Trey Lance still doesn't look comfortable for the 49ers. If that continues, his time may be up in San Francisco
When the deep pass went up in San Francisco 49ers training camp last week, it had zip and was a nice spiral. This was the beginning and end of the good part of the play for quarterback Trey Lance. The rest was objectively bad — poor ball placement combined with the poor judgment of throwing into blanket 1-on-1 coverage. It felt like the likeliest outcome was going to be a broken up pass or interception, if only 49ers cornerback Samuel Womack would turn his head in time.
Instead, the ball zoomed in behind the nameplate on Womack’s back. Rather than digging into the turf like an incoming mortar round, 49ers wideout Willie Snead IV stretched his wingspan and reached behind Womack to stab a one-handed touchdown catch that left everyone in disbelief. The fans in attendance roared. The offensive players on the sidelines exploded. Some on the defense shook their heads. It was one of the best catches you’d ever see in a live practice session.
Later that day, the 49ers' website promoted the video of the catch overlaid with beating drums and players excitedly celebrating. For Lance, it went into a sideline stat cobbling that counted him as 8-for-12 on the day with a touchdown. And just like that, he had another day of cover.
But if you watched Lance's performance Sunday in a lopsided 34-7 preseason loss to the Las Vegas Raiders, there’s little denying that the shade is lifting and the continued worries about Lance are coming squarely into the light. Yes, his stat line read a very deceiving 10-for-15 passing with one touchdown and zero interceptions. And yes, he did this behind a second-team offensive line that was abhorrent.
But if you have eyes and a penchant for honesty, what you saw was a quarterback who continues to look wildly uncomfortable in the pocket on too many throws ... who often holds onto the ball too long ... who had two clear interceptions bungled by the defense (including his touchdown pass) ... and too often picks difficult targets when forced to play from inside the pocket.
It’s also worth mentioning here that this happened against a Raiders defense that was caked with backups and is not currently predicted to be a particularly frightening unit. And while we’re not going to go overboard on fellow 49ers backup Sam Darnold here, he certainly looked more comfortable leading the offense when he stepped into the game. Maybe that was because of his past experience as a starter or the fact that he, too, was playing against the lower end of the Las Vegas depth chart.
But this isn’t about Darnold as much as it is Lance. For a game, he took his practice struggles and discomfort onto the field. On the day he split first-team reps with Darnold last week, it was clear that Lance was holding the ball too long and being too indecisive at times — versus a defensive front without Nick Bosa, no less. If that’s a trend that continues to spill into live games, the story here is writing itself no matter what Niners head coach Kyle Shanahan, or general manager John Lynch, or any of Lance’s offseason workout gurus want to say. The opposition is going to show everyone what they need to know about Lance.
Right now, it’s not good. And no amount of reminding anyone about the trade assets invested in him is going to make this situation better. The game itself — the live action with no mercy and no memory for draft status — is going to speak the truth. Not a trade in the 2021 offseason that cost three first-round draft picks plus a third. The game talks. At some point, the 49ers are going to have to listen. If Lance can’t utilize the next two preseason games to dramatically turn himself in the right direction, he’s going to be the NFL’s highest paid third-string quarterback.
That is, unless the 49ers can find someone to give Lance a fresh start. Which, if he falls below Darnold on the depth chart and fails to show any meaningful progress by the end of the preseason, he is clearly going to need.
The more I watch Lance, the more I think of something Shanahan said to me about why some quarterbacks fall through the cracks in the draft. At the time, we were talking about Brock Purdy, but it very well could have been a conversation about Lance. To be fair to Shanahan, what he said was painting a picture of why Purdy has become a success in the NFL. But again, it was impossible to ignore the message if the same same logic was applied to Lance — especially when it came to why some quarterbacks can flip the switch and make the conversion to the NFL game, and some can’t.
“[Y]ou don’t know until they get in here,” Shanahan said. “And then once they do get in here, you get to see their talent a little bit more on an NFL field. You can see how they handle the NFL pass rush [in practice] — which you usually don’t have college, but you still don’t know until they get into that game. How can they handle the pressure and stuff week in and week out? Lots of guys can go and do it for one to three weeks, but eventually it catches up to you and you’re going to be exposed. So you have to be made of the right stuff and no one really knows if they’re made of the right stuff until they go through it. You can take guesses from college and stuff, but you don’t know.”
As much as that quote was talking about Purdy and how evaluating quarterbacks is as much art as science, it will always have an undertone about the opposite of Purdy — the guys who are taken at the front of the draft rather than at the end. There’s a reason they don’t put it together. And more often than not, it doesn’t take three seasons to see it.
We’re on the doorstep of Lance’s third season. Something is still not clicking for him the way it is with his peers. At some point, if something doesn’t change soon, the 49ers are going to have to be realistic about that. And the conclusion they reach might be the conclusion of Lance in a 49ers uniform.
