49ers insider: Why you should expect Trey Lance to start Week 1

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy is expected to miss six months, recovering from surgery to repair the tear of the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) in his right elbow. If all goes well, that surgery could happen as early as next week. Purdy will meet with his surgeon, Dr. Keith Meister, to evaluate the elbow this week.

Purdy was initially supposed to undergo surgery on February 22 to repair the damage suffered in the NFC Championship Game. However, that was postponed due to inflammation in the quarterback’s arm.

The initial timeline saw Purdy potentially returning in late August, missing most of the offseason but potentially catching the tail end of training camp and being ready for the start of the regular season. Even under that scenario, having Purdy get some work in training camp always seemed a bit on the optimistic side. But you never know.

“Every person’s different, so timelines are just that, they’re guidelines, but we’ll see,” general manager John Lynch said this week at the NFL Scouting Combine. “The reality is the majority of these [types of surgeries] are done on baseball players. This is not a baseball injury.”

What does the postponement mean for his return timetable? It potentially pushes it into early September, right around when the 2023 NFL season is slated to kick off, and no one is pausing anything to wait on Purdy.

One 49ers insider believes fans should expect to see third-year quarterback Trey Lance, not Purdy, behind center when the 49ers offense takes the field in Week 1.

“[The new timeline] points to two things: (1.) Trey Lance running the first-team offense and starting in Week 1 like he did last season, and (2.) the 49ers adding a veteran quarterback in free agency,” Matt Barrows recently wrote in a feature for The Athletic.

That certainly should not be breaking news to anyone following this storyline. The recovery time was always expected to end dangerously close to the start of the regular season. That has not changed. However, it keeps inching closer and closer to overlapping with Week 1.

That’s not even factoring in the possibility that a reconstruction of the ligament, not just a repair, will need to be performed in addition to adding the internal brace within Purdy’s arm.

“There’s this backup plan of having a hybrid surgery,” Purdy said during the week leading to the Super Bowl, “which means a little bit of the graft, and then an internal brace, which can be anywhere from seven to nine months [of recovery].”

That would put most, if not all, of his 2023 campaign in danger. Seven months from early March would be October. Nine months would be December. That would mean a whole lot of Lance starts during the upcoming season. If the 49ers are doing well, that may mean we don’t see Purdy on the field much, if at all, barring any late-season injuries.

“So I think, with the delay, with everything else, we’re not looking at training camp anymore,” Barrows said during a KNBR radio interview this week. “We’re now looking maybe he’s ready sometime in early September, which of course, corresponds with the start of the regular season. Let’s just say that it’s September 7 where he’s fully cleared to practice. He’s not starting in Week 1. Tray Lance is. That’s the likeliest scenario at this point.

“So, yeah, absolutely; It looks as if Trey Lance is going to start the season as the 49ers’ quarterback. And if the 49ers are winning at that point, they’re going to stick with the winning quarterback, for sure.

“Now you look back at the history, and these guys get injured quite a bit. So it seems like there will be an opportunity at some point for a healthy Brock Purdy to regain that job, but in an ideal world, you stick with the same quarterback all 17 games. And that quarterback, I think, at this point, could only be Trey Lance.”