LOS ANGELES — In the first-ever staff job of his career, cutting up tape for the New York Jets in 2013, current USC defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn was paid about $21,000.
Somehow, as father Anthony Lynn remembered, a young Lynn managed to save $7,000.
“I don’t know how you do that,” Anthony said, on a phone call with the Southern California News Group, “to this day.”
But if you knew his son, Anthony Lynn reflected, you knew he was fiscally responsible. D’Anton Lynn lived, for all intents, inside the Jets’ facility that year. His habits didn’t much change years later, when an early-30s Lynn was hired as the Baltimore Ravens’ safeties coach; instead of finding his own place, a Ravens coach invited him to crash with him for a few months. Lynn took him up on it.
That coach was Rob Ryan: a man a generation older, and with hair immeasurably longer, and a filter unmistakably softer.
“Two totally different personalities,” Anthony Lynn chuckled.
Yet a pair of oddball roommates have reunited as colleagues again, after shared stops with the Buffalo Bills in 2016 and the Ravens in 2021. Shockingly, after spending 24 years coaching some of the NFL’s best, the enigmatic Ryan took the Trojans’ linebackers job in mid-January to complete one of the more formidable staffs in the country. There were a number of ties throughout his coaching life to USC, Ryan explained to reporters in a truly unhinged press conference on Wednesday: telling the tale of former New England Patriots linebacker Willie McGinest’s unabashed love for his Trojans, professing his fondness for USC alumni Isaiah Pola-Mao (who played for Ryan with the Las Vegas Raiders) and wife Janina.
But Ryan, truly, never would have arrived at USC without Lynn.
“This is a young Mike Tomlin, way I look at him,” Ryan said of Lynn on Wednesday, referring to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach. “D’Anton’s as sharp as he can be. He’s a wonderful person. He’s a great teacher.”
Lynn first floated the idea of coming to USC to Ryan at the end of the Las Vegas Raiders’ season, where Ryan was a senior defensive assistant. Ryan, plainly, told Lynn he was out of his mind. But Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce was canned in early January, and Lynn kept talking up USC’s progress and his roster, Ryan recalled. Eventually, the NFL lifer came to visit campus and meet head coach Lincoln Riley, who Ryan called “right there” with Rams head coach Sean McVay as one of the best offensive minds in football.
“I’d like to say I asked my wife’s opinion,” Ryan cracked Wednesday, “but I’m like, ‘Man, I’m going to USC.’ So, now, she’s packing what she now says is for the last time, and she is not happy with me.”
Ryan has been tabbed USC’s assistant head coach for defense, in addition to his linebackers title, and the on-paper fit is sheer chaos with Lynn’s more muted nature. In his first press conference at USC, back in December 2023, Lynn described his personal goals in coaching as just wanting to “play the best defense possible.” In Ryan’s first press conference at USC, on Wednesday, he turned a question about coaching with Lynn into a 5-minute story about how name-dropping former player Kaluka Maiava – USC quarterback Jayden Maiava’s uncle – secured him a rental car on a vacation to Oahu.
He’s plenty “comfortable in (his) own skin,” Ryan put it Wednesday, and the highlights from his 20-minute meeting with the media came unbridled and viral and hilarious.
On USC linebacker Eric Gentry: “He does the unnatural, natural. Like, I love this kid. This kid makes more plays – my God. Like, I’m like, this guy’s going to be fun to work with. And he’s got vines for arms. I do great with those guys with the long arms.”
On USC and NFL legend Troy Polamalu: “Both of us, ironically, married Greek women. Phew. That’s tough. That’s tough. So I’m sure that she’s in charge of his house like mine’s in charge of me.”
On spring practice and new Hutchinson Community College-turned-USC running back Waymond Jordan: “I can’t wait. We’re gonna go against the best. Oh, good. Bring it on! I can’t wait to see that lil’ JUCO kid from Hutch. Bam! We’re going to get after it.”
Both Lynn and Ryan, though, are aligned by a philosophy to stop the run, as fellow former colleague Anthony Lynn described. They are aligned, too, in work ethic. In 2016, back in Buffalo, Ryan’s brother Rex – then the Bills’ head coach, and a massive Chicago Cubs fan – rounded up staff and rented a bus to watch Game 7 of the World Series.
Lynn and Ryan were two of the only coaches who stayed behind.
“That’s what I admired about him,” Ryan recalled. “We were always going to work.”
Both, too, have made a living revolutionizing defenses. Ryan did it as Oklahoma State’s defensive coordinator in 1997, his last college stop before USC, taking a unit ranked 80th in the country in points per game to 22nd. Lynn did it at UCLA, and is righting the ship slowly at USC, the Trojans’ defense making massive strides in 2024.
And he’ll have an unlikely partner in Ryan, this fall.
“Watch where we finish this year,” Ryan implored, on Wednesday. “Watch where we finish this year.”
