Getty Image / Thearon W Henderson
After months of speculation, Trey Lance was finally traded last night.
The San Francisco 49ers dealt him to the Dallas Cowboys in exchange for a 4th round pick.
A trade had been expected for a while as Sam Darnold took control of the 49ers’ backup job and it seems that Lance had just one request for that trade.
While speaking to the media after last night’s game against the Chargers, San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan revealed that Lance told the team that he wanted to be traded somewhere that he could be a QB2.
Shanahan says the 49ers hoped to keep Trey Lance on their roster after he was made the third-string QB pic.twitter.com/TV2CZd8ae1
— 49ers on NBCS (@NBCS49ers) August 26, 2023
“[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.”
The interesting thing about the trade that Lance got is that it doesn’t really fulfill his request.
Right now, he is probably going to be the QB3 for the Dallas Cowboys and that might not be a situation that changes any time soon.
Dak Prescott isn’t going anywhere and Cooper Rush is under contract for the next 2 seasons. Rush can be cut without much of a dead cap hit after this season, but the Cowboys would have to feel comfortable with Lance as their backup to do that.
He probably hasn’t earned that level of comfort yet in his career, but maybe he’ll show them something over the next year to change that.
There were other options out there for the 49ers. The Lions, Bills, and Ravens were all reportedly interested.
2 of those teams might not have necessarily been able to guarantee Lance the 2nd spot on their depth chart.
However, the Ravens could have been an interesting option. Tyler Huntley was bad last year and the Ravens might have been open to replacing him with Lance.
Unfortunately, it seems they made a weaker offer than the Cowboys and now Trey Lance will probably remain stuck as a QB3 for at least the rest of the season and potentially for the rest of his rookie contract.