Just call him captain

Sporting News, The, Oct 2, 2000 by Dave Kindred

Imagine you're John Lynch, the Bucs' safety, 6-2, 220 pounds, a hitter, a thinker, the best at what you do. You're 15 yards downfield. What you do next depends on what you see in front of you. And what you see, at the snap of the ball, are colors and bodies and motion and armor shining in the light. It's all so dazzling as to be kaleidoscopic in its beauty and swirling confusion. And the noise. The sound is explosive--if you hear it. But if you hear it, you're in trouble because to hear the noise is to forget what you're there for. You're there to find that little squirt named Barry Sanders. You're there to crush his bones.

Yeah, right.

Even John Lynch laughs.

"Barry made me look sooo bad sooooo many times," he says.

Sanders did a thing human beings can not do. From full speed, he'd stop. Plant both feet. The sprinter became a statue. The natural reaction of a would-be tackler is to mirror a runner's motions. In this case, stop, plant, wait.

At which time Sanders disappeared. Poof, gone.

The tackler would be left behind, revealed as human, blushing if not cursing.

But then came a day in December 1997, the Bucs against the Lions in an NFC playoff game, when John Lynch arrived at speed from the secondary to help against the run--a Barry Sanders run--and he saw the little squirt trapped in a funnel of defenders, Bucs on either side, Sanders with nowhere to go.

"I saw him breaking down," Lynch says, meaning he saw Sanders put both feet down, making ready to disappear, "but I didn't break down with him this time. You gotta keep going at him. I went right on through him. A good lick."

Good? Truth is, connoisseurs of collisions regard that moment as Lynch's signature. On a Bucs team long dependent on its defense, Lynch comes to his work with a certain passion. That's one way to say it. Here's another way, from Buts defensive end Chidi Ahanotu: "He transforms into a maniac out there."

Deion Sanders would rather spill Clorox on his velvet threads than draw near enough a runner to touch him. Fine. Once upon a time, he could play football without touching anyone. John Lynch, on the other hand, plays football. "John's a fierce hitter," says Herm Edwards, the Bucs' secondary coach, himself a 10-year NFL cornerback.

"Reminds me of Jack Tatum."

Tatum's autobiography: They Call Me Assassin.

"I don't mind it at all, being thought of as a `hitter,'" lynch says, "especially when players say it. That's half the battle when you've got them thinking, `Oh, gosh, I'm gonna get tattooed if I go in his area.'"

(Yes. Many, many NFL running backs use "Oh, gosh" as part of their workaday language, though it's seldom they admit to it.)

Back to Herm Edwards on Lynch/Tatum: "The `hitter' thing was a stigma for John, like that's all he could do, that he couldn't play in space, couldn't cover. But all that's past now. Now John does more than Tatum ever did. He might be in the eight-man box one time, playing deep the next time. He's in coverage, he's in gaps, he's blitzing, he's on tight ends. He's everywhere."

Could football, if you like football, be any more fun than that? His junior year at Stanford University, Lynch had to answer that question, sort of.

Did he want to be a quarterback?

Or did he want to play?

He'd been a flashy quarterback at a San Diego high school, widely recruited before enrolling at Stanford. The coach: Dennis Green, now the Vikings' coach. After playing a little his first two years, Lynch thought he'd won the job as a junior only to be told that he hadn't.

"Things had gone pretty well downhill for me," Lynch says.

He considered quitting football for baseball; he was a pitching prospect. But first, because he'd played defense in high school, he asked Green if he could do it again.

"I just wanted to be on the field somewhere."

Wonderful, the way this world works. The frustrated quarterback is now a star strong safety. Happens about as often as John Madden is mistaken for Dennis Miller. This is Lynch's eighth NFL season, all with the Bucs. At age 29, he just signed a six-year, $24 million contract extension with a Super Bowl contender.

All nice, but an even nicer thing happened before the Bucs' opener this season. After defensive captain Hardy Nickerson left to join the Jaguars, a vote was called. We now may call him Captain Lynch. "The proudest moment of my NFL career," he says.

He'll talk all day about the Bucs' defense. It's nothing complex. They do fundamental things well and with precision you'd expect from players who've worked together three years now, five years in some instances.

"Everybody has been here for a while, and we're not trying to trick people," Lynch says. "The genius of the system is its simplicity. It's like Lombardi and the Packers. They said, `We're going to run a sweep, see if you can stop it.' And they ran it so often that they could make adjustments off it. That's where we are defensively."

Now tell us, Captain Lynch, what do you think of your team's star defensive lineman, Mr. Warren Sapp, the high-motor motormouth who is having the time of his life turning quarterbacks upside down, shaking change out of their pockets and thanking them for the opportunity?