Penn State has its defensive coordinator, and D’Anton Lynn should be familiar to PSU fans.
Lynn was already a Penn Stater before joining the coaching staff— which he’s expected to officially do soon per multiple reports, the first one by Jon Sauber of the Centre Daily Times.
As a defensive back from Plano, Texas, Lynn started his Penn State career in 2008, became a starter in 2009 and, by the end of his career, had been through the most challenging period in program history.
After a brief pro career, Lynn got into coaching, and at the age of 36, he’s already made enough of a name for himself to become one of the most important coaches at his alma mater.
Here are five things to know about Lynn.
‘WE WERE SCARED TO DEATH’
The 2011 season became a nightmare for everybody associated with Penn State, and it almost became a nightmare for Lynn individually.
Against Eastern Michigan, Lynn suffered a head and neck injury that Coach Joe Paterno and everybody else who saw it feared could be much worse than it ended up being.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
“Lynn is, thank goodness, his prognosis is not as severe as we were scared to death of,” Paterno said after the game. “And they’re talking about he can start working out on Thursday. But the underlying fact is that Lynn is not anywhere near as severe as we were scared to death of.”
Lynn ended up missing only one game with a concussion and became an all-Big Ten selection for the third time.
Had the injury have been more severe, who knows what that would have meant for Lynn’s future.
Now, he’s a rising star in the coaching industry.
A COACH’S SON
For the first 10 years of D’Anton Lynn’s life, his father was an NFL player.
After that, Anthony Lynn became an NFL coach, coaching running backs for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns before D’Anton got to Penn State.
In 2017, Anthony became the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers, and D’Anton joined his first staff as a defensive assistant.
Being around pro athlete and future coaches shaped D’Anton Lynn, as detailed in the Orange County Register in 2024.
“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.”
When Lynn coached against his father as a member of Houston Texans’ staff in 2019, he told Chron about their relationship.
“I learned a lot from the time I started to play to the time he started to coach,” he said. “I used to go to the office with him all the time. When I started to coach I was on the staff with him, so just sitting back and watching him how he deals with players, how he dealt with other people on the staff, and as I go along in my career, I find myself in those situations, I always go back and think back to what would he do here.”
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.He worked very, very hard. I was fortunate enough to be there while he was a position coach and then a coordinator to see everything it took to get there. Just a perfectionist. I’d be eight years old and he’d coach me like he coaches his guys now.”
‘A YOUNG MIKE TOMLIN’
Rob Ryan, who worked on Lynn’s defensive staff in 2025, compared Lynn to a future Hall of Fame coach.
“This is a young Mike Tomlin, way I look at him,” Ryan said in February, via the Orange County Register. “D’Anton’s as sharp as he can be. He’s a wonderful person. He’s a great teacher.”
‘A GREAT MAN’
Current Austin Peay coach Jeff Faris worked with Lynn at UCLA in 2023, and he noticed how much Lynn cared about his players.
“There was just always this constant stream of players making their way to D-Lynn’s office,” Faris told FootballScoop in November. “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.”
Faris went onto describe Lynn as “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,” he said. “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.”
As it turned out, Penn State is Lynn’s next opportunity.
THE NUMBERS
Lastly, we can’t talk about Lynn fully without discussing the numbers. When Lynn got to UCLA, the defense was coming off a year where it finished 92nd in the country in scoring defense. In 2023, UCLA finished No. 14.
For USA Today’s Matt Wadleigh, UCLA’s improvement was even more impressive beneath the surface.
“Keep in mind that as good as UCLA’s defense looked from a statistical standpoint in 2023, the context makes the Bruins look even better,” Wadleigh wrote. “As good as the actual numbers are, UCLA’s defense actually performed even better than those stats suggest. This is because UCLA’s offense struggled a lot in 2023. The offense couldn’t stay on the field very long. The defense had to do most of the work in UCLA’s games.”
To Wadleigh’s point, UCLA’s offense finished 70th in scoring in 2023.
Lynn’s performance was good enough to impress USC, which hired Lynn after the 2023 season.
In 2023, USC’s defense finished 121st out of 133 FBS teams.
In 2024, USC improved to 58th, and the next year, it cracked the top 50, finishing 49.
“This new defensive identity is way different than in previous years,” defensive end Braylan Shelby said via the LA Times in 2024. “We hold ourselves accountable. We hold ourselves to a standard.”
Few places have standards for defense that are as high as Penn State’s. Lynn knows this better than most.
