LOS ANGELES — The first day, Kamari Ramsey didn’t speak much. Didn’t speak at all, really. Anthony Brown had trained plenty of high school athletes before, a group with natural attention spans as thin as the blades of grass under their cleats, and Brown could only assume the worst from a kid who wouldn’t even glorify him with a response.
“Is he really paying attention to me,” Brown wondered as he set up a cone drill.
Ramsey didn’t speak much. He, Brown came to find, was simply observing.
They ran through an exercise, out there a few years back at Valencia Park in Santa Clarita, focused on placing power on the big toe and moving with quick feet. Brown, a highly regarded defensive backs trainer in Southern California, plopped into a chair to listen to the pat-pat-pat of his athletes’ feet.
Ramsey, the future USC safety, did it perfectly. Exactly as Brown explained. And there, observing Ramsey right back, Brown found himself wondering why in the heck he even needed to train the kid.
Kamari Ramsey, right, poses with trainer Anthony Brown in 2021 at Valencia Meadows Park in Santa Clarita. (Courtesy of Anthony Brown)
“The way he listens – see, people just think he’s quiet,” Brown said of Ramsey, who he’s worked with for years since. “But he’s listening to what’s going on, and that’s crazy. A lot of football players don’t have that. A lot of football players want to finish a coach’s sentence.”
“That’s the most beautiful thing,” Brown continued, “about this young man.”
D’Anton Lynn didn’t speak much either, growing up in Celina, Texas. It was a town dominated by football, where D’Anton’s father Anthony had left a lasting legacy as a running back at Celina High, and Lynn knew from the earliest of ages that he wanted to follow in the footsteps, childhood friend Breck Holman said.
So Lynn didn’t party. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t drink. And he didn’t talk, until you got to know him, Holman remembered, Lynn an analytical defensive back whose best attribute was his mind.
And he found a hand-in-glove fit with Ramsey, in the 35-year-old Lynn’s first year as a coordinator last season at UCLA, the young safety a staple of a defensive turnaround. When USC head coach Lincoln Riley hired Lynn across town, Ramsey was stunned. Is this real? he texted his father at the start of December, when the news broke. A few weeks later, Ramsey followed, transferring to USC for a comfortability in Lynn deeper than football: Their personalities, in many ways, are one and the same.
“Kamari really liked that he had a coach,” his sister, Staci, reflected in the winter, “that could understand him.”
This year at USC has been just Lynn’s second as a coordinator in collegiate football. He was the figurehead of a full-scale defensive change in system, staff and philosophy. And he’s largely lived up to the billing heading into a reunion with UCLA this weekend, pulling together a 43rd-ranked defense that’s often performed greater than the sum of its parts.
The most important piece in the foundation, ultimately, has been the connection with Ramsey.
“It meant a ton to me, especially,” Lynn said Tuesday, of Ramsey following him. “Just having him here, I feel like, jump-started this entire thing.”
The stats don’t necessarily explode, but tell enough of a story. The 6-foot-204-pound Ramsey, in eight games, is fourth on the team with 43 tackles. His two sacks are tied for the program lead on a struggling pass-rush. His five pass deflections are a team high.
USC’s Kamari Ramsey wraps up LSU’s CJ Daniels during the first half Sept. 1, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Photo by Candice Ward/Getty Images)
More important, though, has been the redshirt sophomore’s clutch playmaking, honed by years of quick-reaction footwork drills with Brown and an innate ability to read the game that’s reflected in Lynn’s own steel-eyed stare. Through the eight games Ramsey’s played in, USC has come up with a timely total of 78 third and fourth-down stops, the most apparent feather in Lynn’s cap from this 2024 unit.
Ramsey has accounted for 18% of them either via tackle or pass-breakup, according to a game-by-game review from the Southern California News Group.
“Some people just get ball,” Lynn said of Ramsey, back in fall camp, “and he’s a guy who just understands ball. There’s certain things that we don’t need to teach him that he just naturally gets.”
There is no secret here. Brown knew Ramsey was a “Sunday kid,” as he says frequently, not long after that first session. Sierra Canyon head coach Jon Ellinghouse knew Ramsey was special exactly five minutes into watching him move, his first practice his freshman year. After two days of working with him with the Trailblazers, then-Sierra Canyon defensive backs coach Jarrad Page – a former safety with UCLA and the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs – came home and told his wife that there was a safety he was coaching that was “it.”
“Like, he reminds me of myself,” Page remembered telling her, “but, like, better.”
The key, there, was that Ramsey processed the game “three or four steps” ahead of everyone else, Page recalled. He grew up playing chess, a bright mind originally committed to Stanford before flipping to UCLA. Similar to Lakers mogul LeBron James, who’s often lauded for having a photographic memory to remember specific mid-game plays dating years, Ramsey can explain up to 30 variables he evaluates mid-process on any given play, Page said.
Sierra Canyon’s Kamari Ramsey (33) makes a touchdown-saving tackle on Citrus Hill’s Andrew Brooks during the CIF Southern Section Division 3 football semifinal game Nov. 16, 2018, at Citrus Hill High in Perris. (Photo by Frank Bellino, Contributing Photographer)
“That’s the difference on how he ends up all over the place,” Page said, “and can seemingly seem like he’s reacting quicker than everyone else.”
“He’s starting with more information,” Page continued, a few words later, “the way he plays the game.”
It allowed coaches in high school, as Page recalled, to trust Ramsey with gray areas in schemes. They didn’t have to instruct him to stick with one particular assignment. He had freedom. And he has the same freedom at USC, a player who’s perhaps more familiar than anyone with Lynn’s principles but has shone in read-and-react situations throughout 2024.
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Ramsey never envisioned leaving UCLA, his father, Stacy, told the Southern California News Group this past winter. But if he stayed a Bruin, he’d be on his third coordinator in three years of college football.
His move to USC, high school coach Ellinghouse said, wasn’t about NIL opportunity. Wasn’t about flash. It was about Lynn, a man he trusted and who trusted in him.
“I mean, he has, like, this mad-scientist thing,” Ramsey grinned Wednesday, asked if he agreed he and Lynn had matching personalities. “Like, a way of how he thinks football, and how he looks at the game”.”
And if Lynn is USC’s mad scientist, Ramsey is his lab assistant, two minds cut from the same cloth.