“Obviously we took our shot and it didn’t work out. That’s on us with that. I’m not going to say anything is a ‘failure.’ That would be too much of a negative towards Trey. We took a shot, hoping he could be our guy. That didn’t work out. I understand that from our standpoint.
“I still do believe in Trey. Three years ago, we had the 12th pick in the draft, after that COVID year. We thought we had a really good team. We didn’t think we’d have a chance again to get to that top area to take a quarterback. We went into it realizing it was a risk, but we didn’t think we’d pick that high again for a couple of years. We would never have a chance to move from 12 to 3. We tried to move to a number of spots before that. But 3 was the first one that would do it. We looked at everything in between. We took our shot. We believed in him.
“I was hoping he’d play more his first year. We knew he wouldn’t come in and just take over from Jimmy. We were hoping to mix it in and give him some experience. Once he broke his finger (in the 2021 preseason finale), it got tougher for him. We knew we’d commit to him the next year, which we did. We knew he wasn’t fully ready in every aspect, but we knew with his skillset, we could put some stuff together to give him a chance to compete and grow with a good team as he developed. He got hurt in the first quarter of the second game which set that back.
“Now we’re in the third year, and we still have a good team. We thought it would be Trey. We got pretty fortunate falling into still having a rookie (contract) at quarterback for a second year. It happened to be a seventh-round pick. And we also look back at it as we didn’t think having the 29th pick, which those two first-round picks were (in 2022 and ’23), we were hoping it’d be 32, but two first-round picks at 29, we knew somebody wouldn’t consider moving up with that.
“It felt pretty fortunate what we fell into (with Purdy).”
