‘No half measures’: D’Anton Lynn’s journey from Celina, Texas to USC’s defensive guru
The face of the Trojans’ defensive rebuild, Lynn brings a competitive edge forged from breaking out of his father Anthony Lynn’s shadow
Luca Evans (OC Register) — LOS ANGELES — They would wage wars on the hoop in the driveway, a father who never believed in taking it easy and a son who never could accept his own failure.
Life is hard. Cruel. Unflinching. Anthony Lynn wanted his 10-year-old son D’Anton to know this, and understand that nothing came easy. Anthony was the pastor, and their driveway from Colorado to Texas to Florida was his sermon, preaching lessons with every swat of D’Anton’s shots and every game won 21-0.
D’Anton’s mother Cynda pleaded with Anthony, a former NFL running back in the twilight of his athletic prime, to lower the goal. To let him score, just once. No. If you want to score, Anthony would tell D’Anton, you need to learn how. Do something different. Go around me.
Cynda thought it would break her son’s confidence. Instead, D’Anton would drag his father back out when Anthony would get home, weary from long hours spent across various NFL coaching gigs. Back to the driveway. Back to another butt-whooping for D’Anton, a young Sisyphus pushing the rock.
Losing has never broken D’Anton Lynn, the man now tabbed as USC’s next defensive general. It just pissed him off. For eight years straight, he’d run 21 against his dad, and the competitiveness got intense. Unsettling. One fellow parent, Anthony said, barred a young D’Anton from his house.
He plays too rough.
But by the time his senior year at Celina rolled around, D’Anton beat Anthony in the driveway for the first time.
“There was no mercy,” Anthony remembered.
And D’Anton never lost to his father again.
Two decades later, sister Danielle said, her brother hasn’t changed. That gene’s masked, maybe, by a private demeanor, an analytical approach that made him into a Broyles Award finalist at UCLA and a rising name in the coaching business. But after a mutual pursuit, D’Anton stepped into USC’s open defensive coordinator position in December, with all its pressure and legacy and trail of bodies left behind, because of the challenge.
“You are going to a whole ’nother level of expectations,” Anthony remembered telling his son, when he accepted the job in December. “You are going into a hotbox, kid.”
D’Anton just smiled, a 34-year-old who had long shed his dad’s silhouette back in Celina.
“I just get the impression,” Anthony said, “he likes it. That’s what he wants.”
INTIMIDATING LEGACY
They bought a house in a little neighborhood right outside town, a lake nearby, right down the street from then-Celina offensive coordinator Bill Elliott. In the summers, D’Anton would come running over to the back window of Elliott’s house, where the coach’s boys sold fireworks out of their bedroom. Oh, how Elliott’s sons idolized D’Anton, because he was a Celina Bobcat. And in this town of a few thousand, then, everyone idolized the Celina Bobcats.
This was the home of the greatest win streak in Texas high school football history, a 68-game span. But they were not concerned with going undefeated at Celina, longtime coach Butch Ford said. Not concerned with winning the district. At Celina, it was a state championship or it was nothing.
It was intimidating, Danielle remembered, to move back to this small town. Anthony Lynn, to many, was considered the best Bobcat who had ever come through Celina. Long before D’Anton ever stepped into the spotlight in Los Angeles, his father worried he was making a mistake, bringing his son back to the same field and the same blue-collar atmosphere he was molded by.
“At one point,” Anthony said, “I thought it was going to be like a nightmare.”
Anthony loves Celina. But he grew up angry, at times, in the South. In one Little League game, a team full of “rednecks,” as Anthony’s youth baseball coach Pat Hunt put it, hurled racial slurs at Anthony when he came up to hit. He grew up feeling othered and disrespected. So Anthony took to fighting.
And when he was young, his grandfather sat him down.
You can’t go on like this, his grandfather told Anthony, because at some point, somebody’s going to kill you.
A generation later, early in D’Anton’s time at Celina, a teammate plastered a sticker on his back as a prank. It was meant as nothing more cruel than a joke. But D’Anton took it hard. To his son, then, Anthony said, it “almost came across as even a little racist.”
“Mentally,” Anthony remembered, “the kid wasn’t happy.”
LASER-FOCUSED
By the time they finished school, D’Anton Lynn and that same teammate became best friends.
That Celina kid – who declined to be identified for this story – was about 5-foot nothing. D’Anton had heaps of inches and pounds on him. He could have swung on him, after the sticker. He could have, as family friend Hunt put it, “destroyed him.”
He didn’t. Because the young Lynn, as folks in Celina remember, had a special self-control, a self-confidence. He never touched drink or smoke, laser-focused on a football career that would lead him to Penn State.
Throughout D’Anton’s first year at Celina, Anthony kept an eye on potential schools in Dallas, seeing pain in his son’s eyes and thinking a larger school might be a more comfortable fit. But the young Lynn stuck it out, Ford seeing a need and switching him from quarterback to linebacker and later safety. One day, D’Anton was invited out by a school booster to go and work on the same ranch Anthony grew up working on.
The son came back dirty and tired and happy. That’s my boy, Anthony thought. And he stopped looking at schools in Dallas.
In the final game of D’Anton’s Celina career, his senior year in 2007, he cracked his clavicle on a hit in a state championship game against China Spring. It was a death blow. China Spring liked to throw the ball.
So on the sideline after a few plays being evaluated by a doctor, D’Anton went up to Ford.
“I got to play, Coach,” D’Anton begged Ford. “I got to play. I can help us win.”
He couldn’t raise his arm. But Ford put him back out there. And D’Anton spent the rest of the game shadowing China Spring’s best receiver, tackling one-handed, as Celina won a state title for the second time in his career.
Becoming a part of Celina, truly, in a way his father – who never won a state championship – could never quite touch.
“That’s the kind of kid he is,” Elliott said, remembering D’Anton’s simple refusal to come out of that state title game. “That’s the kind of mentality he has.”
ABSORB AND ASCEND
During a stint with the Buffalo Bills in the mid-2010s, Anthony was walking back to the practice facility parking lot late one night when he heard a voice carrying from the defensive meeting room.
Curious, he turned back and peeked through the door to find his son – then an assistant under head coach Rex Ryan, tasked with some play-install responsibilities – practicing a PowerPoint presentation at 11 p.m. to an empty room as if it was full.
This kid is different, Anthony thought. And in many ways, he only had himself to blame. He used to bring a young D’Anton to training camps when he was with the Denver Broncos, his 8-year-old son forcing his father to listen to his personnel breakdowns on car rides back home.
