BOULDER – Tim Lynott Jr. has had the easy route. He was highly recruited out of high school, redshirted his freshman year and was thrown into the fire the next season, excelling at right guard for a special Colorado Buffaloes team, eventually being named a USA Today First-Team Freshman All-American.
Lynott has always been crazy athletic for his size. That’s why head coach Mike MacIntyre wasn’t afraid to name him a starter for Game 1 last season, because he knew he had the size and athleticism required to block defensive linemen at the Pac-12 level. Nobody really knew he’d be that good – not even Lynott.
“I was expecting a lot out of myself and Coach Adams was as well,” the 6-foot-2, 295-pounder explained. “I didn’t expect to have such a great year but I expected a lot of myself. You know it’s never good enough, obviously. I always want to make sure that I’m improving every day, especially at practice.”
One of the main reasons that Lynott has able to be so good was because of the veterans he has around him. Jeromy Irwin and Gerrad Kough have been through a lot during their time at CU and Lynott continues to learn from them.
“Those guys they don’t take anything for granted,” Lynott said. “Jeromy, he’s a sixth-year senior; when he first got here they were a losing team, obviously, and he didn’t want to go out that way. That’s one of the big things he emphasized with us, it goes by fast too. And one of those things that he always talks about is to never go easy, he doesn’t want to be a losing team. He puts a lot of emphasis on being a winning team.”
Lynott has stayed motivated throughout the off-season and all indications are that he’s bigger and stronger than last season,
“Coach Drew and all of those guys have pushed me very hard with conditioning and weightlifting in general,” the Colorado native said. “It’s been a great off-season I feel like.”
So what makes the Regis Jesuit product so good? MacIntyre explained it as a combination of three different things
“He’s very athletic for his size, 300 pounds, he can move,” MacIntyre said. “The other thing is that he’s extremely intelligent in there, he understands the game, he understands how people are going to attack him, he’s a very good player. The main thing is that he can stay on his feet like a wrestler and still move and keep people in front of him and he’s able to get to the second level. So he can double down, get to the second level and stay on a linebacker, which is really hard to do.”
Lynott will be getting to the second level a lot this season as the anchor for CU’s experienced offensive line.
