49ers’ Shanahan made huge mistake with Trey Lance, no matter what

Sometimes the obvious bears repeating. Whatever happens next with QB-in-exile Trey Lance, the 49ers massively screwed it up. There’s no way around that. 

If Lance is a real-deal NFL starter, Kyle Shanahan and the Niners utterly failed to give him the reps most quarterbacks need to grow. They were cavalier about his development, and eager to toss him to the curb when given the chance. As Bomani Jones pointed out last week, the Bills gave a longer leash to Nathan Peterman than the 49ers did to Lance. Zach Wilson, whom the Jets took with the pick before Lance, will go down as one of the biggest busts in draft history. He’s thrown six times as many NFL passes as Lance. Obviously some of that is due to injuries, but even the Jets are letting Wilson hang around as the backup this year.

It seems probable that the Niners are making the right call about Lance now, though: Not one other NFL team was reportedly willing to give up even a fifth-round pick for Lance this offseason. In his extremely limited regular-season action, Lance has done nothing to show that he’s a worthy starter for a team in its Super Bowl window, although that’s not really fair to a player who has — again — made just four starts, one of which was in a monsoon and another where he broke his ankle in the first quarter.

But if Shanahan and John Lynch are right about Lance now, then there’s no getting around this: In 2021, they were very, very, very wrong. They were about as wrong as it’s possible to be in pro sports, and more wrong than it’s usually possible to be while still keeping your job. Shanahan sometimes talked about Lance like he was saddled with him, but no one forced Shanahan to give up an enormous haul for Lance.

Despite the foibles of the Lance era and the near-constant drumbeat of injuries, the 49ers have been relatively lucky over the last few years, drafting Pro Bowlers in later rounds and making canny trades for reclamation projects. (You could also credit that to brilliant roster construction everywhere but quarterback.) That’s the real gut punch of the Lance trade. Shanahan could have stood pat at No. 12 in the 2021 draft, and the results at quarterback over the last two years may have looked exactly the same: a heavy dose of Jimmy Garoppolo, followed by the emergence of Brock Purdy.

Shanahan deserves a ton of credit for building these Niners into a well-oiled machine, but his successes elsewhere on the roster only invite more scrutiny of the Lance disaster. The 49ers were at the front end of their Super Bowl window, with an expensive, veteran-heavy roster, so why draft a raw project who barely played in college? Earlier this offseason, the team tried to push the line that they had been ready to “live with his mistakes” and develop Lance before he broke his ankle in 2022. Albert Breer pushed the same line Thursday morning, claiming the Niners — a team so all-in on its 2022 roster that it made a huge trade for a running back — had “planned to ride out bumps” with Lance last year.

That makes no sense. In addition to the glaring fact that the Niners were so confident in Lance they brought Garoppolo back as his backup, punting a year to QB growing pains with such a loaded roster otherwise would have been malpractice. In what world is wasting a year of Nick Bosa on a rookie deal and Trent Williams at age 34 a good idea?

On the flip side, Shanahan has rightly earned a ton of credit for crafting a nearly QB-proof offense around Purdy, a perfect marriage of talent and scheme. Purdy has said that playing quarterback in the NFL is easier than it was in college. If Shanahan was able to do that for Mr. Irrelevant straight out of Iowa State, why mortgage the farm for a quarterback in the first place? Seen through this lens, Purdy’s success doesn’t say much in particular about Purdy; it says more about Shanahan, who finally mastered the plug-and-play offense after years of trying. Even Lynch admitted that Lance and Shanahan made limited sense as a pairing. “I give him a lot of credit because we didn’t tailor an offense around him that highlights a lot of the things Trey is able to do,” Lynch said Thursday morning.

None of this whiplash is really fair to Lance, who has thrown about a single NFL season’s worth of game passes since his senior year of high school. It’s not his fault that a win-now team made a huge trade for a project, then cut bait the second the project faltered. But even in Bay Area sports, Lance is peerless at getting screwed by circumstance. Jordan Poole and James Wiseman were also thrown under the bus by a team that wasn’t ready to let them grow at their own pace, but they’ll receive heavy minutes and a chance to prove themselves next year. Lance doesn’t even have that opportunity as of now. Unless Brandon Allen beats him out for the No. 3 spot, or Brock Purdy and Sam Darnold both get hurt, Lance will languish on ice in Santa Clara for the next five months. Based on the 49ers’ recent history, you can’t totally rule out either happening.