Every Down Back: Former Broncos running back Phillip Lindsay tackles sports radio

Phillip Lindsay needed a sign.

He had reached the crossroads , the same place at which every athlete eventually arrives . None of them ever want to get there, but like death and taxes, they all do. Keep pushing? Keep trying to play a game born of childhood dreams? Or is it time to hang it up? Call it a day, a great ride, a stage in life that has reached its inevitable sunset?

“You love the game,” Lindsay told himself. “But the game doesn’t love you.”

Lindsay, of course, was an unlikely story. From the time he was young, he was never quite big enough, never the favorite, always the underdog. He starred at Denver South High School, only to blow out his knee during his senior season; the timing could not have been worse. He redshirted as a freshman at the University of Colorado before turning in a storied career, one that saw him finish with more all-purpose yards than anyone in Buffs history.

As the nation’s ninth-leading rusher and a semifinalist for the Doak Walker Award, it seemed as if getting drafted by an NFL team would be a natural next step. But he wasn’t. Undrafted, he signed with the Denver Broncos as a free agent in 2018. Lindsay made the final cut and ascended from the No. 3 back on the depth charts to the first rookie running back in NFL history to be voted into the Pro Bowl. Though he split carries with Royce Freeman, he finished his first season with 1,037 rushing yards, 241 receiving yards and 10 touchdowns. In 2019, he replicated the effort, becoming the first undrafted player ever to rush for 1,000 yards in his first two seasons.

Sadly, that would be the peak. His 2020 season was riddled with injuries. He was – to the chagrin of Broncos fans – released following the season. Houston signed him, only to release him in November, at which point Miami picked him up off waivers. The Colts signed him the following spring, but cut him before the season. He spent the remainder of the year bouncing between Indy’s practice squad and active roster. Without a team, he gave the XFL a shot, only to see his Seattle Sea Dragons fold when the league merged with the USFL.

Never the beneficiary of a “big money” contract, the undrafted Lindsay, who’d undoubtedly proved he belonged in the NFL, was suddenly lost in the shuffle.

“The game uses you and after time goes on, you start moving around, you kind of get lost and you’re not getting the calls like you used to,” he says.

The phone stopped ringing. Bitterness set in.

“Why am I not getting the opportunity when I’ve showcased that I can do it?” he asked himself. “Why can’t I get another opportunity? Why can’t I go out on my own?

“You want to be able to be the one that decides. But 95% of players don’t get to decide that. Maybe 5% get to decide that – like the Patrick Mahomes or Travis Kelce will be those superstars that decide. But a lot of times you will be pushed out earlier than you want to. That’s just part of the game and that’s why the game doesn’t love you.

“Do you stay in the past and cry over something that you can’t control? Or do you move on and chalk it up and understand that it was a great ride and there’s more to you than just a football player?”

With seemingly nobody to talk to on the other line, he found himself walking the streets of his neighborhood, pondering his next move, talking to himself, talking to God.

“God, I just need a sign,” he said.

**

Not far from where Lindsay broke through with the Denver Broncos, Zach Bye, who’d been talking sports on Denver’s 104.3 The Fan since 2017, had questions of his own. The station he worked for had just gone through a major, very public shakeup, one that said goodbye to former Broncos player Derek Wolfe – and plenty of others. Denver’s most historically successful sports talk station had suddenly lost its afternoon drive show altogether and was clearly at a crossroads. As it was all taking place, Bye knew things he didn’t want to know and had questions that he wasn’t so sure he wanted answered.

“It was a very unsettling time. I was coming home every single night with that weight,” he recalls. “I was getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning, sick to my stomach.”

Up to that point, Bye had been the cohost of the “Stokley and Zach Show,” which aired middays and paired him with former Broncos wide receiver Brandon Stokley. The two had established a great chemistry and had become a favorite amongst sports radio listeners in Denver.

Much like Lindsay, who he’d discussed many times on air, Bye was a fierce competitor in his own right. No, he hadn’t played in the NFL, but he did play college basketball at the College of St. Rose in New York. He could dunk like few 6-foot-4 white guys but earned an even more valuable reputation as a dogged defensive player – so much so that he co-captained the Golden Knights as a senior. And like Lindsay had worked tirelessly for every unlikely opportunity he’d ever been given on the football field, Bye had to patiently and relentlessly work for every opportunity to be heard on air.

“It’s so funny, because (Lindsay) has the word ‘outlast’ tattooed on his ribs,” Bye says. “Dude, that was my life – outlasting people in this business.

