The first time San Francisco General Manager John Lynch and Stanford defensive lineman Solomon Thomas met, neither could have predicted the future they’d have together.
Although Thomas met several NFL general managers during the run-up to the draft, he met Lynch when he was a freshman at Stanford, and the two of them took a class together: Lynch hadn’t finished his degree when he left Stanford for the NFL in 1993, and he decided to go back and get it in 2014.
The class they took together was Management Science and Engineering, and they worked together on a project about how the Washington NFL team should go about deciding whether to change its name.
“He was on top of all the stuff, coming back as an older person, compared to us young people,” Thomas said of Lynch, according to Jenny Vrentas of TheMMQB.com. “He was on top of discipline, very studious and diligent.”
Thomas apparently made a good impression on Lynch.