What It's Like Being An SEC Football Player
An interview with former Georgia tight end, Arthur Lynch.
If Bravo and ESPN had a baby, it would be Impersonal Foul. You in? Subscribe and tell your friends. It means the world!
Fall is almost here.
For me, this means texting
weekly to ask if I should get that Khaite cardigan. It also means that college football is back.As many of you already know, I am a proud University of Georgia alumna. SEC student-athletes are a different breed of student-athlete. They waltz around campus decked out in Nike swag, listening to music on their #gifted Beats headphones.
Every time I had a class with an athlete, I was fascinated by their life. How can they go to class and basically be a professional athlete for the university? Are they allowed to get extensions on assignments? I! Must! Know!
For football players at SEC schools, I imagine the pressure is even greater.
To get to the bottom of it, I spoke with Arthur Lynch, former tight end for The University of Georgia. After college, Lynch played in the NFL before retiring from football.
Today. Lynch works in finance in the Boston area and kindly spoke with me over Zoom about what it’s really like being a football player at an SEC school.
We really get into everything: From discussing that free Nike swag to unpacking the pressure that these athletes face on a daily basis.
Enjoy our conversation below and be sure to subscribe (it’s free!)
(Also go Dawgs.)
An Interview With A Former SEC Football Player
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Be sure to follow Arthur Lynch on Instagram here and Twitter (No—I won’t be calling it ‘X’) here.
Did you always know you wanted to play in college? Or was it something that you came to once you got close to graduation?
I grew up in Massachusetts. The culture around high school sports and college sports—it's very academic. Even the public schools, you don't see the emphasis—or the investment of resources—in high school football or high school baseball as you would in the midwest states or the southern states.
I grew up a football fan. My grandfather was the high school coach in our hometown, small town in Massachusetts. Most of my family were teachers, coaches, nurses. It was a small knit community.
I always knew I wanted to play football. I did not play football until high school. I was too big to play Pop Warner.
I never thought that I was going to have the opportunity to play at a place like Georgia. Honestly, I just got lucky. I grew a lot.
Until about my junior year in high school—when I started speaking with the southern schools or the midwest schools, like the Michigan States, the Ohio States, or the Georgias, the Alabamas, the Floridas—I thought I'd go play at Holy Cross, which is the small Catholic school in Worcester.
Then it went from like, “Maybe I can play there” to “Okay, I think I have an opportunity to play at a higher level.” I always wanted to play college football or a college sport, it did not become a realization until junior or senior of high school.
I probably didn't start thinking about it being a reality to play at the next level—on any level—until probably sophomore year in high school. Once I was like, “This is what I want to do”—which was around my freshman or sophomore year—it came down to like, “Okay, where can I play?” I got lucky enough to play for Coach [Mark] Richt at Georgia.
What was it like coming from Massachusetts to Athens, Georgia?
The best way I can describe it is it was like going to a study abroad program. I went down to Georgia and the only thing that was familiar was that I would put a football helmet on and play football.
The food was different. People sounded different. Religion was even different. I grew up in a super Catholic area of Massachusetts, which is a very stereotypical thing you see in all the Boston movies.
Everything from school, food, the people I was having all these new experiences with, to every day football “Oh, my God, I'm in the SEC”, everything was different. Definitely a culture shock, to say the least.
I didn't like it at first. I was ready to come home, but after I gave it a solid year, by six months struggled, second six months got a little bit better. By year two, I had fully adapted. At this point, I consider myself like an adopted son of the south.
Walk me through a typical day, with classes, practice, school requirements, and then obviously, football requirements. What did those days look like?
My freshman and sophomore year in 2009 and ‘10, I think it was this old school version of student-athletes. We were kind of in the public eye amongst campus, like people knew that we played a sport because we wore the generic athlete gear.
There was no microscope. There was a general microscope, but it was like, okay you're up at 6am. You got a 7am tutor. 8am class. You're in class till 12 to 12:30pm. You go to mandatory lunch. From lunch, you go to mandatory training or physical therapy if you have any injuries. Then you go to meetings and then practice and then mandatory dinner.
Then if you have study hall after practice, you go there. It is a long day. It's like six o'clock in the morning—sometimes five o'clock in the morning—to typically 10 to 11pm at night. It is a long day, but that is just what is expected of you.
Where things got a little bit—I don't want to say crazier and there were definitely benefits and perks that we reaped from this—but 2011 on when Twitter became a mainstream thing, Instagram really started taking over in 2012.
When our lives started becoming forward facing to the public. All of a sudden, myself and my teammates would have weekly press conferences, obligations to the media after practice. We always did community service, but the community service became documented.
