Tyler Linderbaum was lifting weights, a freshman defensive tackle at Iowa, when a staffer told him coach Kirk Ferentz summoned him to chat in his office afterward. Linderbaum assumed he was in trouble, maybe for a touch of too much fun as the Hawkeyes prepared to play Mississippi State at the Outback Bowl in Tampa, Florida.
Hoping for the best but prepared for the worst as he ambled from the weight room up the stairs, Linderbaum sat in Ferentz’s office — thereby changing the course of his career.
“Part of my job is to look at the big picture … and I just didn’t see anybody that I felt like was what we were looking for as a center,” said Ferentz, the country’s longest tenured coach. “I suggest. I don’t mandate. At least I try not to mandate. I try to always make it a suggestion.”
Suggestion accepted. Position switched. Contract with the Las Vegas Raiders signed.
Linderbaum in the last eight years has made himself one of the world’s best centers, a cornerstone of the Raiders rebuild and the NFL’s highest-paid interior offensive lineman ever. Las Vegas signed him to anchor its line, and at 26 he’s approaching his prime with hands like a heavyweight and feet like a featherweight, tied together by a penchant to punish.
A tractor in the run game and pillar in the pass game who played his first four seasons for the Baltimore Ravens before paving the path for a Week 1 win on his first Sunday in a Raiders uniform, Linderbaum said Thursday morning he’s living the “dream” he conceived in Solon, Iowa.
Population 3,399.
Said former Solon football coach Kevin Miller, who recently retired: “Tyler’s not one to ever forget where he came from and what he had to do to get where he’s at and the people that contributed to his growth and his development that afforded him the opportunities to reach his potential.”
‘He is the same guy’
With a face full of stubble and a frame full of muscle at 6-foot-2, 305 pounds, Linderbaum lives in West Branch, Iowa, 18 miles away from Solon. Married to his best friend, Rachel, in May, he trains with the Hawkeyes every offseason — refusing to abandon routines that helped him become a three-time Pro Bowl honoree in Baltimore.
When the Raiders sent Linderbaum his record-setting contract worth $81 million through 2028, he signed it digitally via Docusign and resumed his workout at Iowa’s Stew and LeNore Hansen Iowa Football Performance Center in Iowa City.
“He’s out here like it was five years ago,” Ferentz said. “He is the same guy. He does not change. He is who he is.”
Loyalty is part of Linderbaum’s lineage, rooted for generations in Solon, where everybody knows everybody and high school sports are a social hub. His paternal grandparents were schoolteachers, passing the trade to his father, Todd, who graduated Solon in 1988 and teaches physical education in nearby Iowa City. His mother, Lisa, works for World Class Industries, a local supplier and contractor and his brother, Logan, three-plus years his senior, cultivated his competitiveness.
Hawkeye sports in Iowa City – about a 20-minute drive from Solon — are akin to the Knicks in New York City and Linderbaum attended games with his family, envisioning himself in black and old gold, be it on the field, diamond or court. He focused on football during football season, basketball during basketball season and baseball during baseball season, hating to lose more than loving to win.
But losses to Logan leave a lasting impression.
“Sometimes (my competitiveness) was to my detriment,” said Linderbaum, known as “Lindy” and always ready to take on a teammate on the pool table in the Raiders locker room. “Throwing tantrums when I was younger, losing in video games, but you just learn to love to compete and then when you get into sports, you’re out there trying to win like right now what we’re in.”
Because Linderbaum reviled losing, he wouldn’t shortchange himself during his drills, impressing on his friends and teammates at Solon, their star and one of the guys at once. He’d lift to failure, sprint through the line and push in practice until the whistle blew — spring, summer, autumn and winter.
Cross training as a multi-sport stalwart — and he ceded basketball for wrestling as a sophomore, eventually pinning former state champion and Tampa Bay Buccaneers star tackle Tristan Wirfs in one of the state’s most memorable matches — fortified Linderbaum’s athleticism, his quick-twitch, fleet feet and pliable infighting accentuated by his built-in bounce. A quarterback in junior high, he became unmovable on the offensive line and unblockable on the defensive line as a power-hitting closer and state-placing wrestler who hurled a shotput and discus for fun.
“He was the alpha of the alphas,” Solon baseball coach Keith McSweeney said. “He led vocally without question, but he didn’t have to. Just because everyone was going to follow his lead.”
Linderbaum’s recruitment all but ended as soon as the Hawkeyes made him one of their targets during his junior season at Solon. Iowa might as well be “Lineman U” with Ferentz’s background in developing pros and his commitment fulfilled a lifelong desire to play at Kinnick Stadium.
Albeit as a defensive tackle at first.
Position change
Linderbaum also played center at Solon, catching the attention of alum James Morris, a standout linebacker at Iowa who had a cup of coffee in the NFL. As a volunteer assistant at his alma mater, he relayed to Miller that Linderbaum had pro potential if he focused on center instead of tackle.
As told by Morris, whose grandparents lived next door in Solon to Linderbaum’s grandparents: “Center is a really unique position because you’re effectively locked in a phone booth the entire game … because you always had a tackle on top of you, a guard to the right of you, the guard to the left of you and a quarterback behind you. … People that can both be big and be small and be sudden and be agile within that phone booth, that’s a very unique set of skills.”
Ferentz’s co-sign a few years later might as well have functioned as gospel to Linderbaum, noting Thursday he didn’t hesitate to switch amid Iowa’s track record in the trenches. He smiled in saying, “it changed my life forever” as he credited the tandem of Miller and Ferentz, who said he would’ve started at defensive tackle and joked that Iowa’s defensive coaches didn’t talk to him for two and a half years.
Beyond his obvious physical prowess, Ferentz said he noticed in Linderbaum intangibles befitting of the “poor man’s quarterback,” his euphemism for the center spot as a former NFL offensive line coach.
“Players know what other players are doing,” Ferentz said. “They watch other players. They respect you or don’t based on how you do things and the way you operate. In Tyler’s case, it was everything. He just checks every box.”
No wonder the Raiders rushed to make Linderbaum a building block for first-year coach Klint Kubiak, whose zone-run offense accentuates his talents, providing him the freedom to play in space. He’s strong enough to overpower defenders, quick enough to slither to the second level, seasoned enough to diagnose fronts and composed enough to communicate clearly.
Kubiak, pleased with Linderbaum in the Raiders’ season-opening win against the Miami Dolphins, said, “to play center, you got to be smartest guy on the field. So, he gets everybody on the same page. He plays with great effort. Plays with great athleticism.”
Year after year. Play after play.
Obviously, he wasn’t in trouble when Ferentz beckoned him way back when. Defensive tackles and linebackers were.
“He loves the game of football,” his father said. “He’s in his happy place (on the football field) … Being on the biggest stage and doing something you love and loved doing as a kid, what better can you ask for?”
Contact Sam Gordon at sgordon@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BySamGordon on X.
