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?