Phil Lindsay's fame forged through misfortune

BOULDER – There are generational talents and then there are generational people. Phillip Lindsay is a generational person. The Colorado Buffaloes will never see a person quite like Phil Lindsay again.

At media day last Tuesday, head coach Mike MacIntyre was asked about what Lindsay has meant to this CU football program.

He started his answer with a little chuckle, trying to figure out the right words, “I said Sefo, last year, meant everything to our program. I have to put Phillip Lindsay right there with him meaning everything to our program. If you cut Phillip open, he’d bleed black and gold. He’d also bleed Colorado, he loves Colorado. He’d bleed Denver, the 303 area code. He believes in it, I know it’s pretty funny when people put that up but he truly loves to represent it.”

To understand what makes Lindsay tick, you have to understand where he comes from. Phil’s dad played fullback at CSU, so he understood from an early age that if he wanted to go to college it’d be through a football scholarship.

“You have five kids and you don’t have money, at the end of the day, you just want the best for your kids,” Lindsay said of his father, Troy. “He has told us all from the start, ‘You know we don’t have money so you have to use what God gave you. If you want to go to college, you need to get full rides.’ All five of us got full rides.”

Lindsay not only got a full ride to play football at Colorado, he was also able to set the school rushing record at Denver South High School, while playing just two games his senior year.

Lindsay tore his ACL his senior year and began to worry if MacIntyre was going to honor his scholarship. MacIntyre was able to keep Jon Embree’s promise after Lindsay had been the first player to commit as a part of the 2013 recruiting class. He arrived on campus in the spring of 2013 and he couldn’t even straighten his leg.

“Yeah, blew my knee out the first game of my senior season (at Denver South High School),” Lindsay explained. “We have five kids in the house, both parents are working hard, but we didn’t have the money. People want $100 for a rehab session. It just wasn’t going to happen. So I didn’t get the rehab I needed. It got to the point where the scar tissue got hard and it made my knee stay in one place. When I got here, they looked at it and the trainers didn’t know what to say because they hadn’t seen anything like it before. They told Coach Mac they weren’t sure if I was going to be able to play football.”

MacIntyre likes to talk about how adversity makes the man and this was the time when Phil had to figure out who he truly was as a man. When you hear Phillip Lindsay talk today, you can see the type of man that he’s become and MacIntyre’s motivation played a big role in that.

“In college, everybody is finding their identity and for a lot of kids, they get lost,” Lindsay said. “But you can never get lost if you are okay with who you are. At the end of the day, I am Phillip Lindsay. I don’t let people dictate what I do and how I act and how I feel and how I think about things. And I always listen. The best thing is to listen to people. You need to work on your craft, not only on the football field but in life in general. Take what you learn and use it in everyday life. Coach Mac has done a tremendous job of helping us with becoming men.”

During his freshman year, Lindsay redshirted and participated on the scout team. It was there that he started to earn respect from his teammates.

“I went on scout team, and while most people don’t want to go on scout team, I embraced it,” Lindsay explained. “I looked at it as a way to work on my craft, get my knee stronger and get bigger. I came in here at 160-pounds.”

He embraced it so much that he was awarded Offensive Scout Player of the Year, and Phil takes a lot of pride in that award in particular.

“Even if I win the Heisman or any kind of award coming my way, the best award I have ever won was Scout Team Player of the Year,” Lindsay claimed. “I worked so hard to give the best looks I could to my teammates. I was Bishop Sankey, I was Buck Allen, I was every Oregon running back, Storm Woods, I was all of them. I would watch film on how they ran so I could give that look, but also take things to add to my craft.”

Four years later, Lindsay is now the feature back and arguably the face of the CU football program. But Phillip’s drive to be great hasn’t slowed down at all. Over the summer he wanted to get stronger and he’s now squatting almost 500 pounds, 100 more pounds than he was squatting in 2016.

Lindsay is stronger and healthier than he’s been at CU. But anytime someone asks him about his personal goals, he always reverts it back to the team.

“For me, it is all about the team,” Lindsay said when asked about his personal goals this season. “Without the offensive and defensive lines, we’re nothing. That is the heart of the team. You can’t win a championship without them. If they are rolling, all you have to do is your part. With the talent we have at receiver, with the talent we have at quarterback, I just need to go in there and trust them beasts up front and play my game.”

Phillip Lindsay is the guy that brings his entire offensive line to his post-game press conference, the kind of guy that loves to talk about the team goal of Pac-12 championship but won’t ever dive into the goals he has for himself. He’s the guy that every one of his teammates would bring with them to a street fight and he also has the best chances of bringing the Heisman Trophy back to Boulder in about 15 years.