Before Paxton Lynch became the quarterback of the future for the Denver Broncos, he was a kid in Florida that nobody was recruiting. And were it not for a random trip to a dialysis clinic, he might never had ended up in Denver. So Dave Woloshin, play-by-play voice of the Memphis Tigers, tells the tale.
Woloshin joined Eric Goodman and Les Shapiro on “Afternoon Drive” on Mile High Sports AM 1340 and FM 104.7 on Friday, the day after the Broncos selected Lynch with the 26th overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft, to share the story of how Lynch wound up at Memphis.
“He went to a small high school. Nobody knew about him,” Woloshin says.
That’s certainly not the case now, as Lynch was the third quarterback selected in part because of his 6-foot-7, 245-pound frame, 4.86-second 40-yard dash and an arm that is among the best in the drat. His 758 career completions and 59 touchdowns in three years at Memphis have something to do with it as well. But from the way Woloshin tells it, it was mere chance that Lynch ended up a Tiger.
“…there’s an athletic administrator that’s on a vacation in Florida that’s taking a buddy to get dialysis. So he’s in the waiting room, he’s got nothing to do. He’s looking at this newspaper. It’s a weekly, and the darn thing is a week old – so it’s circumstance, right?”
Woloshin chuckles, as the whole thing seems almost right out of a Disney movie.
“[It’s] a week old. [He] picks it up and reads a story about a kid who was the MVP of an All-Star game that nobody’s recruiting.”
That kid was Lynch, who played at Trinity Christian Academy (Deltona, Fla.), a school with an enrollment of around 600 students.
“[The administrator] shows that to [Memphis head coach] Justin Fuente, actually faxed that to Justin Fuente.”
Thank goodness a fax machine was still in operation! (We thought those went away with beepers.)
“Fuente had just arrived on the scene,” Woloshin recollects, “and really the cupboard was bare.”
Fuente was hired by Memphis in 2011 for the 2012 season and coached Lynch all three years before accepting the head coaching job at West Virginia this past November.
“He never saw Paxton Lynch until he arrived on campus,” laughs Woloshin. “When they saw him throwing the ball around, they went, ‘Whoa! Good deal.’ And the rest is history.”
Now it’s Broncos history.
Listen to the full interview with Woloshin, which includes indepth analysis of Lynch the player, in the podcast below…
Catch “Afternoon Drive” every weekday from 4p-6p on Mile High Sports AM 1340 or FM 104.7, or stream live any time for the best local coverage of Colorado sports from Denver’s biggest sports talk lineup.