Trey Lance has been traded to the Dallas Cowboys

The former 49ers quarterback is now headed to Texas

Trey Lance has been traded from the San Francisco 49ers to the Dallas Cowboys in exchange for a 4th round pick. This trade may seem perfectly fine to a person who knows nothing about the NFL. A backup quarterback is being sent elsewhere to be a backup in exchange for lousy picks. It can’t get any deeper than that, right?

Well, in the case of Trey Lance, that would be wrong, especially considering what the 49ers went through in order to get him, only for him to not deliver. There’s tons to this story, and it’s going to all be broken down here.

When Trey Lance was playing in college, he was being hyped up as a future generational star. However, he wasn’t playing for the usual talent factories such as Ohio State or Georgia, but instead, he was playing for North Dakota State University, who play in the FCS instead of the FBS where college football powerhouses such as Alabama rule. Now, it may seem strange that he was getting any hype at all, considering the team that he was playing for, but somehow, it wasn’t

Carson Wentz, a now-free agent seemingly begging for any team to employ him, also played at NDSU and succeeded. This was made evident when the Philadelphia Eagles drafted Wentz in 2016 with the second overall pick. In the beginning, Wentz’s career was looking good when he became a Pro Bowler in 2017 along with winning multiple other awards in his first 2 seasons with the Eagles. Along with that, in the 2017 season, the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl, although Wentz wasn’t there to play in that game as a result of a torn ACL. His career since then has gone down the gutter, which now leaves him as a free agent.

Perhaps whenever Trey Lance first began to get hype, he was seen to be a player that could manage to do what Wentz couldn’t: have a long, prosperous career as a franchise quarterback. Even if only few had that thought process, it was evident that the San Francisco 49ers did.

San Francisco has the 12th overall pick to begin with in the NFL Draft, but they ended up trading with the Miami Dolphins (who themselves got the pick via a trade with the Houston Texans). When this happened, NFL fans and analysts knew exactly why the 49ers made this ambitious move: to get a long-term franchise QB to replace Jimmy Garoppolo. That quarterback was supposed to be Trey Lance, who was drafted with that 3rd overall pick, but things didn’t exactly go to plan for Lance.

In a total of 2 seasons for the 49ers, Trey Lance only played 8 games as a result of being relegated to playing as a backup, along with injuries. Since 1967, that is the fewest amount of games played by any player drafted in the top 5 of the NFL Draft with the team that drafted them.

In short, Trey Lance’s time with the 49ers was a remarkable failure. San Francisco gave up so much in order to get Lance on their team, only to be left with a 4th round draft pick at the end of it all. In the long run, what the 49ers did will definitely go down as one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, NFL Draft trade of all time. For all the fans of football (or soccer), this makes Eden Hazard’s move to Real Madrid look like a genius ploy by the Spanish club, which surely says a lot (I mean, Hazard did win the Champions League with Madrid).

Anyways, Trey Lance is still young, so for the Cowboys, they shouldn’t see him as a completely lost cause. However, for the 49ers to give up on Lance so quickly when the only better option is none other than Mr. Irrelevant himself Brock Purdy, then sure, there could be some conversations that Trey Lance’s career from here on out is completely over. At this point, the man might as well enjoy his retirement amongst the other Californians flocking over to Texas alongside him, because surely, it won’t get any better for him playing for a team that hasn’t won a Super Bowl since the Clinton administration.

Anyways, what do you think of all of this? Will Trey Lance bounce back, or is his career already 6 feet under for him at the age of 23? Vote in the poll below:

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