Cowboys' decision to trade for Trey Lance continues looking more puzzling by the day

Ahead of the 2023 campaign, the Dallas Cowboys made a trade with the San Francisco 49ers, acquiring Trey Lance in exchange for their fourth-round pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. At the time of the deal, this made a little bit of sense. Lance was taken with the No. 3 overall pick just a couple of years prior by the 49ers, so the potential for him to amount to something was there. With Dak Prescott entering his final year on his contract, there was a chance that Lance was going to be their quarterback of the future if Prescott left.

Well, Prescott didn't leave, and wound up inking a massive contract extension to keep him locked in for the foreseeable future. Additionally, Lance finds himself behind Cooper Rush on the Cowboys depth chart, so he almost certainly won't play even if Prescott gets hurt.

From the looks of it, the Cowboys parted with a fourth-round pick essentially for nothing. Lance did not appear in a game for Dallas last season and likely won't this season either. With this being the final year Lance has on his rookie deal, his time in Dallas could be up as soon as this upcoming spring. Even if he re-signs, this is Prescott's team.

With all of this in mind, the fact that the Cowboys traded a fourth-round pick for nothing is bad. What makes it even worse, though, is the fact that players taken around where that fourth-round pick ended up could've helped this Cowboys team a ton.

Cowboys decision to trade Trey Lance looks worse than anyone could've imagined

Bucky Irving, Ray Davis, and Isaac Guerendo, three running backs, were all taken within the first five picks immediately after the pick that San Francisco received from Dallas in exchange for Lance. For a Cowboys team in dire need of some semblance of a running game, that hurts.

None of these three running backs are starters on their team, but they've all contributed at certain points of the season.

Bucky Irving, the player taken immediately after the Niners selected Malik Mustapha with the Lance pick, has 395 yards rushing thus far for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and has averaged 5.2 yards per carry. To put into perspective how great Irving has been and how awful Dallas' running game is, the Cowboys have a total of 519 rushing yards this season. Irving has 395 yards while being the No. 2 back on his team for much of the season, and the entire Cowboys team has just over 100 more rushing yards. It's pathetic.

Cowboys fans saw first-hand the kind of impact that Isaac Guerendo can have. Tasked with having to operate as the team's lead back following Jordan Mason's injury (with Christian McCaffrey already out), Guerrendo ran for 85 yards on 14 attempts with a touchdown in San Francisco's Week 8 win over Dallas on Sunday Night Football. The Cowboys leading rusher in that game was Ezekiel Elliott, with 34 yards on the ground. The Cowboys have one game in which they've had someone rush for more than 85 yards, and that came back in Week 5 when Rico Dowdle ran for 87 yards.

Ray Davis only has one game this season with more than 10 carries as he's operated as a backup for much of the year for the Buffalo Bills, but in that one game that saw him receive a good amount of volume, he ran for 97 yards - a mark Dallas hasn't reached this season. In his limited reps, Davis is averaging 4.2 yards per carry and has amassed nearly half of Dallas' production as a team on the ground.

With how disastrous Dallas' running game is, any of these three backs would've been a major upgrade over what they've got, and they could've easily been picked in the fourth round. Instead, the Cowboys traded that pick for Trey Lance - a player that they hope will never play a regular season or postseason down for them. The trade has looked awful for a while now, and continues to look worse when these impressive backs have big games like Guerrendo just did against Dallas.