San Francisco 49ers Sign Top Draft Pick Trey Lance To 4-Year Deal
SANTA CLARA (CBS SF) -- As the San Francisco 49ers opened training camp Wednesday morning, the team announced it has signed their No. 1 draft pick Trey Lance to a four-year contract.
According to ESPN's Adam Schefter, Lance's deal is fully guaranteed $34.1 million contract.
The 49ers sent three first-round picks to Miami to move up in the draft to select Lance. At such a high price, Lance appears to be the team's quarterback of the future if not the present.
But at a news conference Wednesday, head coach Kyle Shanahan said Lance will be among the backups to starter Jimmy Garoppolo at least at the start of the season.
"There's no open competition right now in terms of they're getting equal reps with the same group," Shanahan said. "Jimmy's coming in as the one and Trey's coming in as the two."
But it's clear that Shanahan believes Lance needs time to develop.
"I just treat it like I would any other situation," Shanahan said. "Jimmy, going through OTAs, what he's done, he's our best quarterback in the building right now. So, he'll start out training camp that way. And we've got three other guys behind him. Now we're going to give Trey the first chance, obviously, as the backup. And anytime a guy is playing a lot better than the guy in front of them is when you start to split reps up with that team and start to talk about it."
"Trey has had seven practices with us. And I haven't seen him for 40 days, so I'm not thinking about that right now. Just having Jimmy going, he's our starter. And we're going to give all those guys every opportunity to improve. And if someone ever looks like they give us a better chance to win, we'll make that decision."
Shanahan also hinted out adding some plays in the 49ers playbook early in training camp to take advantage of Lance's running skills.
"It's not like you need to practice running the ball a lot," he said. "It's not like he's going to practice bouncing off guys and stuff in practice. When you put a quarterback run in it is more based off of an element of the defenses and accounting for them. So you just run it until they account for it, then you go to other stuff. So you take what they give you. And if you watch his college tape, he's gotten plenty of runs. So we don't need to go out there and run him in practice and stuff like that."
Lance was selected by the 49ers as the 3rd overall pick in this year's NFL Draft out of North Dakota State.
He appeared in 19 college games (17 starts) in three years (2018-20) and completed 208 of 318 passing attempts (65.4 percent) for 2,947 yards, 30 touchdowns and one interception to go along with 192 rushing attempts for 1,325 yards and 18 touchdowns on the ground.
As a sophomore in 2020, he started one game and completed 15 of 30 passing attempts for 149 yards and two touchdowns prior to their season being cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Also ran for 143 yards and two touchdowns.