LOS ANGELES — Rob Ryan might be as relaxed as he has ever been.
The longtime defensive coach walks out on the balcony of
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A lot has changed in the sport since, both in the pros and in the college ranks. Through it all, Ryan has remained unabashedly himself, bouncing with a contagious joy thanks to a job where, as Ryan says, “you don’t have to be anything different but yourself.”
“He’s the smartest guy in the room, but he doesn’t want you to know that,” Rex Ryan said. “He’ll work his ass off, outwork every single person in that school, any school. He’ll put every one of them motherf—ers to sleep.”
Perhaps no one hypes Rob up more than his twin brother, Rex, whose coaching history is just as broad while also featuring a stint as an NFL head coach. It’s a career apex that Rob never reached, but according to Rex, what makes Rob such an effective position coach or coordinator is the fact that he has never been interested in that top job.
“He’s not looking for somebody else’s job. This guy’s there to advance the head coach’s plan and to be right there, to be right hand man to D’anton [Lynn], and that’s exactly what he’s going to do,” Rex, now an analyst for ESPN, said. “And he’s just one hell of a f—ing guy. That’s the thing. And if you can’t get along with him, you’re a f—ing jerkoff. Simple as that. You’re a f—ing a–hole.”
As self-assured as Rob is now, even he can admit that this hasn’t always been the case.
WHEN THE CALL came from a familiar voice, Ryan was facing a situation he knew all too well.
The Las Vegas Raiders, with whom he had been working as a senior defensive assistant since 2022, were undergoing a coaching change after the franchise fired Antonio Pierce. While other coaches might have fretted, Ryan — who took the USC job a week before Pete Carroll was hired with the Raiders — wasn’t too anxious.
“When I was young, man, I couldn’t handle it. That was super hard,” Ryan said of his early firings. “It was pressure. You just feel it, man. It’s a mountain. … It destroyed me. I couldn’t enjoy work. I couldn’t come to work and enjoy it. I couldn’t. It was hard. I was so worried. And it affected me off the field too.”
Ryan was not in a rush to find his next stop, but at USC, the program’s previous linebackers coach, Matt Entz, had left to take the head coaching job at Fresno State. Defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn — fresh off his first season in the position — went outside the box.
When Lynn was a defensive analyst on the Buffalo Bills in 2016, his father Anthony was the interim head coach and offensive coordinator, and Ryan was the assistant head coach for defense. Then, in 2021, when a 31-year-old Lynn was hired as the Baltimore Ravens safeties coach, the team’s inside linebackers coach invited Lynn to crash at his house for a few months. That coach was 57-year-old Ryan.
“We go way back,” Ryan said. “He’s an old roommate.”
Lynn and USC head coach Lincoln Riley wanted someone with experience who could also add a little extra juice to the staff, a certain kind of appeal that couldn’t be found in an up-and-coming college position coach. So Lynn rang Ryan and made his pitch.
“As we talk about building our scheme, just having someone with all that experience to bounce ideas off of has been huge,” Lynn said in a recent interview. “And for our guys, they get a chance to just get exposed to what it is to have an NFL position coach, and they’re getting coached as if they were in the NFL.”
Even though Ryan arrived on campus for his interviews with skepticism, he was quickly swayed by Riley and Lynn, whom Ryan has repeatedly referred to as a Mike Tomlin in the making.
“I’m like, ‘Man, this is awesome.’ I talked to D’Anton again and then talked to Lincoln. I’m like, ‘Man, I’m going to do this. I’m just going to take a chance,'” Ryan said. “And I have no regrets. I’ve absolutely loved it. It’s like a breath of fresh air. It’s getting started again. I mean, I’m new again.”
Ryan does not shy away from the fact that his own particular situation afforded him an invaluable opportunity growing up. As the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals in 1994, Buddy Ryan was the one who gave Rob and his brother Rex their first big breaks as NFL position coaches that season.
“We were young coaches, we thought we were good, but he had to take a chance, and he hired us,” Rob Ryan said. “People screamed nepotism, and it was nepotism! There was no question, but we were great, and we were ready. Once we got there, we were ready. But we had to have a chance. Somebody had to give us a chance.”
It’s not too shocking then that Ryan finds himself in his father’s role — in the latter stages of his career with a son who has a business degree from Clemson but can’t seem to shake the family bug. This time, it’s Rob who wants to give his son, Matthew, the chance to give coaching a real shot.
