Lynch’s play, silence speak volumes
Marshawn Lynch maintained his vow of media silence Sunday, just as he’s done every day since entering his guilty plea.
He dressed in private, outside of the Buffalo Bills locker room, and sent a member of the equipment staff to retrieve the items he’d left behind. He departed through a side exit, met up with friends in the tunnel, and shot the breeze for a good 10 minutes. It was quite the animated discussion, with Lynch laughing, shouting, even doing a little dance.
As he headed out to the parking lot I caught up with him to see if we could talk, so the past could finally be relegated to the past. But Lynch declined, saying, if I heard him right, that he talks with his play on the field. When I asked if he thought he’d meet the media at all this season, Lynch responded that he’ll see how it goes.
Without his input it’s difficult to know for certain what drove Lynch into this hole. Some in the media speculate that he’s upset over how he was portrayed during the hit-and-run episode that captivated Western New York throughout the month of June. What that means, I’m not sure. I wrote shortly after the accident that if Lynch was guilty he should step up and admit it and mitigate the fallout. And admit it he did, albeit more than three weeks later, after his attorney concluded that the mounting evidence no longer made silence a viable alternative. If his image suffered in the interim, well . . .
This time, Lynch bears the burden for the tactical error. Until he gets back to business as usual he won’t totally distance himself from the baggage he carries from that dark and rainy night when the SUV he was driving struck a woman at the corner of Chippewa and Delaware. He was agreeable to interviews before the incident, opposed to them thereafter. The logical conclusion is that he’s holding a grudge because of the notoriety he received, as if his status should have dictated that the whole mess be swept aside, ignored.
But Lynch is right on one count. His play in Sunday’s season-opening 34-10 dismantling of the Seattle Seahawks reopened a form of dialogue with the fans. The game arose from a deep slumber when Trent Edwards and Lee Evans hooked up for a 32-yard gain late in the first quarter. Three plays later, with Edwards operating out of the shotgun on third-and-11, Lynch took a handoff and broke outside left, finding plenty of room and then the end zone thanks to a key block from Evans. Up until then, Lynch had managed just 4 yards on six carries. He would finish with 76 yards on 18 attempts, a solid afternoon that included jaunts of 18 yards in the second quarter and 15 in the third.
“The weather had a little bit of a factor in that [slow start],” left tackle Langston Walker said. “It’s hard to get your foot in the ground. But I think our coaching staff and ourselves, we said all week that the first quarter might be 1 yard, 2 yards. Second quarter same thing. But you keep working at it, keep plowing, keeping pushing, and 1-2 turns into 3-4, 3-4 turns into 5-6, and every once in a while you might get a home run.”
Lynch’s first-quarter “home run,” that 21-yard burst for a touchdown, figured as prominently as any play in the Bills establishing their superiority over the injury-riddled Seahawks.
A field goal would have been an unwelcome compromise after the long throw to Evans had invigorated the masses.
“Us getting that score, us getting six points, sort of got the engine running,” Walker said.
“Man, sometimes you know, with Marshawn, you do what you’re supposed to do and he’s such a great back that a lot of times he makes something out of nothing. That’s what makes him such a good player.”
It would have been nice to hear Lynch’s take on the afternoon, but that’s his choice. He’s not the first player to withdraw from the spotlight. The offensive linemen on the Denver Broncos have declined interview requests for years. But the day will come when he’s summoned to the podium and forced to comply with NFL rules regarding dealings with the media. And on that day he’ll encounter the questions he could have been done with at the start of training camp instead of prolonging the inevitable.
