Steve Young has been clamoring to see Trey Lance all season, and he got his wish last Sunday.
The rookie was uneven in his second-career start, but did enough in the second half to help lead the 49ers to a win in a must-win game vs. the lowly Texans.
Young joined Tolbert, Krueger & Brooks on Wednesday to recap what he saw, and describe the realization that he came to watching the youngster.
“Trey is big and strong and powerful,” Young said Wednesday on KNBR. “You can see all the things you want to see more of, right? But it hit me the other day as I was watching him as he tried to meter throws over linebackers and tried to figure out where people are. It just hit me that they said he had thrown 300 passes in college, and you think to yourself just how much I learned playing more and metering things so I can get a sense of what works, what doesn’t work, how to put it into that spot. In the NFL, obviously, it gets faster and more difficult, but it just hit me that we are going to watch Trey go from essentially, not zero, but two to 10.
“Like that whole process of seeing him grow, we are actually going to witness. Because he doesn’t come from a place of playing at Alabama for three years or Clemson for three years and getting all of that stuff worked out in the system. He’s going to do that in front of us. I’m cool with it. It just hit me that that’s where we are with him, and that’s a positive.
“I thought that the first half scared me because it was just too much. The idea that ‘I can kind of get ahead of it.’ And then, in the second half, he settles in and actually does a lot of cool stuff. We can take that kind of iteration where it starts slow, ‘I have to figure it out, get up to speed and then, bam, I’m up to speed.’ That’s the kind of process, the cycle that we can all live with, and we’ll expect that to better and better — not incrementally huge every time, but better and better, and, we’ll all kind of go along with the growth of the great Trey Lance because he starts from square one or two.”
Lance’s rawness is why Young believes that Shanahan will go with Jimmy Garoppolo as the starter this Sunday vs. the Rams. Garoppolo is 5-0 vs. Los Angeles in his tenure with the 49ers. If he goes 6-0, San Francisco is guaranteed a playoff spot.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Tolbert, Krueger & Brooks weekdays from 2 p.m.- 6 p.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.