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The eyes of the NFL world will be on Kyle Shanahan this week to see if he will give Trey Lance his first start as a professional quarterback against the Cardinals. Of course, most head coaches are notoriously low-key about any decision, and quarterbacks are doubly so.
However, during yesterday’s session with the media, I thought Kyle had said something that could have revealed more than he thought.
During the first part of the media session, Kyle went with the typical coach talk about how Garoppolo is improving but still not quite ready to roll. Then, later in the press conference, he was asked how important it was for Trey Lance to have all of the first team training reps if he was going to be the starter:
“Oh, this is huge. It’s huge for whoever goes there this week. You set up a new game plan on Wednesday morning and they go out and practice on Wednesday. And then on Thursday you put together a whole new thing for the third down, the short distance, the goal line and things like that. And they come out on Thursday and do it. And on Friday you try to revisit some stuff, but you put in a bunch of red zone stuff. That’s why, whatever the job, usually the guys you’d expect to play get all of these reps. Because it’s not just the same thing, you do different numbers, different fronts, different covers. So having a week, I think it was huge for him too to have all this time where he could just go and play quarterback and make other cards, other defenses and not really have to ‘learn what was going on that day. I just play soccer and get better. These practices are more about learning what we do all morning, bringing it to the field, correcting it in the evening, coming the next morning with questions and how you build throughout the week through Sunday. evening and you are confident and ready to go play.
Shanahan made sure to say it’s huge for the quarterback to be a part of practice on Wednesday, as that’s when the new game plan starts to be installed. Of course, we also already know that Jimmy Garoppolo didn’t train yesterday. So this question that Kyle Shanahan faces is simple:
Is he really going to play a struggling Jimmy Garoppolo who is in poor health by his own admission and also missed a day of installing the game plan instead of the third overall pick in the draft?
Then consider this comment Kyle made about Trey Lance on Wednesday:
” It develops. That’s what you’ll see when you come out for game day … All summer long he was trying to get it all, I thought he was getting better as he went. Then when he got into the games it would be a new learning process and I think he would improve every week in those games. I thought when he got into the battle here, just performing the attack and not really his specific plays, I thought he felt more comfortable as the match progressed. Especially coming home and watching the tape after the game, I thought there were a lot of encouraging things. So guys who are rookies, sophomores, whatever the job, you’re still developing yourself. You are always trying to improve yourself and he will see things that he has never seen before, but what you like about him and things that he might not be ready for, he can overcompensate with some of his skills. athletic ability and, to me, how competitive he is and how good he is a football player.
That’s the kind of progression you want to see from the guy you gave up three first-round picks for. Did watching Lance become more comfortable in a real regular season game tip the scales in Trey’s favor?
Sounds like sure to me, but as long as Shanahan leaves the door open for Jimmy Garoppolo’s return, Arizona will have to prepare for both players.
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