Dallas City News

We are just talking here. These are only words. They cannot hurt you.

Dallas Cowboys training camp is over a week in now and we are getting a chance to draw legitimate conclusions on this, that and the other. Trey Lance has been somewhat of a mystery to fans and reports to this point had been a bit all over the place, but on Friday he had what was undoubtedly his finest throw wearing a star on his helmet.

Obviously no NFL team is seriously going to trade for Lance based off of this throw, but you have got to crawl before you can walk, and this throw was our equivalent to screaming when the baby starts to scoot.

So if we live in the hypothetical where Lance is suddenly an asset that a would-be team could care about, we are still only halfway through the equation. Given that every NFL team is in the middle of training camp, there is nobody who really needs him at the moment, especially with him entering the final year of his contract.

Any situation where Lance would be an option for a team would likely involve a team having a sudden need at the position in a way that they didn’t when training camp first began for them. One such team is the Los Angeles Chargers where, if you missed it, it was announced that Justin Herbert is dealing with plantar fascia.

The early word from the Chargers is that Herbert will be back for the regular season, but if we are reaching for any kind of idea in the name of a conversation this seems to be a potentially, maybe, sort of possible landing spot for someone like Trey Lance.

Obviously we are incredibly biased as we see things through the Cowboys lens so in the interest of objectivity I asked my friend Michael Peterson from Bolts From The Blue a few questions.

BTB: On a scale of 1-10 how worried are you about Herbert’s health for the start of the season?

On a scale of 1-10, I’m probably at a 5. I’m not that worried overall but any injury on this team makes me hold my breath due to all the times the team said it wasn’t a serious injury only for a player to miss half the year because the issue won’t go away.

BTB: Who are the other quarterbacks on the depth chart?

The backup quarterbacks are Easton Stick (four starts in 2023), 2023 seventh-round pick Max Duggan, and 2024 UDFA Casey Bauman. Stick played “fine” to end last season but he’s far from an efficient passer. He’s much better as a gamer who can utilize his legs to extend drives. Duggan led TCU to the 2023 CFP title game but got walloped by Georgia. He had a rough pre-draft process which led to him being a dart throw by the Chargers despite being a Heisman runner-up. He has a matching skillset to Stick in that he’s not the best passer but he can improvise and extend plays with his athleticism. Lastly, Bauman is a tall 6’7 passer who went from FCS Montana State to Division II Augustana. Injuries limited his career to a degree but he’s yet another dual-threat player. Just a camp arm, though.

BTB: Hypothetically would you (as in you, not the team) have interest in Trey Lance as a potential option for let’s say something like the first month of the season while Herbert got fully healthy if things came down to that?

I would not have any interest in making a trade for Lance as the team can make do with Stick in the meantime. If this was more of a “make-or-break” season, I’d entertain the idea more but this is year essentially a re-tooling where the Chargers should be very happy if they manage to finish with a record above .500. If they’re a 9-8 team and miss the playoffs with Herbert, going 6-11 and earning a better draft pick because Stick dropped a few games doesn’t sound too bad.

More than anything this exercise felt like even more proof that any idea of trading Lance feels incredibly optimistic at best (in terms of recouping some sort of compensation for him). The Chargers are hardly in a state of panic in the aftermath of the Herbert injury, but Michael’s words about how he feels the team can “make do” with another option are potentially how most people across different teams would feel at this point.

He also noted that if things were more critical for the Chargers that he would consider it which harkens back to the last time something like this truly came to pass. The Minnesota Vikings, incidentally coached by Mike Zimmer at the time, traded for Sam Bradford right before the regular season started when Teddy Bridgewater was injured. Even then, Bradford had a legitimate career to go off of and work off of in a way that Lance simply doesn’t at this point.