After being drafted third overall by the San Francisco 49ers in the 2021 NFL Draft, sitting behind Jimmy Garoppolo (QB – SFO) for a year was not the expectation for Trey Lance (QB – SFO) when Dynasty managers drafted him ~1.03 in rookie drafts or late second to early the third round in startups. After seeing Garoppolo’s abhorrent play in the January 2022 NFC Championship, it became clear that Lance was the future of this franchise and managers grew extremely excited. While he was drafted as highly as he was in dynasty drafts due to his insane rushing upside (best season college finishes of 1,100 rushing yards over 16 games, averaging 6.5 rush yards/attempt), he surprised us by ranking third in the NFL in passing yards/attempt with 8.5 (albeit on 71 attempts), sitting right behind none other than Jimmy Garoppolo (8.6). The sky was the limit for Lance in the 2022-2023 season until he broke his ankle in the second game of his sophomore season against the Seattle Seahawks.
This article will be a small case study on QB rushing post-fractured ankles. I’m looking only at bone breaks here, as the recovery time and/or the treatments available for them have not seemed to change drastically in the last couple of decades, compared with ACL injuries, Achilles tendon injuries, or soft tissue injuries. Investigating these injuries further and how they pertain to this case study would require a medical degree, and I am simply not qualified. Another thing I will avoid looking too deeply at is future value change in relation to bone breaks, as this article would be a lot shorter if I investigated that. Spoiler alert: buy injured players – their value almost always goes back up after the initial dip, but that’s an article for another time.
I’ll be comparing Trey Lance to the quarterbacks below:
2003 Michael Vick (QB – ATL)
2020 Dak Prescott (QB – DAL)
2016 Derek Carr (QB – LV)
2016 Marcus Mariota (QB – TEN)
2005 Byron Leftwich (QB – JAX)
I chose to purposefully exclude 2018 Alex Smith (QB – WSH); with only ten rush attempts after his injury there simply isn’t enough rushing data post-break, as he retired soon after his return. If there are other recent quarterbacks I’m forgetting PM me and I’d be more than happy to include them in an updated article if they fit the parameters.
All numbers courtesy of pro-football-reference.com
*Leftwich did not start a game in 2008
Now Lance’s rushing yards/game after injury and rushing yards/attempt after injury are the question. I chose up to three years after injury here as Lance has three years left on his rookie deal. I highly doubt San Francisco moves on from him before his fifth season, as they invested a total of three first-round picks into his selection. His current job security is not in question, but his future job security is entirely reliant on the 49ers’ success and his proficiency as a passer. On the subject of passing, an important piece of this case study I’m choosing not to consider is his passing projections, as we have no idea how he, or any young quarterbacks for that matter, will progress as passers. His rookie season 8.5 Y/A looks promising, but I’ll leave passing speculation to minds smarter than me.
I’m not a data analyst, so I had to give myself a quick refresher on R2 and goodness of fit from my days in Algebra 2. After refamiliarizing myself, I can proclaim that this data tells us one thing assuredly – we need more data. The extremely small correlations show us that the trendlines on both charts of three of the four quarterbacks do not fit well. Drawing what conclusions we can from the trendlines we can see that Michael Vick is the only one with positive trendlines, meaning Prescott, Carr, and Leftwich all saw negative trends with regard to their rushing yards/game and rushing yards/attempt post-injury. Should we be panicking based on a small sample size of three years post-injury data? Absolutely not. Is it something to take into account that ¾ of the participants saw their rushing statistics trend down after fracturing their ankles? Absolutely.
Utilizing this data, should we be hopeful about Trey Lance? In my opinion, cautiously. Prescott and Carr were already proficient passers before fracturing their ankle, and Vick was one of the most dangerous rushing threats in the league at the time of his injury. Leftwich, however, struggled after his injury, reinjuring the same ankle the next season, and eventually was cut from the Jaguars. While Trey Lance it’s too early to say if Lance is a proficient passer yet and he assuredly is not one of the best rushing quarterbacks in the league, what he does have is the benefit of playing in a system that allows Jimmy Garoppolo to have the second highest yards/attempt in the league. Could Lance recover like Vick and post higher rush yards/attempt and rush yards/game in his first season back from injury or will his numbers diminish like Prescott, Carr, and Leftwich? I don’t have an answer for you because I’m not clairvoyant, but I have my process.
When drafting or trading players, you should always be looking for upside, and Trey Lance is the upside play. He is at the cheapest price he’s ever been currently according to KeepTradeCut.com’s value tracker, with his value adjacent to quarterbacks like Kenny Pickett and Daniel Jones. I personally just traded three 2024 2nds and Mac Jones (who you should’ve sold long ago if you haven’t already) for him, an offer that would have been laughed at and smash-rejected just three months ago.
You have two options when acquiring Trey Lance now, you can either hold him and hope he goes down the Vick route and you get a top-five scoring quarterback for QB2 prices, or you hold him until August 2023 and sell him for 20% more than he’s worth now. Remember when I said injured players’ values almost always go back to where they were before?
The only caveat with that is that his value this offseason may only rise to almost where it was pre-injury, being that part of what was baked into preseason value was the expectation he would play and produce in the 2022 season, something that obviously did not happen. For that reason, some folks may not value him as highly as they did before the 2022 season as he is another year into his rookie deal, but I’m sure it will be a negligible difference if this scenario even happens at all.
Finally, the newest hair in the ointment for some folks is the rise of Brock Purdy (QB – SFO), the newest San Francisco 49ers QB who stepped in for the injured Jimmy Garoppolo. I’ve witnessed people on Twitter discuss that Trey Lance will not be able to beat out Purdy for the starting job come training camp and that the 49ers will turn to Purdy to be their quarterback of the future. However, I completely disagree and believe that Purdy’s success is even more of a reason to believe in Lance as a passer in the future. This tweet from @JakobSanderson explains my thinking very succinctly:
Send an offer out for Trey Lance in all of your leagues even if the small sample size shown above says the outlook could be bleak, this is the cheapest high upside play you’ll find this year. If you’re weary of the injury affecting his immediate rushing production upon his return, acquire him for the positive gains to your investment you’re sure to find come August.
What to Do with Trey Lance?
Verdict: BUY or HOLD
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