SANTA CLARA — Kyle Shanahan wishes he didn't call the play that resulted in quarterback Trey Lance breaking his ankle.
"Yeah, anytime a guy gets hurt, I wish I didn't call that," Shanahan said Sunday.
But as for second-guessing Lance's usage as a runner — specifically a runner up the middle — Shanahan won't hear it.
"No, that's something we were going to do and something we would continue to do," Shanahan said. "That's a football play we believe in, and something that gives him a chance to be real successful in this league."
Buffalo does it all the time. With their quarterback, it's a pretty normal play. It's part of football and it's unfortunate that he hurt his ankle on it, but it's a very normal run play."
It is, indeed, a normal run play in the NFL in 2022.
But is it really fair to compare Lance to Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen?
It was probably too early in Lance's career to come to a definitive answer, but early returns suggested it was not.
The NFL has never seen more dynamism at the quarterback position than it has right now, with players like Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Kyler Murray impacting the game as both throwers and elite runners.
Lance isn't built like Jackson, whose agility makes him a threat to reach the endzone on any play. He isn't a spritely improviser like Murray, either.
But the Niners looked at Allen and saw a player built like Lance. They wanted that for their offense.
Both players are roughly the same size — Lance is 6-foot-4, Allen 6-foot-5, and the latter weighs roughly 10 pounds more. Both players went to small schools, were drafted early thanks to their big arms and frames, and struggled with their pass accuracy upon arriving in the NFL. Both players showed a willingness on their college film to drop their shoulders and run over a defender instead of ducking out of bounds or sliding.
There are some similarities here.
The problem with this comparison is that Allen is a far better athlete than Lance. He's a far better athlete than nearly anyone on the field with him in the NFL.
Allen's combination of size and speed is rare. The Niners value 10-yard splits in the 40-yard dash when drafting running backs. It tells them how a ball carrier gets off the line once he has the ball. They want guys who can put their foot in the ground and go.
Allen's 1.59-second 10-yard split in his NFL Draft Combine's 40-yard dash showed that the quarterback had elite burst. Not just for a quarterback, either. The fastest players in the NFL are only one-tenth of a second faster off the line.
Allen is like a Tesla Model X — heavy but with insane acceleration.
Lance didn't run the 40-yard dash in his pre-draft process. His management team sent out unverifiable stats and numbers and told NFL teams that Lance's game film would show his speed.
That's a clever way to cover up the fact that he would run slow.
Sure enough, in Lance's first NFL start, last season at Arizona in Week 5, it was clear that he lacked the same kind of speed as Allen when running the football. And his penchant for running players over at the second-tier college level wasn't going to fly in the NFL, either.
"I'm not bigger, faster, and stronger than pretty much everyone else. Guys catch up a lot quicker, space is filled, guys close a lot faster," Lance said Wednesday when I asked him about the change from college to the NFL as a runner.
Now Lance was still a good runner — he has good vision as a ballcarrier — but while Allen was jumping over defenders and beating speed rushers to the edge amid his early-career struggles as a passer, Lance's four NFL starts showed he was more a classic, old-school bruising back than a modern burner.
The Niners' formula for developing Lance was still the Allen blueprint, though — specifically the part about him running to counter his inaccuracy as a thrower.
The Niners — like the Bills before them — didn't trust their young quarterback to consistently make short and intermediate passes.
How do you pick up those yards? Include the quarterback in the run game.
A team has to move the chains somehow.
It worked for Buffalo. In Allen's rookie season, the Bills returned from their bye week and told the quarterback to run. If he saw a gap in the defense, he should take it.
He carried the ball 31 times over the next three games, gaining 335 yards, with six runs of 20-plus yards. Buffalo went 3-3 after the bye to end the season, with Allen posting a monster season finale on the ground and in the air. It was a harbinger of things to come.
While there is no precedent for Allen's ability to go from a 56 percent passer in his first two seasons (27 starts) to a 66 percent passer in years three and four (33 starts), the [Bills believed part of the improvement process was getting Allen more involved in the run game. Not only does success — in any form — slow down the game for a young quarterback, but Allen's rushing ability forced defenses to be honest and not drop eight into coverage against Buffalo and their then-sub-par receivers.
The Bills still use Allen runs — designed and improvisational — to flummox defenses.
It's what Shanahan wanted for the Niners with Lance: 11-on-11 football always puts the offense at an advantage. But was Lance a runner worthy of that kind of usage?
Still, it should be noted that according to Pro Football Focus, Allen had twice as many runs outside the tackles as he did inside them in his first two years in the NFL.
That ratio has roughly maintained since Allen has become a perennial MVP candidate, despite the fact on outside runs, he's averaged two more yards per carry.
So while Shanahan is right that Buffalo still calls inside runs for Allen, one of which is their variations of the zone-read play that led to Lance's injury Sunday, those calls are not nearly as frequent as the Niners' head coach wants you to believe.
Nor were the inside runs as frequent for Lance as Shanahan's critics want you to believe.
Per PFF, Lance has 36 designed rushes (this excludes scrambles) in his short NFL career to date. While all three of his runs were between the tackles on Sunday, more than two-thirds of his rushes in his career came outside the tackles.
Lance's issue was that on those 25 outside-the-tackle runs, he averaged a paltry 3 yards a carry.
That's the lack of speed on display.
Not exactly Allen-esque.
How long would it have taken the Niners to figure out that Lance — a small-school guy with a big but inaccurate arm — probably wasn't the second coming of Josh Allen, at least on the ground?
No one can say.
The question now is whether the Niners will try to apply the same blueprint again in 2023, when Lance returns to the fold.
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