On the Cusp of a Dream: James Lynch goes deep w/ SicEm365 about Baylor career, NFL future
His brother, Dustin, will arrive Thursday with his smoker in tow—the same one he’s hauled to Baylor football games the past three seasons.
Ribs, wings, steaks, burgers, sausage. The spread for James Lynch’s NFL Draft watch party next week will rival the tailgate feasts he missed while starring as a defensive end for the Bears.
“Anything you can put on a smoker, man … Dustin takes it to the next level,” Lynch, the reigning Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year, said by phone from Round Rock Thursday. “I’ll have six or seven people over—the people who got me where I am today—and we’ll just have a bunch of meat laying around.”
He chuckles.
“I guess we’ll just eat until my name is called.”
Whenever that may be.
Should Dustin bring enough food for one day, or two? Maybe even three?
The predictions for where Lynch will be selected in next week’s draft are all over the board—“I’ve seen anywhere from late in the first all the way to the sixth,” he says—but the most common thought is that he’ll be taken in the third or fourth round.
ESPN will air the first round of the draft Thursday night. The second and third rounds are on Friday before the event concludes Saturday with rounds four through seven.
“I’d obviously like to be a higher pick,” Lynch told SicEm365. “But it’s not going to bother me if it doesn’t happen.
“I feel like I’ve kinda been overlooked and doubted my entire career. People have said I shouldn’t be able to do this or that. So honestly, it wouldn’t bother me one bit if I went lower. It’d just give me a chance to prove myself again, which is all I can really ask for.”
The 6-foot-4, 289-pound Lynch said he’s spoken with multiple NFL teams via phone during the past few months, but the Cowboys, Eagles, Vikings and Steelers have “shown the most love” with repeated calls and inquiries.
Whoever selects Lynch will be getting one of the more decorated players in Baylor history, as Lynch earned first-team All-American honors after setting the school record for single-season (13.5) and career sacks (22).
In a text to SicEm365 Friday morning, former Baylor coach Matt Rhule—now in his first year with the NFL’s Charlotte Panthers—praised Lynch’s physical traits but said it’s the intangibles that set him apart.
“There is no doubt,” Rhule said, “that his unique combination of size and athleticism—as well as his elite production, rare football intelligence and superb feel for the game—will make him a great addition to a team. He will have a long and productive career.”
Lynch says he’s indebted to Rhule for simply giving him a chance.
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A former Nebraska linebacker, Tim Lynch named gave his son the middle name “Husker” because of his love for his alma mater. And goodness knows, James was smitten with the Cornhuskers, too, first as a young child and then all the way into high school. He attended their spring game his junior year and let it be known he’d be willing to commit on the spot, but a scholarship offer never came.
Instead Lynch pledged to TCU in May of 2016. But during a subsequent visit to the school in August, he was stunned when a Horned Frogs assistant coach summoned him into an office to tell him the staff planned to move him from defensive end to the offensive line in college.
Feeling misled, Lynch de-committed the following week and pledged to USC two days later. He played his whole senior season of high school in 2016 excited about becoming a Trojan. But in mid-December—less than two months before National Signing Day—Lynch said the Trojans yanked their scholarship offer after hearing he’d undergone shoulder surgery to repair a partially-torn labrum. Lynch announced he was de-committing, but he says now that wasn’t the case.
“They told me I couldn’t come,” he said.
Lynch went into scramble mode, frantically reaching out to the other schools that had extended offers. But all the programs he’d been interested in told Lynch their recruiting classes were full, that they’d run out of spots.
The one exception was Baylor.
Lynch had spoken a few weeks earlier with Shawn Bell, who had just left his job at Cedar Ridge High School in Round Rock to join Rhule’s inaugural staff at Baylor. Lynch had initially told Bell he was gung-ho for USC and had no interest in de-committing. But when Lynch called Bell a few weeks later, it was a different story.
“Hey, um, Coach Bell … can I still come to Baylor?”
“Coach Rhule was in my living room a few days later,” Lynch said. “By the time he left, it was a wrap. I knew I wanted to play for him.”
Lynch said Rhule caught him off guard with his recruiting pitch.
“I told him I wanted to play in the NFL, and he told me his goal was to be an NFL head coach,” Lynch said. “That’s usually not how you would recruit someone, because that recruit will think, ‘He’s going to leave me.’ But I thought, ‘OK, this guy is a straight shooter. I like that.’
“I was looking for someone to trust. Obviously by that point in recruiting, some people had gone back on promises and I was having a hard time trusting anyone. But I could sense that Coach Rhule was being straight up and honest with me. That’s all I cared about."
Although he wasn’t a starter, Lynch played in all but one game as a freshman in 2017, when Baylor finished 1-11. The season was maddening at times, Lynch said, because most of the players on that squad had been recruited by former coach Art Briles, who had won big, but with a completely different style.
Naturally, Lynch said, some of the upperclassmen were resistant to Rhule’s approach.
“It was tough,” Lynch said. “I can’t lie. It sucked and it wasn’t fun. (Rhule) came in and was a pretty tough coach and, basically … the whole team wasn’t bought in. It was hard for him to implement the way he wanted to play and the way he wanted to do things when some people weren’t feeling it.
“The biggest thing I had in my back pocket—the thing I kept telling myself—was that the senior class that year would be moving on. For me, I was his guy, so whatever he said, I did. That first year obviously sucked, but it was worth it.”
Indeed, the very next season, Baylor capped off a 7-6 campaign by defeating Vanderbilt in the Texas Bowl. The six-game turnaround was the biggest in college football in 2018.
With each passing week, Lynch said, the Bears began buying in more and more to Rhule’s mentality.