It went from this really packed schedule my first two years, where you basically learn time management and there was extra responsibilities upon you as a student-athlete, but was normal. They were paying for our school, so it was a trade off. To where 2011, ‘12 and ‘13 years, I feel like I'm a professional athlete now.
Meaning we're meeting with [the] communications department and having brand ambassadors come in. This is 2011 or ‘12 talking about what you say, how you say it. Next thing I know, it's like I'm getting pulled out in a class. Coach Richt’s bringing me to a donor luncheon and I'm speaking to a bunch of these old guys at a country club.
I’m just like, “Yeah, sure, coach, I'll do it.” I do think what college athletes—and this goes all genders, all sports—the amount of pressure that they have today, I think is tenfold compared to what I had.
Now you see Deion Sanders, for example. He's taking over college sports. He has a camera on him and on his team 24/7, 365, for better or for worse. I don't know how it's gonna continue to evolve over time. I think this professionalization of amateur sports has completely taken over.
That full schedule that I had in ‘09 and ‘10—where I was up at five and sometimes I'd be leaving the library at 2am if I had a long week of school—that now is still there. You're still required to do that, but you're under this massive microscope. Some people like it and then there are people who don't who have no choice, because that's the nature of college sports.
What was the most challenging part of being a college athlete? Or the most difficult part to adjust to?
Obviously, hindsight is 2020. I can look at things from a mental health perspective. I know it’s a hot button topic now. I had a number of different personal issues that I failed to deal with growing up.
I went from being a role player to being able to start to this kind of—not public pressure— but this kind of like, “Okay, you now kind of have to be a spokesperson for this program.” I didn't handle it great. It may have looked like I did outwardly, but internally I had no idea what I was doing.
It created a ton of dilemmas internally from a mental health perspective. To be fair, that was not a topic of conversation. It is now today.
That was for me, probably the hardest thing, because I didn't realize that my mental health was deteriorating over time. These different coping mechanisms that I was using—one of them being football itself—when the rubber hit the road and I went to the NFL and I got injured and I wasn't able to play football as an outlet, I was somewhat lost.
Not because I didn't have football anymore—because I was still on a team—but because I had no way of constructively coping or having a constructive coping mechanism and a healthy way to handle how I was handling things mentally. I think that has changed.
But that was the most difficult thing for me. The toxic masculinity thing that was super prevalent when I was there. Don’t talk about your feelings. You get hurt, figure it out. I think that was definitely a tough thing for me.
If I were to do it all over again—if I have a son or if I have a daughter one day—and they're like, “Hey, I'm very good at this sport, I want to play this sport.” I'd have honest conversations with them about the commitments that come with that.
Then I would be like, “Well, first and foremost, here's how you should handle things, different forms of adversity. Here's how you should try to handle this massive influx of responsibility that's going to get thrown on your plate when you're 18.”
I think Coach Richt and our team and our support staff did a great job of it. I just know, personally, I did not have the self awareness or the confidence or the ability to overcome insecurities to be like, “Hey, I need to figure out how to navigate these things, because I'm kind of approaching it in a Neanderthal way.”
I'll just head butt my way through it and then shoot first ask questions later. Ultimately, it developed calluses that were not sustainable long term.
How did you manage being both an athlete and a student?
At Georgia, the academic center is called the Rankin Smith [Center]. There was a woman, Ms. Rhonda Kilpatrick. She was basically an academic coordinator.
She was, I kid you not, a miracle worker. She had the emotional EQ to handle a lot of different kids from a lot of different backgrounds. Everyone was on the same even keel during school.
Whether you were an honor’s student who also got recruited to play football or if you were an academic fringe guy who was a Parade All-American in high school who was able to get in, you went to study hall at 7am as freshmen altogether.
Two athletes would have a direct mentor. Every day at 7am, from June—I think they incentivized us to the end of first semester, it could have been spring semester—unless you had I think it was either 3.0 or 3.5 following your first semester, you had to continue to go to mentoring six days a week.
So Monday through Friday and then Sunday afternoon. I think they did that, because they're like, “We're gonna hammer time management into your brains right away.”
They taught me how to be academically responsible early on. That helped the transition.
As you were getting towards the end of your college career, what was the process like to prepare for the future? Whether you’re going to the NFL or not. How did you Georgia prepare you for that next step?
I always thought this was super interesting about what life skills were we developing if football weren’t to work out. The SEC is a football factory. There's no two ways around it. I always say if you want to get into investment banking and you go to Amherst College, your goal is to go to one of the big four banks.
If you want to play in the NFL, to put yourself in a position to get there, you want to go to a place that would be like the equivalent of Goldman Sachs to prepare you for a successful career in finance. That's what playing in the SEC is like.
