How Trey Lance Will Help the 49ers Beat the Packers

If the 49ers don't use all of their offensive weapons against the Packers this Sunday, the 49ers could lose.

Kyle Shanahan has a conundrum.

The way I see it, he probably wants to play Trey Lance Sunday night against the Packers, probably has wanted to play him all season. That's why Shanahan gave him two snaps on the opening drive of Week 1, plus the first touchdown throw.

But it seems Shanahan is struggling to sell the need to play Lance to his team -- that's probably why Lance didn't play against the Eagles. The 49ers are a veteran team that went to the Super Bowl with Jimmy Garoppolo when Lance was a 19-year old at North Dakota State. Garoppolo still is overwhelmingly popular in the locker room. And now they're 2-0 with him as the starter.

But they've been doing the bare minimum on offense. They're not getting George Kittle the ball down the field, nor are they getting Brandon Aiyuk the ball hardly at all. He has one catch in two games. And they're keeping their most dangerous weapon -- Lance -- on the bench.

If the 49ers don't use all of their offensive weapons against the Packers this Sunday, the 49ers could lose a home game they should win, because the Packers have Aaron Rodgers, and the Lions and Eagles don't. Fortunately for Shanahan, he has the perfect opportunity to sell the Lance Package to his team this week.

All the 49ers top-five running backs currently are injured. Their starter Sunday night most likely will be rookie Trey Sermon, who has one career carry and left last week's game with a concussion. The rest of the active running backs will be practice squad players.

If the 49ers can't run the ball well and there's no threat of play action, they will lose. They have to run the ball to beat Rodgers.

And Lance is the 49ers' best healthy ball carrier. Shanahan can put him in the game to boost the run game if it's struggling.

And the Packers won't be able to stop Lance from running. They have a terrible defense. It will look like Colin Kaepernick running circles around them all over again.

And to keep the Packers defense honest, Shanahan will call a couple play-action deep passes for Lance. And if he hits them, his teammates will see how much more dangerous the offense can be with him as opposed to Garoppolo.

And the 49ers will win 27-21.

And the transition from Garoppolo to Lance will begin.


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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.