“He just made us so tough,” Lynch said. “He changed our mindsets. Whatever was in front of us, we were going to attack it. If you knocked us on our back, we were going to keep getting up, keep attacking.
“I remember him telling us, ‘Once that Baylor Line storms onto the field and those gates in the end zone are closed and locked, you can’t leave the field until one team beats the other. You’re stuck in there, fighting your opponent like gladiators, fighting to the death.’ That’s the mentality we had.”
Baylor exemplified that toughness during its historic season in 2019, when the Bears climbed to No. 12 in the Associated Press poll by winning its first nine games. Five of those victories were by eight points or less.
There was the overtime win against Texas Tech, the last-second field goal to beat Iowa State and the triple OT victory at TCU, when Baylor kicker John Mayers kept Baylor’s hopes alive with a 51-yard field goal at the end of regulation.
“I was so nervous I couldn’t even watch,” Lynch said. “I just stared at the TCU student section and waited for their reaction.
"So many games were intense like that. It also goes back to that 1-11 year. It made us appreciate that win is a win, whether it was ugly or whether you looked great. You can’t take any of them for granted. So appreciate them and celebrate with your brothers in the locker room and realize that you just won a college football game, which is very hard to do.”
Lynch said the most gratifying Big 12 victory of the season was also one of Baylor’s most lopsided: a 45-27 road win at Oklahoma State. Two seasons earlier the Cowboys had whipped the Bears 59-16 in Stillwater.
“It felt like we lost by 100,” Lynch said. “After the game Coach Rhule promised us that we were going to come back to Stillwater in two years and beat them.
“Then we went back, and we were undefeated and the higher-ranked team. But everyone was predicting that we were going to lose. I didn’t understand it.”
Baylor trailed 13-10 at halftime before outscoring the Cowboys 35-14 after intermission.
“Coach Rhule was like, ‘Hey, are we going to be the team we want to be? Or are we going to let other people say who we are?’ Lynch said. “We ended up dominating them. That was a big moment for us, to realize what kind of team we were. We weren’t going to back down from anyone or any situation.
“It was us versus the world. It felt like no one wanted us to be good. But we were good. There’s a video of me running through their tunnel and looking at their crowd, making a gesture like, ‘Bring it on! We’re here! Come and take it from us!’ That was our mindset.”
Baylor would eventually finish the regular season 11-1, with the lone loss coming in a 34-31 home defeat against Oklahoma—a setback that was particularly hard to stomach considering the Bears led 31-10 at halftime.
“We weren’t ourselves in the second half,” Lynch said. “We were making mistakes and we were playing timid. We were so far ahead against this great team and we didn’t handle it well. I also think we got tired. Our defense was on the field a lot. I think I played the most snaps of my career in that game.”
Still, even after losing again (in overtime) to Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game at AT&T Stadium, Baylor was awarded a berth in the Sugar Bowl, where it lost to SEC power Georgia 26-14. Lynch bristles at anyone who suggests the Bears were out-matched against the Bulldogs. Baylor played most of the second half without injured starting quarterback Charlie Brewer and still only lost by 12 points.
“When we first came out we were flying around and hitting people,” he said. “Then they did a little flea-flicker and got a trick play on us. It worked. Good play call by them. But to me, that’s not like them physically beating us and overmatching us. They tricked us. At the end of the day they had 26 points and we had 14. It wasn’t a blowout by any means.
“Nobody really wanted us there and no one really liked us. I would’ve loved to have gotten another shot at them. Still, we took so much pride in being there. It was a great experience, a great time.”
it was around then—during the buildup to the bowl game—that Lynch began contemplating leaving Baylor a year early for the NFL draft. His All-American play had generated a buzz in NFL circles, and rumblings about Rhule potentially leaving for the NFL were becoming louder and louder.
“I was already thinking it was probably in my best interest to leave,” Lynch said. “But once (Rhule) left it was icing on the cake. I knew it was the right move. I made the leap and I don’t have any regrets about it.”
Asked if he would’ve returned to Baylor had Rhule stayed, Lynch said: “It would’ve made it tougher. He’s my guy and he’s gotten me to where I am right now. I thank him for that, but I think I made the right decision.”
Lynch has been working hard ever since. He had a strong showing in late February at the NFL Combine, where scouts and personnel from various teams peppered him with questions about football, his upbringing, his character—and, um, various other things. Lynch said one team asked if he’d rather be a dog or a cat. Another wondered whether he preferred pink or purple.
“The weirdest one was when a team asked me if I thought my mom was attractive,” Lynch said. “It was odd, but I had to answer.”
A few weeks later, COVID-19 forced the nation into shelter mode, so Lynch’s workouts have been limited to the bench press and dumbbells he has in his home gym, along with conditioning workouts on a nearby turf field in Round Rock.
He spends most of his free time playing video games and watching shows on Netflix—“Peaky Blinders” and “Tiger King” are among his favorites—while waiting for next week’s NFL draft.
Although he played defensive end at Baylor, the assumption is that he will move to a 3-technique defensive tackle in a four-man front in the NFL.
One team that emplys that defense is Charlotte, which is in desperate need of defensive tackles following the loss of Dontari Poe, Gerald McCoy and Vernon Butler to free agency. If the Panthers don’t select a tackle with their seventh overall pick, Lynch could be an option for them in the later rounds.
Such a scenario, of course, would reunite Lynch with Rhule and former Baylor defensive coordinator Phil Snow. Lynch said he and Rhule have talked numerous times since Rhule left Baylor. But the conversation that will always stand out the most is the one they had in Lynch’s living room back in December of 2016, when each of them revealed their dream.
Three years later, they’ve both achieved them.