You choose the SEC to fine tune your skills both on the field and off the field to prepare you for an opportunity to play in the NFL. With that being said, that comes with a lot of sacrifice, that comes with a ton of a ton of benefits. Don't get me wrong, probably more benefits than there are sacrifices.
All summer long, we'd have workouts at 6am. We'd have workouts in the afternoon, three days a week, as well. You had to take some sort of class or internship around the area. You could not remove yourself from Athens.
If you did secure an internship in New York City to go work for an investment bank or you did get an internship in Silicon Valley to go work in a company or if you did get an internship at ESPN in Bristol to go work in media, you had to make a conscious decision: Am I going to leave my team for two months—even though we're not in season—and risk the development as an athlete that might jeopardize my future in the NFL to go supplement another future that I probably am going to do after football?
That’s very difficult and it’s incredibly difficult for coaches to navigate that world, because ultimately their job is dependent on us performing on the field.
Coach Richt did a really good job of bringing in leaders of Fortune 500 companies, networking events to try and prepare us for the long term. That is definitely a sacrifice. Some walk ons would go and skip summer workouts and go to New York or go to Atlanta, but if you were a scholarship guy and you wanted to play in the NFL, you were in Athens 11 to 12 months a year.
For me, I was like, “Okay, I'm gonna go just give it all a football.” When I got done playing and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next and I was interviewing for different jobs in New York—whether it be real estate or finance or I was thinking about doing stuff in media—they would always ask, “Well, what do you study? Did you do an internship?” It’s very hard to prepare for both. It’s certainly a sacrifice you have to make.
Speaking to NFL preparation, it's quite the opposite. The moment you step on campus, you see all the upperclassmen who have started for a couple of years. I now see how they're being courted by agents, financial advisors, marketing people. Georgia did a very good job of bringing in third party firms to be like, “Here's how you manage your money. Here’s how you appropriately evaluate different agencies. Here's the different types of training facilities that these agencies will send you to.”
In a way, those internships that we didn't necessarily have the opportunity to do, it was made up for by the preparation that we were ultimately getting for the NFL, because at the end of the day, if you're playing significant minutes on a SEC football team—particularly in a place like Georgia—you're gonna get an opportunity NFL.
Now, that opportunity might be a first round pick or it might be an un drafted situation. There is a wide spectrum. Each of those guys was equally prepared when they have the opportunity to go.
What was the transition like when you were officially done being a professional football player to what you’re doing now?
The transition to being a professional football player started as soon as about an hour after my last game. My agent was in my hotel in Florida after we play in the Gator Bowl against Nebraska.
I signed my agency papers the very next day. I was shipped off to Florida for combine training. That basically started a six, seven month process until I was drafted. Once you're in the machine, you're just trying to survive and thrive.
After I got done, the first thing that happened I had multiple back surgeries. Complications with the surgeries and then once I retired from football—which was January of 2017— it just came down to leveraging the whole NFL spiel to try to get in as many doors as humanly possible across a number of different industries.
That's where I learned I was like, “Well, I don't have that tangible intern experience. I'm not ready to go back to grad school. I don't know if I want to go back to grad school.” It's like, what skills do I have? And how are those skills transferable?
That was pretty difficult, because I knew I wanted to work in finance. I had no finance background and so it really just came down to knocking on as many doors, sending as many messages as I could. Eventually, I worked my way into it.
Although I didn't have any tangible substantive skills around finance modeling or PowerPoint presentations, those were all stuff that I could learn. It’s a testament to Ms. Rhonda and Coach Richt for developing that system of core competency.
I was like, “Well, if I just approach this like I approach a Monday through Friday in-season schedule, where if I'm on time, I'm late, if I'm five minutes early, I'm on time mentality, then I think I'll find success.” Ultimately, I did.
But that transition is rocky. It’s rocky for a lot of athletes, particularly athletes that don't decide to stay in football or their respective sport.
I dated a girl for a while who I'm still close with and she was a professional soccer player. She dealt with a ton of injuries. I remember talking to her about that transition.
You don't want to watch the sport right away. You don't necessarily want to talk about it. It’s not an open wound. It’s not like I'm trying to like hold on to the past. It’s almost like you have this proverbial limb that's missing, because you have this sense of purpose for so long and when that purpose is—not taken away—but when that sense of purpose is vacant, you have to find ways to fill it.
It’s different for everybody. It took me a couple of years. Even though I was working and everything seemed normal, I was still kind of lost a little bit like, “Okay, am I trying to be someone I'm not or am I or am I trying to really focus on what I want to be long term?” It’s definitely a happy medium.
