The Biggest Dodged Bullet In Football
It keeps me awake at night knowing in 2021 the 49ers made one of the biggest draft blunders in recent history, maybe up there in all of draft history, and got away with it because the very next year they randomly struck gold with the very final pick in the draft.
Trey Lance went out this weekend and put up maybe the worst QB performance of the pre-season against the Chargers backups, throwing 5 interceptions to one touchdown. Those are Nathan Peterman numbers. It makes sense! Lance has almost no experience as a football player. He barely threw the ball in high school and college and has spent his career being a backup besides one week when he started and immediately got hurt. He’s young, he has room to grow, and he’s cheap because he was a late round pick by the Cowboys. Oh wait, no he fucking wasn’t, the man was drafted THIRD OVERALL by the 49ers after giving up a fortune for him!
Nothing about the pick makes any sense in hindsight, and it was confusing even at the time. Lance was a weird prospect to begin with who was being severely overrated by scouts because he had all the physical attributes. I remember him being viewed as a fringe first-rounder, maybe someone who’d go around the mid-20’s at the earliest or more likely slip to the second. When the 49ers sent 3 first-rounders and a 3rd rounder to the Dolphins for the rights to #3, everyone was talking Mac Jones or Justin Fields. Mac at least seems like he might have worked in the Shanahan system. Fields is a bust but he was probably still a better choice than Lance. What the hell did Shanahan and Lynch see in Lance at all? Why did he go third overall? The 2021 draft was after the Covid season and it also resulted in Zach Wilson styling on a bunch of scrubs in college enough to justify a second overall choice, a move only slightly less dumb because at least the Jets didn’t trade up for him.
Yeah, I think the Zach Wilson pick was better than Lance. That’s how awful this was. They spent 3 first-round picks and a 3rd for a backup/heir apparent and that guy never saw the damn field past 1 game and got traded for a 4th after two seasons. That is one of the biggest mistakes of all time. I would kill for the chance to have been in that draft room to know what the fuck the 49ers were thinking.
A blunder like that should have set the team back years, even as stacked as the team is otherwise. Lance is poop. He must have been dreadful at 49ers camp to get jettisoned for a 4th instead of just staying a backup. The 49ers got away with a regime-defining mistake because they got lucky that Brock turned out good. It bothers me. Brock was maybe the luckiest pick in history.
Brock was a lucky pick, sure. But the luckiest pick in history has to be Tom Brady at #199 in the 6th round.
Maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe Tom Brady was an a-hole even then, and Belichick was feeling a little… excited after the interview. And he was like, “Oooh, this sexy little jerk, I’ll put him in his place and break him, then he’ll be mine!” And then for the next 20 or so sexually charged years, BB and TB were vying to make the other one the bottom. Kinda like how Joker and Batman are supposedly enemies, but they really wanna get it on. Or Trump and Biden.
this might be the best comment ive ever seen.
My immediate first thought was Tom Brady as well. As picks like, well, Trey Lance show, if the Pats really thought he was going to turn into TOM FUCKIN’ BRADY, they would’ve picked him in the first round, not the sixth.
The difference between Brady and Purdy is that Brady didn’t cover up a mistake. It’s not like the Pats picked Ryan Leaf and then Brady just happened to solve the problem. They had a franchise guy already and they picked Brady as a curiosity backup who turned out to be the GOAT. Brady even had a year to sit and learn first. The 49ers actively, tremendously fucked up, but got away with it because a dude they picked even later than Brady turned out good
And Bledsoe signed a 10 year deal in 01. It was the highest paying contract at the time.He wasn’t just the starter but he was literally the guy. It’s insane how much QB hype during draft season has become over the years. Everyone wants the next incredible development player (like Mahomes and Allen) but teams just can’t develop them.
