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Kyle Shanahan Says He Doesn't Know Who the Starting Quarterback Will Be Next Season

Probably not what Trey Lance wants to hear.

Grant Cohn

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Admit it. You want to stay in the moment and appreciate this season, because it's one of the most intriguing in 49ers history. But at the same time, you can't help but think ahead to next season and wonder who the starting quarterback will be.

Will the starter be Brock Purdy or Trey Lance? At the beginning of this year, the starter was Lance, but then he got hurt, and players aren't supposed to lose their starting jobs due to injury. Purdy has played so incredibly well -- better than any rookie ever. Will he take the starting job if he keeps playing well in the playoffs, or has he taken it already?

"I don't even know what year it is after this season is over," Kyle Shanahan said Monday on a conference call, dodging the question. "I'm trying to think about how to get them ready for Wednesday, man. So that's a great question. Honestly, I don't look ahead like that. We've got a number of big games in front of us."

This answer indicates that the starting job for next season is wide open and the 49ers won't simply give it back to Lance by default. This might seem obvious by now, but it's a big deal, because it shows how well Purdy has played. He's giving the 49ers everything they hoped Lance would give them. So if Purdy continues to play this well and if he wins a few playoff games as a rookie, why would the 49ers bench him? How could they even justify it?

It's possible the 49ers will have a true quarterback competition this offseason, which would be phenomenal. That seems like a fair outcome. But if Purdy wins the Super Bowl, the competition might be over before it starts.

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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.

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