By Chase Goodbread | March 11, 2021

No, this perhaps was the only thing worse than not throwing well: he threw well, and nobody cared.

"As you get going into it," Lance said, "you sense that nobody is really even watching you."

Elite 11 organizers are transparent about the fact that regional camps aren't really an open competition to advance as a finalist; high school tape evaluation plays a much larger role in the selections. That wasn't altogether clear to the Lance family, however, as they drove the nine hours from Minnesota to Chicago thinking this camp could finally be the springboard for recognition that an unheralded kid from a small Minnesota town of 13,500 had been waiting for.

Instead, he felt more anonymous walking out than he did walking in.

Lance lost reps to quarterbacks who skipped the line for extra throws, but it wouldn't have been like him to do the same. He would later hear that some Elite 11 coaches not only don't mind the skippers, it's one way they identify the alphas in the group. Lance threw around 20-to-30 balls in live reps, more than a few campers but fewer than most.

Looking back, he leads with humility.

"I'm not saying I deserved to be a finalist," Lance said. "There are a ton of quarterbacks there, and I understand how hard it is to narrow it down from the Elite 11's standpoint. But I didn't come out of it feeling like I had a shot going into it."

Shoulder, meet chip.

It wasn't the first time Lance felt snubbed.

A couple months earlier, Lance visited the University of Minnesota for a recruiting event and was all in to be a Golden Gopher. However, Lance said coach P.J. Fleck, then in his first year with the team, saw him as a safety at the college level. Almost immediately, recruiting services changed his position from QB to ATH. Lance can't be sure the change happened as a result of Fleck not offering him as a quarterback, but when his designation changed to "athlete" so fast -- he noticed it on his ride home from the Twin Cities -- how could he not suspect it?

Three years and one magical season at North Dakota State later, the 16-year-old nobody noticed in Chicago now shares top billing with the top quarterback prospects available in the 2021 NFL Draft, including three former Elite 11 picks -- Clemson's Trevor Lawrence, Ohio State's Justin Fields and Alabama's Mac Jones.

On Oct. 3, due to COVID-19, North Dakota State played its only game of the fall against Central Arkansas – just the 17th career start for Lance, only a redshirt sophomore. More than two dozen scouts representing 20 NFL clubs flocked to NDSU for what they correctly expected to be his final college game.

Finally, people are noticing.

Carlton began throwing with Trey in a spacious family backyard that allowed for tosses of up to 30 yards. He'd been a cornerback at Southwest Minnesota State from 1988 through 1991 and played two years in the CFL, but he was no quarterbacks coach. Asked if it was his dad who first taught him to throw, Trey acknowledges it with a grin.

"I guess you could say that," he said.

While Carlton might not have been a quarterback whisperer when it came to the technique needed for a tight spiral, he knew what frustrated cornerbacks about good passers and how to take advantage of poor ones. As such, Trey's backyard education in quarterbacking had less to do with how to throw and more to do with how to beat a defense.

Private instruction? He never gave it a thought. Giving up basketball? Forget about it.

The robotic grind of year-round training makes quarterbacks out of kids who were never meant to be one. Lance, by contrast, was a natural.

"The ball just started flying out of his hand, and he could put it wherever I asked him to," Carlton said. "He started tearing up my hands. I had to get some gloves after a while."

By the end of his son's sophomore year at Marshall High, Carlton wanted an objective opinion on Trey's throwing arm -- one he could trust, because, as a dad, he wasn't sure he trusted his own. He put in a call to Jeff Loots, a friend who had been the quarterback at Southwest Minnesota State when Carlton played there. Loots was a record-breaking passer at the school, but wasn't selected in the 1993 NFL Draft. He ended up playing for a lengthy string of Arena Football League teams. Carlton sent Loots a link to Trey's highlight video, just a smattering of throws he'd made in the first few games of his prep career. When Loots watched the tape, he saw a 15-year-old whose mechanics were advanced as if he'd been formally trained for years.

Only, he hadn't.

"I liked the way his feet stepped to the target, the way he transferred his weight properly," Loots said. "That's something kids that age struggle with. And he could throw on the move, to his right or left. He still had two years of high school left to go, and it was obvious just watching a few minutes of video that he had what it took to go play somewhere."

Both Wentz and Easton Stick, a fifth-round pick of the Los Angeles Chargers who commanded the Bison offense between Wentz's career and Lance's, were dual-threats in college. Lance is similar; along with a 28:0 TD-to-INT ratio last year, he ran for 1,100 yards and 14 scores on the ground. NFL Network analyst Daniel Jeremiah compares Lance (6-foot-4 and 226 pounds) to former No. 1 overall pick Andrew Luck (6-4, 234 coming out of Stanford) because of their similarities in athleticism, maturity, confidence and fearlessness.