“It’s the family business. We probably can’t do anything else, but we damn sure can coach, and that’s our niche, that’s our life,” Rex said. “We never got in the business to make money, but now, f—, you make a ton of money. We certainly didn’t get in the business to do that.”
While talking to Riley and Lynn about the position, Rob Ryan said that the opportunity — not just for him, but for Matthew to become a defensive analyst on staff — was one he could not pass up.
“It’s not really for my growth, cause I’m not going anywhere,” Ryan said. “I want to be a part of something great, but it’s for Matthew to learn. … This is the perfect place for that. But I mean, it’s for me too. Look around, I’m having more fun than anybody else.”
RYAN REMEMBERS WALKING into a team meeting with the Cardinals back in 1994 and being appalled at just how his dad was running things. In short, Ryan explained, the way a former master sergeant in the Korean War would run a team meeting.
“It’s like the things he was saying was like, oh hell, HR would have him out of there in two seconds. He had no problem having a player do anything,” Ryan said. “I thought, ‘God Almighty, I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that.’ So I realized I needed to be genuine to myself.”
Over the past 30 years, Ryan’s personality has crystallized into a coaching style that runs on a type of magnetic zeal that isn’t affected by game-to-game results.
“He has the most energy every single day, and he is also the oldest on the staff,” Lynn said.
His effervescence, players say, is contagious. He doesn’t connect by trying to relate to players 40-plus years his junior as much as he tries to find common ground in the game they’re trying to excel at, the game that he’s still enamored with to this day.
“He’s got a million stories, lived every one of them,” Rex said. “There’s also a confidence and a thing where nothing’s going to intimidate him. He’s not afraid of the f—ing devil.”
Position meetings, though chock-full of traditional insight and strategy, often include an open session where Rob leans into what makes him, well, him.
“He’ll just have a story for us, just a random story, every day, he’ll have us dying laughing,” Madden said. “It may be something that happened a week ago or something 20 years ago”
USC’s linebackers are already privy to not just Ryan’s storytelling, but also the kind of confidence he has given them.
“He definitely wants us to just be who we are,” freshman linebacker Desman Stephens II said. “He talks about how we’ve been playing football our whole life and we have instincts that are helpful to our game. So he just allows us to go out there and play, not carefree but loose.”
“Even though he’s old-school, even though he’s accomplished a lot in this game, he still has an open ear,” redshirt junior linebacker Anthony Beavers Jr. said. “I think he’s forever learning and that’s unique.”
Ryan likes to say that he teaches football more than he coaches it, an approach bolstered by the many stops he has had throughout his career. But he is also supercharged by what he refers to as an affinity for the game that he wants to not just convey, but impress upon his players.
“I think I love what I’m doing. I think it shows,” Ryan said. “I want ’em to love football. I don’t want ’em to dread it. I don’t want ’em to come to work like it’s in a factory. I’ve worked in factories, but I want ’em to love the game. I think my style is: I’m going to have more fun than anybody on that field.”
TO HEAR RYAN speak about football is to be met with someone who has known no other life. Anything prior to his time as a coach, even the years he spent as a defensive end at Southwestern Oklahoma State University alongside Rex, feel like an inconsequential fable at this point. All that matters is what has transpired inside locker rooms and in between the hash marks over the course of the past four decades — good or bad — and the way that he has held on.
“No one’s more used to being fired than me,” Rob Ryan said. “I get fired. At least I was myself. So I can live with that.”
It all raises the question: How long will Ryan keep doing this? And when will he know to pry himself away from the very thing that has defined him?
“He will probably be there 10 years, he loves to coach that much,” Rex said. “He’ll be a guy they’ll have to drag his ass off the football field.”
Rob could have stayed in the NFL if he wanted to, Rex said, but the fact that he didn’t makes Rex believe Rob’s committed to USC for the foreseeable future, or at the very least, “until they tell him to leave.”
“This is it for us,” Rob Ryan, whose wife is from California, said for the both of them. “This is our last move until we walk off in the sunset.”
In this very moment, as the sun fades away and washes every brick-laden building on the USC campus in an orange hue, Rob isn’t ready to go just yet.
“When I retire, cool, I’ll be retired. I’ll probably be the happiest guy in the world in retirement,” he said. “But right now, I’m the happiest guy in the world still doing this.”
