Kawakami: Trey Lance and the 10 moments of doubt and recalculation that doomed his 49ers career

It was, relative to all other immensely expensive acquisitions and long-term quarterback plans, a stunningly quick fall for Trey Lance’s 28-month 49ers career — all ebb, very little flow.
He outlasted Jimmy Garoppolo, the incumbent Lance was drafted to replace, but only by five months and zero regular-season weeks. He started four games. He lost a position battle in two of his three 49ers training camps. He suffered multiple injuries. He never seemed completely comfortable as QB1.
In the end, the football reality is that Lance lost out to the last player picked in the 2022 draft (Brock Purdy) and to a QB now on his third team (Sam Darnold). Whenever Kyle Shanahan is ready to tell the whole truth, he’ll probably admit that Lance wasn’t even his choice to be QB3 this season over Brandon Allen, which all is moot now after Lance was traded to the Cowboys for a fourth-round pick.
And that’s probably only about 10 percent of the stuff that Lance went through, suffered from, got defeated by and couldn’t survive during his 49ers tenure.
It’s a sad story. It’s in some ways an unfair story — Lance did nothing wrong here and has every chance to develop into a good NFL QB elsewhere. He didn’t force the 49ers to rewire their whole franchise to make way for him. It’s more their failure than his, really. He worked hard, got along with everybody on the team, dealt with the spotlight forced on him by the trade and his No. 3 overall selection in 2021 and battled through multiple injuries.
But football isn’t about fairness. It’s about playing the best guys. It’s about taking advantage of whatever opportunity you get, even if it’s not much. It’s about winning and losing. When we talk about Lance’s 49ers career in 10 years, I’m not even sure what moment we’ll remember. A sizzling practice day as a rookie in 2021? That one big-time throw against the Texans? Anything? I don’t know. Maybe nothing except the Concept of Lance, which created a lot of drama but not much practical football success.
That’s also why Lance’s exit, for all the hubbub this summer and especially last weekend, wasn’t very surprising. There were signs from the beginning of the adventure that this moonshot might not work out. Actually, there were signs from before the beginning.
Here’s a look at 10 moments that set the tone for Lance and the 49ers’ uncomfortable relationship and were premonitions for the ending we just experienced:
1. Before the 2021 draft, Shanahan and Lynch decided they needed a quality young QB for salary-cap purposes, not that they needed this QB.
They did it backward. Usually, if a team goes all-in on a player in the draft, it falls in love first, then figures out how much it’s going to cost. That way, the team won’t get stuck if it can’t find the right player after making a big move up. Guess what happened this time? The 49ers, holding the No. 12 pick after an injury-ravaged 2020 season, decided to jump up to get one of the top guys in what was thought to be a draft loaded with star QBs. They just didn’t know which one at the time of the trade.
You can understand the logic. With many of their stars coming up on contract extensions and with major questions about Garoppolo after another injury-wrecked season (and with some lingering regret that the 49ers turned down Tom Brady and stuck with Garoppolo the previous offseason), Shanahan and Lynch were right to conclude that a great young QB on a rookie contract would be perfect for the situation.
On Friday, Lynch said they tried to move up to any slot where they could land a good QB, but it was Miami at No. 3 that made the deal several weeks before the draft — costing the 49ers their 2021, 2022 and 2023 first-round picks and a third-rounder in 2022. So Shanahan and Lynch had a while to decide between Lance, Mac Jones and Justin Fields because they knew that Trevor Lawrence and Zach Wilson were going 1-2.
Oops. This was absolutely the wrong year to do this, as Matt Barrows points out, due to pandemic restrictions that canceled the combine and prevented much up-close scouting of everybody, especially Lance’s abbreviated 2020 season playing on a team almost nobody scouts heavily.
And once the 49ers were committed to this path, it was impossible to pivot out when the most talented QB available didn’t quite fit the 49ers’ system. Or their timetable.
2. Shanahan probably was ready to select Jones, a much more developed pocket passer but much less talented than Lance, and only settled on Lance after taking a long weekend to reconsider.
