San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch would surely take back his 2021 decision to trade up and draft Trey Lance if given the chance, but he also isn’t giving up on the quarterback who is now a member of the Dallas Cowboys.
“I always am careful of this because Trey Lance’s story hasn’t been written yet,” Lynch told reporters Monday.
“He’s in Dallas right now and I still think Trey’s got good football in him. We’ll see. That will play out. But I think, also, the freedom that, when you’ve done something, and you feel like maybe it can improve us to move on, we aren’t beholden to, ‘Well, we drafted the guy. We just gotta stick it out.’ We can do the things we want to do, and I think that served us well.
San Francisco decided to trade its 2022 first-round pick, 2023 first-round pick and 2022 third-round pick to move up from No. 12 to No. 3 in the 2021 draft to select Lance out of North Dakota State even though he appeared in one total game during his final year in college.
It was a high-risk, high-reward move, and injuries largely prevented him from ever having a significant chance to live up to expectations. He went into the 2022 season as the starter but suffered an injury in the second game and never got his job back thanks largely to the emergence of Brock Purdy.
Many teams would struggle if their presumed franchise quarterback suffered an injury and never lived up to the expectations surrounding him as such a high draft pick, but the 49ers went to the NFC Championship Game during the 2021 and 2022 seasons and reached the Super Bowl last season.
Purdy went from being the final pick of the 2022 draft into a Pro Bowler playing on the sport’s biggest stage, which is a development Lynch appreciates.
“They believe in Kyle and I, and our leadership,” he said of San Francisco’s ownership. “When we think something’s going to make us better, they say go for it, and they don’t give us a lot of restrictions there. And that’s comforting to know we can go be bold and do things like that.
Leave a Reply