SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Kyle Shanahan didn’t think he’d be here this fast, nor did anyone else in the 49ers building.
Two months ago, the coach sent his team off for summer break thinking Jimmy Garoppolo had really responded to a tumultuous offseason, and rookie Trey Lance, whose acquisition was the primary source of that tumult, had a long way to go. When they got back, six weeks had passed. Things had changed.
“I can tell [Lance] put himself in position to play this year with what he did in the 40 days away,” Shanahan said in a quiet moment after Wednesday practice. “You get a guy for OTAs, they come in after rookie camp—and OTAs wasn’t like past OTAs, we didn’t do 10 practices, we didn’t do the minicamp, the reps we had were all cut in half because of everything going on—and he was just trying to take everything in. He looked like a rookie quarterback. You could see the talent. Then they get away for 40 days and you wonder how he’d use that.
“ We didn’t see him at all, but I know he was working his butt off. And you come in and you want to see how efficient he was, and how he was working. And the crispness in him picking up stuff compared to OTAs, it was like, n. And now each day, we keep adding more stuff, and we’re doing it to the whole team, but he’s handling it a lot better than OTAs.”
Two days later, Shanahan stirred the NFL news cycle by conceding, in a press conference with the local media, that Lance was going to play in some capacity in 2021.
I don’t know how this will all play out. But I can say this—he wasn’t just throwing that out there. And the impression Lance is making here amounts to a whole lot more than press-conference soundbites and social-media sizzle reels. Shanahan said it because Lance has earned his way into the on-field equation for the 2021 Niners.
The next question, of course, is in what capacity Lance will be playing. The question after that would be what the result of all this means for Garoppolo. Meanwhile, the underlying truth is: Lance competing to get on the field would make this——a quarterback competition. And it is, sort of.
“I think it’s gonna be tough for [Lance] to win the job, just in terms of it being two different styles of quarterbacks, and maybe a little different style of offense for both of them,” Shanahan says. “I’d be very surprised if he did with the way Jimmy’s playing. It’d put a lot on a kid to do that. He’s doing everything he can. I’m very impressed with him so far, but I’d be very surprised if that happened.”
In there, lurks the biggest takeaway from my time with Shanahan the other day. It’d be a mistake to look at what’s happening in San Francisco as you would a conventional race for a quarterbacking job almost anywhere else, and that’s because he’s not looking at the decision he’ll have to make as binary. As he sees it, he’s got more than two options on the table. And that makes this as fascinating a situation as there is in the NFL this summer.