“I did not have an uncle in the business. I did not go to a university with an alumni network. I had to do everything the hard way. My goal was getting to someplace like The Fan. It took me 10 years of outlasting others to finally get my opportunity. I’ll be damned if I’m not going to maximize it once I get there.”

Yet, with the station on the heels of a major shakeup, maximizing his opportunity – or at least how to maximize it – was a question that kept Bye up at night.

“God, I need a sign,” Lindsay reiterated, “to continue to pursue this dream of playing professional football, or time for me to branch out and start something new, start something different.”

Three days later, he got a call.

“I get a call from the radio station, saying, ‘Hey, would you be interested in coming in just to see if you would like to do something like this, and for us, to kind of get a feeling of how you would do if you were in a situation with the radio?’ For me, it was like, ‘I’m getting on my wife’s nerves. Why not?’”

Lindsay went in and did some “run throughs” with Bye, who was suddenly slated to fill the afternoon drive slot. Not long after, Bye offered Lindsay the chance to be his co-host.

“I went home and I thought about it,” says Lindsay. “This was the sign that I was asking for. Either you can ignore the sign that you asked for – that God gave you – or you could take it for what it is and run with it.”

As if a quarterback had just handed him the football, Lindsay began to run. Carrying the load as a full-time, four-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week talk show host was different, yet similar in that it was a job, a new challenge that wasn’t always easy. Furthermore, it helped him cope with the loss of the job he’d held before.

“The job I’m doing now, it’s intense in its own way,” Lindsay says, now a year into his role on The Fan. “You’re still competing with other stations. You still want to be the best. You’re working on your craft. For me, nothing changes. It’s all about showing up every day. It’s all about putting that work in and showing people that you are getting better, showing people that you are willing to work. That’s what it took for me to get to the NFL. It’s the same thing in radio. You’re not physically getting beat up, but mentally.”

But Lindsay was a rookie once again. For a veteran like Bye, Lindsay presented a new challenge.

“Phil was so green,” says Bye. “It was such a big change at the station, and we knew that the show was going to have a slow start because Phil had never done the job before. It was, it was an anxiety filled time for me, a very anxious time, a time where I was purposely not looking at social media, purposely not looking at our text line – for months.”

Recalls Lindsay: “A lot of people were saying hateful stuff.”

There were two reasons, however, that Bye had confidence in his new situation. First, Lindsay “is a good dude.” The two established a genuine friendship and mutual respect, requirements for partners who share the unnatural duty of sitting in the same room and talking for four hours, five days a week. And second, Bye noticed that Lindsay wasn’t like some other professional athletes he’s seen transition into talk radio.

“You know the reputation,” Bye says. “Ex-pro athletes? They don’t want to work. They don’t want to work hard. They don’t want to grind. They don’t want to be there every single day. And Phil is the opposite of that stereotype.

“My wife is a teacher and she’s got a phrase, and I think of Phil when she says it. She says, ‘If you’ve got the will, we can teach the skill.’ And Phil Lindsay has a duffle-bag load of will.”

Tactically, Bye’s approach with his new co-host was simple: Keep Phillip Lindsay out of trouble.

“My tack with Phil was like having my son in the pool with me. I am not going ask my son to swim into the deep end because I know he’s going to wind up in trouble,” Bye explains. “So I would only lead him into spaces where I thought that he could wade in those waters competently. And I would not ask him about what he thought of the second-line center for the Avs last night. I would not put him on the spot. Everything that we did, especially in the first six months, had guardrails on it.”

While Bye navigated choppy waters, Lindsay soaked in anything and everything Bye could offer.

“Zach is one of the best in the country,” Lindsay says. “He gave me some big-time advice.”

Lindsay the football player was used to stacking plays; Bye told him they needed to stack days. He warned the ex-back that radio was a marathon, not a sprint. He encouraged his new rookie to “tell his story,” to be relatable, as Lindsay had a locker room perspective that few people on the planet could provide to an audience.

Bye was consistently impressed with Lindsay’s thirst for improvement.

“Phil did not grow up watching hockey,” Bye says, setting the stage for a story that he considers illustrative of Lindsay’s passion for the job. “He said to me after a show, ‘Hey, the Avalanche play at 6 o’clock tonight. Can you go to a local bar with me and watch the game with me and talk through the game with me?’ And I was just like, ‘Wow. This dude wants it.’ He would watch a game and come in with a page full of notes. He would show up to work 30, 40 minutes early and talk through his thoughts with our producer just to make sure that he’s having real opinions and thoughts about the game. I was just so impressed.

