Trey Lance says that this is as long as he’s gone without a full football schedule since the third grade, so, yes, it’s been a very strange 14 months since he completed a 16–0 first season as a starter at North Dakota State and piloted the Bison to the program’s eighth FCS national championship in nine years on Jan. 11, 2020.
To be sure, he was already creeping onto the NFL’s radar at that point, and, conversely, the feeling that he could be in the pros in 2021 was moving onto his radar, as well. But the idea that he’d play only one more college game? Or that what would’ve been, if all went well, his final college season would be spent split between four different states?
That, most assuredly, was on the 20-year-old’s radar.
“I’ve been playing football as long as I can remember. … So yeah, it’s been super weird,” Lance said during a break in his schedule late Wednesday afternoon. “But it’s been good for me, honestly, just from a being-able-to-make-yourself-uncomfortable standpoint.”
No one would draw up the path that Lance has taken to get where he is now, back in Fargo, with his pro day hours away, and that’s not even a reference to his roots as a lightly recruited, small-town Minnesota kid who turned down the likes of Cornell and Brown to pursue his football dreams in the Missouri Valley Football Conference.
It’s what he’s gone through since then to get here, to the doorstep of the first round.
At his Friday morning pro day in the Fargodome, Lance will do what so many expected him to do in the fall, and that’s step onto a bigger stage with more scrutiny and the NFL’s eyes squarely upon him. And while it’s not his fault that he didn’t get the chance to do it before this—the pandemic robbed him of that—there’s very little question that this particular pro day might be as important as any in recent memory.
Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields and Zach Wilson have junior tape to lean back on. Lance does not and, to his credit, he knows the stakes.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he said. “This is pretty much my Super Bowl. It’s what I get for 2020. I’m just so excited for it, feel so prepared for it, where that just kind of handles the pressure by itself. My mindset towards it is like I’m going into a game. Whether it’s a game or this, I prepare to the point where I feel like I’ve done everything I possibly can to be as ready as I possibly can be to do my very best.
“And at that point, it’s just attitude and effort. Those are easy things for me.”
The goal is simple—he wants to reintroduce himself to the NFL after being out of the spotlight, and without game film, for a significant period of time.
If things go according to plan, he’ll give the NFL a show. And as he sees it, that show will largely be a product of all that he’s been through since he last hoisted a trophy 14 months ago.