Even without factoring in the trade, it’s probably the worst QB pick in NFL history, given how highly he was picked and how few games he played. Even Art Schlichter played 13 games! Even Jamarcus Russell started for about a season and a half! Even Ryan Leaf started games across 3 seasons (missing a full season in the middle)! Lance was so bad and/or always hurt that he started a grand total of 4 games, playing in 8 total, before being shipped off for a 4th round pick and at this point almost certainly failing to make Dallas’ 53 man roster. Do you remember how much we made of the Jets taking Christian Hackenberg in the second round only for him to never see the field? That’s basically what the Lance pick is, except Hackenberg was selected in the back half of the second round. Lance was taken third overall and still barely saw the field. All of this is BEFORE factoring in the niners trading multiple firsts away to trade up. Once you include that, this isn’t even a question. It is easily the worst QB draft pick in NFL history. And outside of QB, the only one I can think of that comes close is the Saints trading their whole draft for Ricky Williams, and at least he was on the field a good amount.
Poor Panthers did the same thing, but didn’t get a Brock :-(.
Still too early to judge Bryce Young
You could say they got Purdy lucky.
Booo!! Boo this man!
The 49ers were desperate for a franchise QB when it became very apparent that Jimmy G was not the guy. Unfortunately, they decided to find their guy in what has to be the worst QB draft class in the history of the NFL; and they traded away 3 first round picks to go up and get him. The whole thing was a headscratcher for us fans as well. The consensus seems to be that they felt confident they could take his raw physical talent and mold him into the QB they needed. Pure hubris on Shanahan’s part if you ask me. They got extremely lucky with Brock. Dumb draft moves and trades like this routinely sink franchises in the mire for decades, and somehow the Niners managed to avoid that fate. At least for now. I still think that next season they’re going to drop back down into the mid-card because they won’t be able to pay all of the contracts that their guys have earned. If they don’t win it all this year (and honestly the odds are stacked against them), I think it’s going to be another decade before they get another really good chance at doing it. I watched them win 4 Super Bowls as a kid, and now I’m faced with the very likely scenario of never seeing them win another one. First world problem, for sure, as I know the majority of fans in the NFL haven’t seen their team win a single one.
People wouldn’t stop fixating on the fact that Trey Lance came from the same system that produced Carson Wentz and Josh Allen. Speaking as a Wyoming fan who got to see a lot of how Craig Bohl and his whole coaching tree work, scouts pay zero attention to the fact that these men are great at finding talent, but awful at developing them. Though I acknowledge that Bohl turned the Cowboys from a disasterpiece with the occasional fluke success to a cosistently above average program, so few of our recruits improve one iota after stepping on campus. If anything, Allen regressed in his final year at Wyoming and as thrilled as I am to see a UW grad succeed so much in the pros, I credit Sean McDermott, Brian Daboll and Allen’s own work ethic entirely for that. He was not ready for the pros in the slightest after his time in Laramie and every fan who wasn’t blinded by the hype knew it. Allen would fall apart in the clutch and start making dumb mistakes. It’s not entirely gone either. You can still see it from time to time if you pay attention. He’ll get this deer in the headlights look while lining up and not long after, he’ll gun it deep to a covered receiver for an easy INT. This was a habit he had from his very first game as a Cowboy. Bohl never cared to address this in any way because Allen was still far and away the best QB the team had since Josh Wallwork. And unlike Wallwork, Allen didn’t have a ton of drug problems making NFL scouts steer clear of him. Why bother to improve your golden goose when he’s already guaranteed you get a massive contract extension?
As a 9ers fan I didn’t like the Lance pick at the time and thought it was a reach. I thought getting a better Oline around Jimmy G, despite his flaws, was the way to go.
On the flip side, I thought Zach Wilson looked the best in the draft that year in a year of scrubs. Even Trev Lawrence is a mid at this point of his career.
Playing a franchise on Madden ’23 and the 49ers use Lance, end up at the bottom of the league, and Shanahan gets fired. It’s like I’m seeing into an alternate future.