At the end of the day, there's no like, systematic approach to it. It's a lot of trial and error.
Switching gears a bit. I was always fascinated by the swag. What was it like getting all of that swag? Did you guys have to wear certain sweat sets on certain days?
It was classic feeding our own egos They couldn't have been bigger than what they were back then.
It’s funny, I’m still very close with my core group. My roommates. It’s like Dustin Royston, Aaron Murray, Ty Frix, and Christian Robinson.
Thank god for these phones. Apple Photos will be like, “Oh, this is a feature photo today.” It’ll be me and me and Aaron [Murray] in 2011 and it'll be some shirt that we were wearing. The same one. I'd always be like, “Does anyone know where any of my clothes went?” I have none of that swag. I think I have one shirt left over.
It was all given out universally around different times of the year. Those gray sweat suits that you're talking about, I think they issued them the day after first frost in the fall.
The day I think it hits 32 degrees in the morning—or not even 32—I’d maybe call it 42, we would come in the next day or to practice that afternoon and our little cubbies would be this fresh gray sweatsuit. We got it every year. Obviously, we all wore it for about a month straight. It was probably disgusting by day six.
Backpacks were all universal. You got a backpack the first week you were on campus. You didn't get the name tags until the bowl game. After the bowl game, that was your initiation patch almost.
Me and my group still talking about it. If we can have one piece of swag that we got once a year in perpetuity, it would be the gray sweatsuits.
What happened to your stuff?! Did you keep it after you graduated?
I couldn’t tell you where it went. This is Bravo and ESPN, so a ton of ex-girlfriends have all of the clothes. There's no question in my mind.
Did you wear suits on game day?
I was on an executive leadership team my junior and senior year. We noticed that Alabama always wore shirt and ties. I was like, “This is a business meeting. They’re going to handle business and win games.” We would show up [in] sweat suits. Not in uniform.
I think we did the suit and tie for two games and Shawn Williams was like, “I’m not doing this. This is stupid.” It was a very brief thing and that was in 2012.
But for 99.9 percent of the other time, we would get issued two sweat suits. One that was a thicker more sweatshirt material for the cold year one and then a little bit more loose kind of pullover sweatsuit that was for September, October. That was uniform. You had to be in uniform during game weekends for that.
What was dating like while being a student-athlete?
A ton of guys dated other athletes. A couple guys ended up dating and marrying cheerleaders. Some guys had their high school girlfriends who also went to Georgia.
It was different, though. I was not about like, “I want a girlfriend to be around my family and wear my pin and wear whatever.” I just thought that was bizarre.
It was difficult I would say. Off-season, not so much. In season, the days were so long. I actually give a lot of credit to the people who had functional, healthy long-term relationships through college and for their significant other who maybe wasn't playing a sport, who put up with demanding hours.
We talked a little bit about it about the mental health aspect of it. I would get depressed, like severely depressed, if we lost the game. I learned pretty early on, when we lose the game, the pressure around the program intensifies that much more, because people's jobs are on the line.
We all had a collective goal of trying to win championships, but coaches wanted job security and players wanted to play well to get drafted and go on to the next level. It would get pretty testy.
There was one fall where I did have a girlfriend. I was not present at all. I was like, “This isn't gonna last.” Because I'm a miserable prick to be around.
I think, holistically, athletes dated athletes and then the people who had those healthy relationships throughout typically got married to those people. Because they had so much they had been through.
Was there anything that was a fun or surprising thing that people would not know about being a student-athlete at Georgia?
We got a train table for food my junior or sophomore year, and that was pretty awesome. They set it up in the Coliseum, right where the gymnasts’ facility is with the basketball facility. It just completely privatized our meals. We were getting catered by the on-campus food halls. One thing that was very—not stressful—but it was fun once in a while, but going to the dining halls was very hectic.
Because you are in the larger community of the student body and some people grew up massive Georgia fans, so they had a hard time separating Saturdays to like, “Hey, I'm just trying to drink my smoothie, eat my sandwich and go to class.”
That perk of being able to go into this Coliseum, get your lunch, in and out. That was probably one of the best perks that wasn't a thing until my sophomore or junior year.
If Bravo and ESPN had a baby, it would be Impersonal Foul. You in? Subscribe and tell your friends. It means the world!
You can follow me on Instagram here, Twitter here and TikTok here. Enjoy the endless void of content!
Is he blaming his mental health issues for the reason he was thrown out of the Army and his sexual assault charges? Why no questions on those topics?!?!?
Excellent interview Art. You could definitely be a conduit for kids seeking to play on Di level. Love you brother