Second Chance in Dallas: Ex-49ers Star Hopes to Revive Career with Coyboys

You could play the “What if” game for over a dozen scenarios since Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch took over for the San Francisco 49ers.

What if Jimmy Garoppolo never tore his ACL?

What if Deforest Buckner was never traded?

What if the 49ers never traded up from No. 12 in 2021?

What if Shanahan had started Trey Lance from Day 1?

What if Trey Lance never got hurt in Week 2 of the 2022 regular season?

Per multiple national reporters, Lance, the player the 49ers put all of their eggs into one basket for just a few NFL Drafts ago, is set to make his first career start for the Dallas Cowboys in Week 18 and the first start since Week 2, when Lance injured his ankle against the Seattle Seahawks starting for the Niners.

Depending on how you feel about Lance, you’ll have a different opinion on what went wrong where. In hindsight, it was an objectively bad decision to trade multiple first-round picks for a player you would never play right away. As we’ve seen since, Garoppolo hasn’t amounted to anything since he left San Francisco.

And that’s not to say Lance would have been anything more than “average” or suitable at any point, but the 49ers needed to acknowledge there was going to be at least one season that would have been full of lumps and mistakes that comes with any first-time quarterback.

Doing that as a rookie while Lance could learn on the fly and do the same things that you asked of Garoppolo while likely struggling to get to the playoffs but ultimately would have developed for the future would have made the most sense.

But Shanahan was unwilling to sacrifice a season or losses at the time, and Lance never got a chance to get his feet underneath him.

Perhaps we would have seen that version of Lance by the time Brock Purdy took over for an injured Trey and Jimmy in 2022. Undoubtedly, the running game would have reached new heights with the addition of Christian McCaffrey in the middle of the season.

But by the time 2023 rolled around, it was the same unfinished product that the team had drafted back in 2021, and Lance was still making rookie mistakes during training camp and looked like a player who read defenses and made decisions like an FCS quarterback would.

So, it wasn’t surprising to see the 49ers trade away their QB3 at the time, but it was surprising to see how the franchise handled Lance. Fast-forward to Week 18 and today might be Trey’s last chance to start a regular-season game.