Will Lance ever catch on in the NFL?
On a Friday night in August, on the night of a preseason game, mind you, the San Francisco 49ers washed their hands from a move that didn’t work out and sent the former No. 3 overall pick Trey Lance to the Dallas Cowboys for a fourth-round pick in the 2024 NFL Draft.
Lance’s career never got off the ground. To date, he’s slightly over 100 career passing attempts. Situation, injuries, and circumstance prevented Lance from stringing together more than three starts with the Niners. Heading into the 2023 season, Lance was demoted to QB3 behind Sam Darnold, which eventually ended his tenure in the Bay Area.
As frustrating as those couple of seasons were, only 43 percent of 49ers fans felt like the team would regret trading Lance, who did not throw a pass for the Cowboys last year.
The 49ers used the 124th pick they received from Dallas on Wake Forest safety Malik Mustapha, who has a chance to top Lance’s career snaps as a rookie. We’ll see how it plays out, but it feels like the Niners already won that trade since they received value for Lance.
Why? The Cowboys announced they declined Lance’s fifth-year option. Dallas would’ve had to pay Lance $22.4 million, which would have been fully guaranteed. Obviously, that was never going to happen. But it makes you wonder why Jerry Jones was willing to make a deal to begin with.
Lance is a distant memory for a 49ers roster that’s thinking about getting over the hump known as the Kansas City Chiefs and not which quarterback they’re going to start or pay in 2025. San Francisco knows that answer already.
Trey will be 24 by the time training camp starts. Generally speaking, first-round quarterbacks have a long leash and will catch on a couple of times with other teams before being shunned from the league. But Lance hasn’t played an entire season since 2019. There isn’t film to evaluate him off, and the only way he’ll ever improve is by stepping onto the field.
You can’t help but feel for the person. Hopefully, at some point, a team gives Lance a shot. It’s not as if the quarterback play around the NFL is otherwordly.
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