenders. Lance didn’t show much getaway speed on outside runs. So Shanahan turned to inside runs, which exposed Lance to bigger bodies and bigger hits.
Many long-time NFL evaluators were critical of the 49ers’ aggressive move to get Lance with the third pick when it occurred.
Former 49ers general manager Scot McCloughan was bullish on Lance and likened him to, among others, Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. But he had three other 2021 quarterbacks rated more highly — Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields and Zach Wilson, in that order — and gave Lance a 1.3 grade, which means he thought his most appropriate draft position was the last third of the first round.
“Would I have spent two (first-round picks) for him?” McCloughan said at the time. “Absolutely not. Because there are way too many unknowns. Way too many.”
Former New Orleans Saints and Miami Dolphins general manager Randy Mueller, who now writes for The Athletic, said the fact that Lance never ran a 40-yard dash was problematic, but it ranked far down the list of reasons why Lance was a reach with the third pick. He said Lance’s body of work in college would have made him a tremendous gamble at pick No. 12, the 49ers’ original draft spot that year.
“It was all the other skill sets for me,” Mueller said in a phone interview this week. “I never saw an NFL passer, I never saw the accuracy, I never saw the poise in the pocket. Just because that’s not what they do there. … None of it ever would have equated to even thinking about picking a guy (that high). And trading up to do it was somewhat reckless, in my opinion.”
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Shanahan and Lynch have long said they jumped up to pick No. 3 because they wanted to give themselves the opportunity to take the next best quarterback after Lawrence and Wilson, who seemed like locks to go 1-2 that year.
“I believe to this day, if we hadn’t taken (Lance), someone would’ve right behind us,” Lynch said Friday. “I think the next pick.”
Mueller acknowledged that the 49ers weren’t alone in thinking Lance was a top-five prospect. But it’s not a move he would have made.
“I think it’s just a lesson in inexperience more than anything,” he said. “I think those guys are probably good evaluators. We don’t know that yet. An experienced GM or team builder — I just don’t think would have that same nonchalance to (say), ‘Hey, we’re going to gamble at that level.’”
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