The presumed Shanahan/personnel staff split between Jones and Lance was a bad sign, whomever Shanahan decided to pick. It was cordial, and everybody agreed that it was a close call. Lynch has said Shanahan needed some time alone to settle on Lance over Jones. But it also meant that neither QB had the across-the-board support. That some powerful people in the building wouldn’t be all the way invested with the QB they took. (Fields might end up the best of all three QBs, but it’s clear that the 49ers didn’t consider him an option. It’s likely that Fields wasn’t considered a strong pocket-passing prospect.)
If the 49ers had taken Jones, the personnel staff would’ve grumbled a bit every time he threw a wobbly pass or couldn’t escape the pass rush. And once the 49ers took Lance, Shanahan had reason to second-guess the decision every time he saw Lance hesitate on a throw and screw up a read. This is not about Shanahan privately backing away from the Lance pick, by the way. He’s never done that, to my knowledge. On Friday, he went out of his way to take responsibility for the decision. But splits like this happen all the time, in every round. It was just a bad omen that it happened for this specific pick.
Lance already had many hurdles to clear early in his career — his inexperience, his injuries, the pressure to not screw things up for a team hunting for a Super Bowl — but one of the toughest was competing with what Shanahan imagined Jones could’ve done in a 49ers uniform.
3. Shanahan tried to get Lance into games as a rookie by using a two-QB system with Garoppolo, but the run-pass option plays never really worked, Garoppolo and the first-team offense didn’t like the shuffling, and Shanahan quickly abandoned the idea.
The 49ers didn’t quite call this a training camp competition between Garoppolo and Lance in 2021, but that was mostly because Lance, despite some flashes, never played well enough in his rookie camp to challenge Garoppolo. Then Lance hurt his finger late in the preseason, which wiped out the possibility of Lance moving past Garoppolo even later in the season.
The 49ers still wanted to get Lance into games as a red-zone threat or just to expand the offense’s options and get him some experience. But even in camp, those plays never looked explosive. Frankly, Lance, a 1,000-yard rusher in his only full season at North Dakota State, just didn’t look like a natural runner at this level. And he couldn’t turn the corner on NFL linebackers and safeties. (Again, remember that the 49ers never got a 40 time on Lance in the pre-draft period.)
When the 49ers ended up using these plays out of necessity in Lance’s two emergency starts as a rookie and at the beginning of 2022, they weren’t part of a souped-up Shanahan system. They just looked like remnants of a limited college offense and performed about as well. Which is the very last thing Shanahan ever wants his offense to be.
4. The 49ers’ inability to trade Garoppolo in the 2022 offseason put a slight pause on a full commitment to Lance’s QB1 ascension.
Shanahan didn’t officially name Lance as the starter until the day before the opening of 2022 camp. Some of that was just Shanahan’s natural coy approach to pending trades, and some of that was about a nagging thought that this veteran team might need a more reliable QB — and why write off Garoppolo when he was still on the 49ers’ roster a few months after he had led the 49ers to the NFC Championship Game?
Lance could’ve silenced all of this with a lights-out performance in that camp, which would’ve cemented him as the 49ers’ Franchise QB. But that was the problem and the growing tension. He needed to be lights-out at a time when he wasn’t at all ready to deliver like that.
5. Lance struggled throughout the 2022 camp, which was magnified by the sight of Garoppolo working out at the same time on a side field; then the 49ers brought back Garoppolo on a restructured contract as a hedge against Lance.
We don’t need to belabor this one: Lance at times looked OK in that camp, but mostly he looked unprepared to be a winning NFL QB. He’d have to work it out on the fly, and the 49ers would have to bear with it. But the camp struggles led to two huge recalibrations: The 49ers brought back Garoppolo to be QB2 and they jumped Purdy to QB3 and released Nate Sudfeld, who was signed to be Lance’s backup.
The 49ers lost their opener in Chicago and then Lance broke his ankle in the first quarter of Week 2. After that victory over Seattle, his teammates were definitely sad for Lance. But they also were back on familiar territory with Garoppolo at QB and that released all of the tension that had been building inside 49ers HQ.
It wasn’t hard to see. Remember that giddy celebration in the end zone after Garoppolo’s touchdown sneak in the Seattle game?
