This could become the best weekend ever for 49ers GM John Lynch.
MIAMI — It would not surprise anyone who has been watching the arc of his career if John Lynch were elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame the same weekend that his team is playing in the Super Bowl.
After all, good things seem to happen for the former Tampa Bay safety who is now the 49ers’ general manager.
“It would make for a very cool weekend,” Lynch said this week.
Lynch won a Super Bowl in his hometown of San Diego. Now he could make the Hall of Fame while his 49ers are about to play in the Super Bowl.
Will he be elected in his seventh year as a finalist? Perhaps, though it is hard to predict how the supersecretive, extremely opaque Pro Football Hall process will go.
But the guy who is nicknamed “Captain America” has a lot of synchronicity in his life.
“Fortunately, this year, my mind is occupied,” Lynch said. “I’ve got a lot of other duties and I haven’t thought about it a whole lot.
“It probably makes it easier,
because my mind is elsewhere. With the Super Bowl there are so many details that pop up and I just want to make sure we’re making it as normal as possible for our guys.”
Whether he earns professional football’s highest honor or not this weekend, this has been a triumphant turn for Lynch. The former Stanford player, who turned down a professional baseball career in order to play collegiate football for Bill Walsh, has rebuilt Walsh’s former team back into a Super Bowl participant.
When he stepped out of the broadcast booth three years ago, to become a rookie general manager, no one knew how Lynch would handle the job.
“He makes every team that’s he’s a part of better,” 49ers CEO Jed York said recently. “He makes every team a championshipcaliber group. We joke — his nickname is Captain America — but that’s who he is. He’s real.”
Lynch was handpicked by head coach Kyle Shanahan to be his partner at the 49ers. He was in the midst of a successful and comfortable broadcasting career, which allowed him to be with his wife and four children at their home in San Diego.
There was an assumption that Shanahan and Lynch were tight because Lynch played for Shanahan’s dad, Mike, in Denver. Not true.
“When I played for the Broncos, he was off in college doing his own thing,” Lynch said of Kyle.
Yet, despite not knowing him extremely well, Shanahan saw in Lynch a person who could not only work with him in rebuilding the team, but could also be a face for the front office and the franchise.
“No one is really Captain America,” Shanahan said. “I’m like, all right, the person’s got to be somewhat phony. You’re waiting to see how they really are.
“But then you get with John day in and day out and that’s genuinely who he is. To have that type of personality, that’s exactly as he is and, on top of that, to be one of the most violent, physical players I’ve ever seen. It’s as cool a combination as there is.”
Lynch was violent. Superior. A ninetime Pro Bowl player.
But would he be a good general manager?
Shanahan called him about the GM job after the young coach had already been approached by the 49ers, while he was handling the offense for the Super Bowlbound Falcons.
“You know how Kyle talks,” Lynch said. “He said, ‘I’m going to have this dude, his name is Jed, give you a call.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know Jed.’ ”
“Dude” York called while Lynch was at his daughter’s tennis lesson. When Lynch expressed interest in the job, York flew him up from San Diego, took him to dinner, and then interviewed him on a flight to Atlanta to meet with Shanahan.
Lynch was asked to do some unconventional things.
“They had this cool thing — you had 150 points for the salary cap,” Lynch said. He had to allocate them in a certain way.
“It was communicated to me that Kyle’s and mine were almost directly in sync.”
Shanahan had already bluntly told York about the weaknesses of his roster.
“Kyle was right — it wasn’t great,” Lynch said.
That was the start of their roles as good cop, bad cop.
“He’s better at one and I’m better at the other,” Shanahan said. “We’re similar people but come off a little bit opposite. The hardest thing is when you’re trying to figure out who someone is. John is one of the few people I’ve met in my life who seems that good all the time. That’s exactly who he is.”
The partnership has been a breath of fresh air after years of 49ers front office dysfunction. The men, who didn’t know each other well, have a mutual admiration society and strengthened their bonds during the tough times.
And as Lynch knows, that makes it so much sweeter when things are good.
“There’s something about starting at the bottom,” he said. “In Tampa, we were the worst franchise in all of sports. It made it all the more sweet. Those three years of struggle, we have a great bond on this team.”
Maybe Lynch will receive professional football’s highest honor Saturday. Maybe not.
Either way, this is a very cool weekend.