“I’ll tell you this, man – because I already know where I think this is going – Phillip Lindsay, in the next two to three years, is going to be able to talk about all four Denver sports, not just to pass the test, but he’ll be able to talk about them at a high level. He’s already approaching that area in certain regards because he has put so much time into it. I don’t know if I’ve seen another ex-pro athlete put as much time into getting up to speed from an institutional knowledge standpoint than Philip Lindsay this last year.”

It doesn’t hurt that Phillip Lindsay, regardless of his radio experience, is wildly popular amongst Broncos fans.

Early on, when the duo would host their show on location, Bye would feel anxious, wondering if people were actually going to show up. Not only have they shown up, but shows done remotely often include lines of fans hopeful for an autograph or a selfie with Lindsay. At training camp this year, they learned that in order to actually watch camp, they needed to be somewhat covered – otherwise, the steady stream of fans seeking an interaction with Lindsay was too distracting.

“We have other true stars and Super Bowl champions on our team at The Fan – like Mark Schlereth and Brandon Stokley,” says Bye. “But the combination of the recency with Phil, coupled with the hometown story, coupled with an underdog story, coupled with unprecedented success with all that together – where he’s the first ever Pro Bowl rookie running back that was undrafted and living in his parents’ basement – you just can’t manufacture that story. I have never seen an ex-athlete working in radio that elicits as much response as Phillip Lindsay gets present day.”

But the fact that countless No. 30 jerseys can still be found on the hillside of training camp doesn’t necessarily translate to ratings. Neither Lindsay nor Bye is about to assume the success of their radio show will have anything to do with Lindsay’s heroics on the football field.

“This is a performance-based business, just like football,” Lindsay says. “You don’t do well, you don’t get good ratings, you are not going to be here.”

“We know we still have a long way to go. That’s not a secret,” adds Bye.

There are signs, however, that the show is headed in the right direction – fans who stop by to let them know the show is sounding better and better, unsolicited texts confirming what Bye feels after what he considers to be the kind of segments that stack together to make great shows, listeners who tell him, “I loved you and Stokley, but you and Phil are really starting to click.”

If one thing is indisputable, it’s that both Lindsay and Bye have a singular focus – to be the No. 1 show in the market.

There are legendary stories of a young Phillip Lindsay’s first days on campus in Boulder. Former Buffs player and coach Darian Hagan recalls Lindsay, who couldn’t have weighed 150 pounds as a freshman, ready and willing to fight anyone during any given practice – a senior linebacker, a 350-pound lineman, anyone. Lindsay laughs about those days and is quick to point out that he now draws motivation from being a father, a husband and an acute desire to be known as more than just a football player. Still, he doesn’t deny the stories of duking his way toward becoming a star at the University of Colorado.

“That’s my edge,” he says.

Ironically, Bye – having no prompt or knowledge of Lindsay’s willingness to scrap as a redshirt college freshman – tells a similar story.

“Every day I wake up, the first thing I’m thinking of is my baby or my wife,” says Bye. “And the second thing is that I’m ready for a fist fight. I wake up that way every day. And that manifests itself in prep, that manifests itself in passion and attention to detail. I know we will not be satisfied until we are the number one show in this market in the PM drive. That’s said with all due respect to everyone who we’re competing against, but we feel like we have championship capability. So, we will not stop working until we are No. 1. Period. That’s the way that I’ve always been. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder… I want to fight.”

At the moment, Lindsay is a football star fighting to become a radio star. It’s a transition he embraces; it’s a transition Bye sees as not only possible, but likely.

“You can transition into doing something and be great at it,” he says.

“He’s got an opportunity,” says Bye, “Long-term, big picture, over the next two-to-three decades to be known more as a radio personality that used to play football, (rather than) a former football player that now does radio.”

Make no mistake though: This is a more than a job; much like Lindsay’s former career, it’s a high-stakes game to be won or lost.

“I want our team, our station to be No. 1,” Lindsay says. “I want Zach Bye and I to be No. 1. Zach deserves to be No. 1 because he is good. As a team, I think there’s nobody out there that brings things to the table in the Denver area like we do.”

“This is my NFL,” Bye says of both his radio career and the opportunity at hand. “There is a scoreboard. And we want to fucking win. And we will not be satisfied until we fucking win.

“And you can print that.”