If Trey Lance isn’t going to be the 49ers’ backup quarterback, will he be on the team? That’s the question many are asking after he was clearly outplayed by Sam Darnold during the 49ers’ preseason opener. The thinking goes, if Lance isn’t going to be at least the backup, what’s the value of having him as a third stringer, since he definitely won’t be getting the reps he needs at that spot on the depth chart.
Even so, 49ers beat writer Matt Barrows isn’t convinced that getting rid of Lance makes a whole lot of sense.
“I just don’t see a scenario where they get any sort of great trade value for him,” Barrows said on KNBR. “This was always a team that thought Trey Lance would be a longer-term project. So to say, given all the reasons I just cited, that he’s never going to be something, they would be going against what they already knew about him.
“It’s a win-now league, they think he’s still kind of behind the learning curve and they’ve got two other guys that can operate this offense better. Maybe he’s not on the team, but I think that would be announcing to the world that you made a colossal mistake two years ago.”
Lance was always supposed to be a bit of a project, and he hasn’t had the time to develop due to multiple injuries. If you believed he had the tools to be great with experience, there shouldn’t be much reason to believe that he still can’t become great.
“The other part is if you were initially right and your thinking on Trey Lance was that he’s not going to be great right away, but we can turn him into something fantastic, you’d be risking another team getting him for a song, and then having him develop into that quarterback you thought he could be all along. And that would just be so much egg on your face that you would choke to death.”
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