Second TD of the day for @JimmyG_10!
📺 #SEAvsSF on @NFLonFOX pic.twitter.com/onYYke7jE2
— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) September 18, 2022
6. The 49ers started winning (again) with Garoppolo.
From the Seattle game through the Miami game in early December, when Garoppolo suffered his own injury, the 49ers were 7-3 last year in the games Garoppolo played a majority of the snaps. Would they have done the same with Lance? Maybe, but not likely. Which almost certainly caused a practical shift in the 49ers’ thinking at QB.
They took the shot with Lance, but they couldn’t keep waiting for him. They had Garoppolo winning games. With all the talent they had accumulated, maybe they didn’t need a superstar QB. They sure didn’t need an unreliable one. Yes, at some point that fall, the 49ers’ front office had internal discussions about the prospect of trying to keep Garoppolo as the starter into 2023, even when Lance was healthy.
And Shanahan was also intrigued enough by his new rookie QB that he told associates back then that he’d never been more eager to see what he had in a third-string QB than he was to get a look at Purdy.
If you’re looking for the existential moment when Shanahan mentally started moving on from Lance, this might’ve been it.
7. After Garoppolo’s early-December injury, Purdy got his chance and did everything the 49ers had wanted to see from Lance.
This wasn’t existential, this was total. If Shanahan hadn’t been so high on Purdy going into this emergency situation, maybe everything wouldn’t have been changed by Purdy’s 8-0 run (counting the Miami game when he subbed in for Garoppolo, and not counting the NFC Championship Game against the Eagles when Purdy was hurt in the first quarter). If Purdy’s teammates hadn’t been intrigued by his scout-team reps in practice, maybe they wouldn’t have been so prepared to recognize this was now his offense.
But all of those things were true. And none of it happened in a vacuum — once Purdy looked so comfortable in Shanahan’s system and won so many games, the entire franchise knew that Garoppolo’s time had come and gone and Lance’s time might’ve run out, too.
Kyle Shanahan, 49ers players process Trey Lance's rapid exit: 'The NFL moves quick'
8. The 49ers signed Darnold and Allen last offseason and Shanahan started raving about both.
Three things: Shanahan clearly didn’t trust Lance as his main insurance in case Purdy couldn’t make it back for the start of the regular season, so he brought in Darnold; given all that, Darnold likely knew he had an odds-on shot for QB2 ahead of Lance if Purdy was healthy; and Allen was Cincinnati’s QB2 for a few years, so why would he want to be the 49ers’ QB4?
OK, I don’t think either came to the 49ers with a guarantee that they’d end up ahead of Lance. But they both probably had an inkling that it’d take something special from Lance to hold onto QB2, and that if he didn’t, he’d be gone and Darnold and Allen would be set up right behind Purdy on the depth chart.
9. Lance essentially had to outplay Darnold in camp, and that didn’t happen.
I don’t necessarily think the QB2 competition was rigged against Lance, but it wasn’t set up kindly for him, either. After toying with the run-pass option packages for Lance in his first two camps, Shanahan ditched that stuff entirely this year. Nothing was built for Lance. It’s built for Purdy now. And Lance had to compete with Darnold on those terms. Which somebody might’ve brought up in the first week of practice.
10. Lance got the start in the exhibition opener in Las Vegas, and it did not go well.
Maybe we all should’ve realized it was over during the postgame pressers that night, when Shanahan smiled and praised Lance’s decision to throw it into the end zone directly to a Raiders defensive back, who clanked it over to Ross Dwelley for a weird rebound 49ers TD. Shanahan also shrugged off the four sacks Lance took.
That was very out of character for Shanahan, who just doesn’t evaluate QBs as blithely as that. At least not the ones he’s counting on. I think the decision to move on from Lance — if he didn’t want to be QB3 and if the 49ers could find a trade — was made that night, signified by that off-hand Shanahan moment, though the hints and recalculations had been piling up for years.
“The TK Show”: Go to Tim Kawakami’s podcast page on Apple, Spotify and The Athletic app.
The awkward and necessary end to the 49ers' Trey Lance era