Josh Bynes is a young linebacker for the Ravens who got on the field for just one game as a rookie last season. But he says he learned a whole career’s worth of lessons just from being around Ray Lewis.
The 22-year-old Bynes said the 37-year-old Lewis has showed him how to be a professional football player.
“It’s amazing,” Bynes told the Mobile Press-Register. “You couldn’t ask for anything better than one of the best -- if not the best -- players in the game of football, defensively. It’s just incredible to pick up the things he’s seeing and the knowledge he has of the game of football.”
Lewis’s physical tools are great, but Bynes says it’s Lewis’s approach to the mental side of the game that really impresses him.
“When he sees something ... on film, he studies it like that’s a Bible almost,” Bynes said of Lewis. “That’s something I’m picking up off him. I study film, but I think his study of film is a lot different than anybody else’s. . . . I’m going to learn every bit I can as long as he’s in the league and then hopefully when he’s gone I’ll be doing the same thing.”
It’s probably fair to say Bynes won’t do the same things that Lewis has done in his 17-year career, in which he’s become arguably the best linebacker in NFL history. But as Lewis’s career winds down, he’s passing along some of what he’s learned to the next generation.