When the 49ers decided Trey Lance would be the third-string quarterback at best, they gave him a chance to provide input as to his future. On Friday night, coach Kyle Shanahan told reporters that Lance decided he wanted to go to a team where he had a chance to land at the second spot on the depth chart.
"[W]hen we told Trey that he wasn’t the two, I said we’d like to keep him here as the three, but we also want to do what’s good for him too, and we’ll see how this plays out,” Shanahan said after the preseason game against the Chargers. “When we looked into other teams and he told us that he would like another opportunity to go somewhere where we had a chance to be the two, we thought we got some good deals for him. There’s a number of teams involved to end up getting the fourth was a little better than we anticipated and clears up a lot of money and allows a better situation for him too.”
It sounds as if a bit of an auction broke out for Lance’s contract. It would be interesting to know whether and to what extent Lance had a say in the final destination. Did he prefer a place that was offering less?
That didn’t come up. The focal point for reporters was figuring out how the conversations unfolded between the team and Lance, especially since the reporters hadn’t had a chance to talk to Shanahan or G.M. John Lynch until after it all happened.
“When Trey and I talked [on Wednesday], we talked about all the situations going forward,” Shanahan said. “I told him how much I’d still want him to [be] here to be the three and things like that. I also told him that what I think is best for Trey, I do think Trey needs an opportunity to play more. The opportunities he’s had here, when he has had those two opportunities, he’s gotten hurt in both of them and kind of missed that window a little bit. Gave an opportunity for someone else to do it. That person did it and stayed healthy for those seven games and showed us something that we’re confident in. Trey kind of needs that again. He didn’t get that here. So I told him that’s what I think is best for him, if he can find a good opportunity. If he doesn’t and he wants to be here, well we want him here. Trey took a little bit of time to think about it, but he came back and said he’d like to find another spot if we can. That’s when we started looking into it. His agent, us. That came to fruition today.”
Apparently, Lance didn’t even need to sleep on it. Shanahan said Lance came back with an answer not long after the Wednesday conversation regarding his spot on the 49ers’ depth chart.
“About an hour and a half later he came and told me that he would like that,” Shanahan said. “He’d also like to not have to go out to practice and stuff, just to get his stuff together and think about it. That’s what he did. The next day he came in and was at our walk thru, was at our meetings last night. We didn’t know if something would happen today. Him and I were communicating about it yesterday. The possibilities of it, told him some teams that were interested. So, I was talking to him about those options last night, what I thought was best, what he did. Then today some other teams became interested and if they wouldn’t have, he would have been out at that game and stuff and we would’ve tried to go with him as our three. But some good stuff did come up. And some stuff that I think he’s really excited about. And especially after talking to him today, I could tell he was.”
So that’s that. Lance had a choice to stay or go. He opted to go. The 49ers got more than they would have expected. And life moves on with Brock Purdy and Sam Darnold as QB1 and QB 2, respectively, in San Francisco.
