Possibly one external offer and one internal offer(the dangle)

BLUF: Is the internal role offer a dangle?

Short about me: Business school B.sc.(accounting/auditing) graduate 2010 and have been working as a product specialist since 2013 in a FP&A team. Have significantly strenghtend skills in SQL and R past 3-4 years and as such have been presented with below opportunities.

The situation:
I am in a external recruitment process and have had 2 interviews with the client and the recruiter have now collected referenses and also done asked for background check. The external role is combined business controller and data analyst role. In the external role they defined the data analyst capabilities as requirments for the role (SQL) and also have been brought up as the key specialized skills i woul bring to the small business controller team. The external role is a company with a portfolio of insurance and banking. I would be working with the insurance parts.
One of my references asked if he could see if there is willingness to offer me a new role internally without saying that i am leaving and i said it is fine. A day after my referens said he would check I was contacted by a manager internally for a system manager/data analyst role (title probably will be system manager). I said i have not had time to think about it so would get back to them to see if they should provide a concrete package offer. In the internal role(electric grid DSO) the data analyst part of the job has been clearly defined as something needed by the company but they were about to reqruit a system manager full time and now they are saying i would do that job as well as data analyst. I believe it is that way that they managed to scramble together a possibility of creating the opening budgetwise within 1 day. The manager who called me upp and said he thinks i would be someone who am able to long term transition into a data scientist position. So the combination of me knowing they were about to recruit a system manager full time and now packaging it as a dual role and that he tried to entice me with data scientist track kind of created a red flag as "the dangle" for me. Am i being paranoid? Should i be trying to follow the part about manager tools where Mark and Mike has said that one should try and take on more work and frame the dual role as challenge instead?

I think that the least amount of risk of ending up in a bad situation with respect to "the dangle" is with the external offer. Am i wrong to assume this based on above info?