LAS VEGAS – Carefully, his firm footsteps tracing inside the white-painted outline that surrounded the turf at Allegiant Stadium, the man chosen as USC’s defensive savior made his pregame rounds.
For five laps pregame Sunday afternoon, as the mania of thousands in Vegas grew around him, nobody bothered D’Anton Lynn. He chomped gum between his teeth, jaw grinding furiously. Headphones, snug over a USC cap, blocked out the outside world. He stopped for nobody, his face both slack and steel.
Again he strode, around the perimeter. Again. Again.
This, a matchup with blue-blood LSU and a prolific SEC offense, was what he’d asked for. He turned one of the most lackluster units in the country at UCLA into standouts in 2023, and he was attempting for the same at USC, a program with a defense that had become the butt of a national joke for two seasons. He and the Trojans entered a Louisiana storm in Vegas in Week 1 with plenty to prove, head coach Lincoln Riley selling the farm in the offseason to laud a brand-new staff helmed by Lynn – the man who needed to show he wasn’t simply a crosstown fluke.
“There obviously was a level of, he just did this one year, so – is it just a one-year wonder type-thing?” Dave Emerick, USC’s general manager, told the Southern California News Group in the winter after Lynn’s hire. “But that’s where you have really in-depth conversations, and get to know really what he’s all about.”
He showed what he was all about, truly, as an offseason of players raving over Lynn’s scheme paid off in a dynamic defensive performance in USC’s 27-20 win over LSU Sunday. There were a couple breakdowns, yes; but in a complete contrast to last season, these Trojans suddenly wrapped up stiff on third downs. They stuffed run gaps on the defensive front. They held an LSU offense prolific in playmakers, largely, to game-management from gunslinging Texan native Garrett Nussmeier.
And as LSU dangled but a smidgeon of bulletin-board material last week – the now-famed “fistfight” comment from offensive lineman Will Campbell, and an admission taken slightly out-of-context that the Tigers intended to run the ball – USC snatched it and ran.
“They had every right to be confident,” Riley said postgame, speaking of LSU’s run game behind a stout offensive line. “But so did we. And we just chose to not say it in the media.”
It started on LSU’s first drive, a 13-play march downfield that ended on a fourth-down stop after Lynn dialed up a blitz pinned back at his own 3-yard-line. It continued on LSU’s second-to-last drive, when 6-foot-6 slinky-armed linebacker Eric Gentry made a massive third-and-1 stop of a Tigers run. All told, LSU was 1-of-4 on third downs Sunday, a remarkable shift from USC’s unit last season.
“I mean, shoot, I don’t even think it was just, statistically, that we won,” linebacker Easton Mascarenas-Arnold said postgame, when asked about USC’s third-down success. “I think it was the way that we responded to the entire game.”
And, indeed, it was the way players looked transformed. Throughout fall, players had explained and praised Lynn’s defense as player-focused, harping versatility, aggressiveness and simply putting athletes in the right spots.
Take Shelby, who was too often put in unfavorable coverage situations last season in Alex Grinch’s unit and shone Sunday with a couple stops off the edge. Take veteran defensive lineman Kobe Pepe, who was pushed by new defensive-line coach Eric Henderson in the winter and was entrusted on key drives for run-stuffing situations. Take Gentry, who’d struggled to find consistency in snaps and in impact through two years at USC but looked like the Trojans’ best linebacker in a seven-tackle effort against LSU.
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“As an offense, I know they’re looking out there like, ‘Damn, they got a 6-foot-6 linebacker, like, I know he’s a threat,’” Mascarenas-Arnold said of Gentry postgame. “I know he’s going to have an amazing season. This is just, not even close to what he’s capable of.”
Safety Akili Arnold, postgame, called Lynn’s coaching style “relaxed.” Shelby agreed. He trusted, they affirmed, that his players would execute. He was calm, in all moments.
But within those headphones Sunday, within the working of his jaw, was a man on a mission.