Wentz, Stick and Lance all ran a Bison offensive scheme that bore similarities to a traditional NFL system, and although Wentz and Stick played for former NDSU coach Chris Klieman (now the head man at Kansas State), that hasn't changed under Entz. According to NDSU quarterbacks coach Randy Hedberg, Lance processed pre-snap looks from the defense remarkably well for a first-year starter, and shares credit with an offensive line that allowed just 13 sacks in 16 games.

"In our system, the quarterback sets the protection on almost every play, which is a little unusual," Hedberg said. "Our offensive line did a great job, but so did Trey with knowing what protections to call. That helped Carson and Easton transition to the NFL, and it will help Trey."

Entz and his staff realized quickly after Lance's arrival in 2018 that he was the program's future at quarterback. They responded by giving him some first-team practice reps with the starters during a redshirt year, an unusual move as redshirting quarterbacks typically run the scout-team offense. He learned much from Stick, whom Lance credits for turning him into an extremely detailed note-taker. NDSU backup QB Zeb Noland said he witnessed Lance pen 80 thoughts, one for every snap, while breaking down a Central Arkansas game from last year. Lance has also built a relationship with Wentz, who sent him a text of encouragement before every NDSU game last year.

NFL clubs' evaluations of Lance have to stop a little shallow due to experience. As a one-year starter whose 2020 fall season was scrapped, except for one game, he simply doesn't offer a very deep library of game tapes.

Still, Lance's talent has scouts looking beyond his experience.

"I really doubt he'll be asked to carry a team as a rookie," said an area scout for an NFC team. "He's got all the physical traits teams like and that's going to drive his draft position. He's a great college player with a bright future. But throwing a kid that young into an NFL season who didn't even get to play his last year in college, with one year as an FCS starter, it's a lot to ask."

The competitive divide between the FCS and the NFL is a deep one; only six FCS players were selected in the 2020 draft, although that number is more commonly in the teens. A scheduled NDSU game against Oregon this fall would have helped scouts get a better feel for Lance's ability against tougher competition, but the Pac-12's July decision to cancel non-conference games wiped out that opportunity. The Ducks would have been the first FBS opponent Lance faced in college. Nevertheless, his skill overrides any concern about competition, just as it did with Wentz, who faced only one FBS opponent (Iowa State) in his NDSU career.

"The number of games he's played would be more of a concern (than the competition level)," Jeremiah said. "His skill set is easy to identify, I don't care who he's playing against or with. But ideally, you'd like a little longer track record."

The two became so close, Noland has come to value his time with Lance as much or more than his time on the field. Noland recalls the meeting with Entz in which he was told Lance had beaten out the veteran transfer for the starting job: "I just looked [Trey] dead in the eye and said, 'I've got your back.' In that moment, the relationship we'd built meant more than who would start. We love each other."

Noland describes a charismatic presence in Lance that exudes a quiet confidence and rallies teammates. At the quarterback position, intangible traits like that, paired with the top-shelf physical skills, can have a galvanizing effect on an NFL team.

"He's so impressive to talk to, you think, I'm not betting against that guy," said Jeremiah. "With some players, you just know they're not going to fail. I had the same feeling about Josh Jacobs; you realize this guy has all the skills you need, plus he's wired the right way. I feel the same way about Trey Lance."

Had Noland transferred to any other school, to compete with anyone not named Trey Lance, he says he would have likely been bitter about a bench role. But even though playing time was the reason he left Iowa State for NDSU in the first place, Noland says that he Lance had stayed in college for 2021, he would've returned to be his backup once again.

"If I was anywhere else, I'd probably transfer again and try to go play somewhere for one last season," Noland said. "But whatever he decides, I'm staying here, because I would never leave him. It's hard to explain, but I wouldn't give up another year of just being around him, even as a backup again."

"We talked about how they missed me, and I gave them as hard a time as I could about it," Lance said with a laugh. "Trent told me, 'We do miss guys. The guys we pick aren't all going to be starters.' You don't hear that side of things when you're a regional kid looking at it from the outside."

Stumpf had already gone back and watched Lance's old high school tape, looking for things the Elite 11 staff might've missed when it first evaluated him in 2017. He saw a true field general with impressive athleticism, but also one who handed the ball off more than he threw in a Wing-T offense. He saw a kid who was better exposed to college basketball coaches through AAU than he ever was as a football recruit. He saw a quarterback whose only Power Five scholarship offer, from Iowa, was to play linebacker.

Indeed, Lance's talent was missed by more than just the Elite 11. Save for NDSU and a few other small schools, everyone else missed, too.

"I wouldn't change anything about how everything's turned out," Lance said. "That chip on my shoulder is one of the reasons I am where I am today."

Follow Chase Goodbread on Twitter at @ChaseGoodbread.