The 49ers Missed on Trey Lance, But the Gamble Still Made Sense at the Time

San Francisco lost a big bet, but hedged with Brock Purdy and survived anyway.

Amid all the hand-wringing over Trey Lance’s failing to beat out Sam Darnold for the 49ers’ No. 2 quarterback spot and, thus, placing himself on the trading block, we are failing to recognize the root of the problem.

After the football world largely graduated intellectually from a phase in which we all blamed the lack of a draft pick’s success on the players themselves, holding them up to numbers and round standards they didn’t choose for themselves, we seem to have bolted feverishly in the other direction. Now, we’re more regularly blaming the general manager and the coach for failure to develop, which, while closer to the central truth, is still missing the point.

Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch’s drafting of Lance (and trading a massive haul of picks for the privilege) was supposed to be a slam dunk because Shanahan is a “quarterback guru” or “quarterback whisperer.” I am as guilty as any person on this earth in perpetuating that myth, when the developments of this week serve only to underscore the only tangible fact about the draft (and maybe the NFL in general): No one is infallible. There is no such thing as a guru, or a sage, or maybe even a certified “genius” in our sport. There are people who are sometimes, more often, better than others. There are windows of time when one person’s scheme is uniquely effective against a certain trend of defensive schemes or the current build of this generation’s defensive personnel.

That’s it.

Once we’ve accepted that fact, Lance becomes another gamble. The 49ers lost but also hedged those losses by drafting and developing their current starter, Brock Purdy, who, had he not torn his UCL in the playoffs last year, may very well have started in a Super Bowl.

Lance threw only 102 passes in his first two NFL season :: Stan Szeto/USA TODAY Sports

Maybe I need to accept that sports is just the place for our animus. That it’s entertainment, and we like sitting back and calling something or someone stupid. This is the safest arena in which to do so, since our bosses at work don’t normally appreciate that kind of feedback (my boss also happens to be, like, 6'10" and would demolish me in a fistfight), and our cousins would be pretty upset if we lobbed that kind of grenade at the next family cookout. But this kind of mythmaking has the habit of bleeding into our everyday lives. This is as good an opportunity to nip it in the bud as any.

At the time of the selection it seemed like a defensible choice. We were in the era of the alien quarterback. Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen were mauling teams, and Lance had a similar makeup.

We were also in the era of Shanahan’s offense repopulating throughout the NFL. I had written at the time, based on conversations with people familiar with that decision, that Shanahan wanted to take the next step. He wanted to add quarterback mobility to a run game that already gave itself such an entrenched advantage. He wanted to try to break most NFL defenses.

I know that Shanahan became enamored with potential. He chose Lance over Mac Jones and after Zach Wilson. Jones best fit Shanahan’s ideals for a quarterback, but Shanahan was trying to break his own process and distance himself from the patterns that created a great offense, as it was being homed in on by teams that spent their entire offseasons studying it.

Through that process, Lance got hurt and the backups played well. To this I say: It could have been much worse.

If I wasn’t worried about being labeled a Shanahan sycophant by the end of this article I’d ask how many teams would have been able to survive that kind of mistake in real time and be no worse off, that this was organizational brilliance. But we’re trying to cut back on the hyperbole, remember? No one is really brilliant. We’re all just playing football.

Shanahan missed. And then while he tried to fix it, the 49ers continued to be highly competitive, which took away from the kind of time some struggling teams have to repair a prospect who clearly needs more playing time. Now Lance can go elsewhere and get fixed. Or Lance can hang in San Francisco and try to fix himself.

Humans miss on things all the time. Thinking of Shanahan as human, like the rest of us, helps. Because it’s true.