The hit lingers. Impact resonates. Even after all this time.
It’s been 15 years since the conclusion of DeOn’Tae Pannell’s collegiate playing career and almost two decades since entering Penn State as part of College Football Hall of Fame coach Joe Paterno’s last freshman-to-senior class.
D’Anton Lynn, now both a former teammate and coaching colleague, is at the center of Pannell's memory.
“D-Lynn’s one of toughest guys I’ve ever met in my life,” Pannell, the former four-year letterwinner on Penn State’s offensive line whose arrival in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, was simultaneous to Lynn’s, told FootballScoop. “I still remember him putting his helmet on the center’s chest on a corner blitz in practice. He liked to tackle, get in the box any chance he could to mix it up.
“In those years, you could expect that corner cat about five times a game, and we got it five, 10 times a week in practice. Number 1, he’s beaten me off the edge before and another time I’ve seen him absolutely put his face through somebody’s chest. I still remember him going head-to-head with Julio Jones (Alabama star, future NFL first-round draft pick), and he didn’t back down a second.”
Lynn’s penchant for refusing to back down is why he is where is today: at the forefront of USC’s defensive turnaround, standing as perhaps coach Lincoln Riley's most important Los Angeles move; crucial element in the Trojans’ ongoing College Football Playoff hopes and burgeoning head coaching candidate already receiving calls.
USC, No. 17 in the CFP rankings and very much alive for a berth in the 12-team field, hosts No. 21 Iowa Saturday afternoon.
The son of two-time Super Bowl champ and former Los Angeles Chargers head coach Anthony Lynn, D-Lynn – no one uses full names – patiently visits with a reporter for approximately an hour on a Friday evening before escaping to spend three more hours poring over digital video of the next day’s opponent.
All that external noise? Lynn insists nothing is cluttering his brain except how best to position his defenders to stop the opposition, which on average is scoring 21.78 points per game against USC – or merely 37-percent less than the 34.4 clip of Lynn’s inheritance upon his arrival in Lincoln Riley’s program after the 2023 season.
Turning 36 a week before his unit allows just three points in the second half of a comeback-win at Nebraska, Lynn nonetheless is implementing a goal brewing now for decades.
“When my dad started to coach, when I was in fourth or fifth grade, I always looked up to him,” Lynn told FootballScoop in an exclusive, one-on-one meeting. “I started by being a ball boy at practice, working in the equipment room, I even worked in the landscape department for the Cleveland Browns, did all their mulching, pulled all their weeds.
“My dad tried to point me in any other direction; he said how about golf not football, baseball not football. He was like, try internships in finance, and I was hellbent on coaching. So, he made me do a scouting internship before I coached.”
Aside from his formative days playing at Texas prep powerhouse Celina and his 33-game, three-time honorable mention Big Ten Conference career at Penn State, Lynn at his core builds attacking, ferocious defenses after planting the early seeds of his career developing a discerning eye for talent in the New York Jets’ scouting department.
“My evaluation process, as a coach but also big-picture wise, has to have consistency behind it; consistency in the process,” said Lynn, who took a UCLA defense that had plummeted to 103rd and had it 11th nationally in yards per game in his lone Westwood season. “You start with the tape. If I’m evaluating a defensive back, I separate by coverage and watch man stuff back-to-back-to-back. Then, I watch it separated by press and then off (coverage). Let me watch his press reps, watch his off reps, man in slot and then switch to zone. Split-safety zone, pattern-match zone.
“In college, you have to get a feel for the tape to say, ‘Who is the kid? What’s his mental makeup?’ Your culture, it helps so much bringing in kids who already are wired that way.”
Jeff Faris knows culture. It’s why, at just 35 years old, he’s among the youngest head coaches anywhere in NCAA Division I football. It’s why he’s the owner of FCS program Austin Peay’s first FBS win – against in-state, would-be bully MTSU no less – since the Ronald Reagan era, before Faris’ birth.
After working alongside Lynn at UCLA, he also knows Lynn’s cultural approach and ability to maximize output without optimal input.
“To think what he was able to do in our time together at UCLA, we were not spending the resources the rest of the league was,” Faris, on the bubble of FBS head coaching opportunities and still having Austin Peay alive in the FCS Playoffs hunt, told FootballScoop. “But, to be that good defensively, D-Lynn deserves a ton of credit.
“He would always be in his office, watching film as late as anybody. Not just the opponent; he’d be watching the NFL, trying to see new trends.”
Faris, UCLA’s tight ends coach the year before and during Lynn’s Bruins tenure, recalls with a bit of envy the worn path outside Lynn’s office.
“There was just always this constant stream of players making their way to D-Lynn’s office,” Faris said. “And not just the starters. There were true freshmen, guys not even traveling. It’s kind of funny, because he’s not a loud personality.
“I think him being a former player and having been in the NFL (eight years on various staffs) as long as he'd been, it really resonated but he has no arrogance and is so humble.”
Be it from his time as Lynn’s teammate at Penn State or as UCLA’s defensive analyst and run-game coordinator under his classmate, Pannell, like Faris a part of that '23 Bruins staff, knows Lynn’s selfless preparation gives his current USC defense a chance every week – and sets the stage for Lynn’s future.
“The big thing about working with him was the amount of organization, which also says a lot about the rest of the staff, too, when we were at UCLA, but there wasn’t a single day we walked out of a staff meeting where we weren’t all on same pages,” said Pannell. “For him, it was never and won’t ever be about egos. He asked one main question every single day: What is the best way to do this? He wanted all opinions, and then he’d make the best decision from there. His ability to not show ego and get everyone on the same page, I really hadn’t been around that before.
“He’s just a great man. With him, there’s no stone left unturned and I think he thinks about everything deeply, thoroughly, and it’s never about him. It’s just what is the best answer to get it done. He won’t find the right coaching opportunity; the right coaching opportunity will find him.”
Like a corner blitz getting home. Like a helmet to a chest-plate. Like the path Lynn’s been carving now for decades.