Should the 49ers Have Kept Trey Lance?

The 49ers are one play away from Joshua Dobbs or Brandon Allen starting games for them.

Grant Cohn | Apr 2, 2024

Oct 8, 2023; Santa Clara, California, USA; Dallas Cowboys quarterback Trey Lance (15) jogs off of / Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers had their reasons to trade Trey Lance when they did, but now their backup quarterback is Joshua Dobbs. Wouldn't Lance be better?

The 49ers trade Lance because they didn't need him to start anymore -- Brock Purdy had taken his job. And they didn't need Lance to be the backup either, because they signed Sam Darnold and preferred him. So they traded Lance during last year's preseason to the Dallas Cowboys for a fourth-round pick -- a decent return for a quarterback who has started just four games in the NFL.

No one on the 49ers missed Lance last season because Purdy stayed healthy and played well. But head coach Kyle Shanahan never has kept a starting quarterback healthy for two seasons in a row -- he has a long history of getting quarterbacks injured. And if he misses time next season, Sam Darnold won't replace him, because he recently signed with the Minnesota Vikings.

Which means the 49ers are one play away from Joshua Dobbs or Brandon Allen starting games for them. And both of them may be decent backup quarterbacks. Dobbs certainly had some good moments last season when he started 12 games, winning 3 of them. But wouldn't Lance be a better option?

If the 49ers knew they would lose Darnold after just one year, would they have signed him and traded Lance? Because they got nothing from Darnold and then he left, and now they're stuck with Dobbs and Allen.

The 49ers used to talk about how strong their quarterback room was. It would be much stronger now if it still had Lance in it.

Published Apr 2, 2024

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.