Will Trey Lance get the Lamar Jackson treatment from the media?

Mina Kimes is, in my opinion, the best NFL analyst on television. She routinely examines the narratives about the league and provides data to either support or debunk them. On NFL Live, she recently offered an opinion about Lamar Jackson that our own Jason Aponte and Leo Luna believe will apply to Trey Lance as well.

For context, Mina was responding to comments about Lamar Jackson from league sources in this article ranking the top ten quarterbacks.

So many opinions about Lamar Jackson year after year are based on people’s priors rather than reflecting reality or context.

Now let’s see how that applies to Trey Lance. Jason Aponte put it nicely on today’s Oh, Hey There! podcast.

“The preconceived notions that people have, it’s about being right about Trey Lance and not getting it right...What has this kid done to so many people that has them just calling him a bust?

The other thing is, so many of the things that everybody knows about Trey all of a sudden now are coming up. ‘Well, I don’t know if he’s grasping the playbook,’ I’ve heard. He’s literally the smartest kid out of the entire [quarterback] group. ‘Well, I don’t know if he can master the scheme.’ NDSU runs the same things, basically, with run concepts and he did his own line checks.

Everybody continues to give all those other guys passes. Don’t get it twisted, I love Justin Fields...but he didn’t play well last year. Zach Wilson didn’t play well last year. Trevor Lawrence looked awful last year. But yet, ‘Zach will be all right, it’s gonna be his second year. Trevor’s gonna be fine, Doug Pederson is there.’ Why do you continuously look at other quarterbacks from this draft class, see the poor play they put on tape, and still give them hope? Yet two games and a half for Trey Lance and the book is written? People are in a rush to be right, not to get it correct.”

“I was wrong” is not a phrase that’s easy for any human being to say. For NFL analysts, doubly so. In the case of Lamar Jackson, even years of data, becoming the youngest MVP ever and just the second unanimous MVP in league history haven’t been enough to get people to say it.

So, even if Trey Lance plays well next year, don’t expect these old criticisms to go away any time soon.