Lynn Is Not Crazy After All These Years : Bengals: Ex-Charger coach enjoys seeing his old team come together even as he tries to figure out puzzling Cincinnati.

Sooner or later, defensive coordinator Ron Lynn said, the odds are bound to turn in your favor.

And in a way they swung around Sunday. With a 27-10 victory over the Bengals, the Chargers have won nine games for the first time since winning 10 in 1981.

But for Lynn, well, he’s still waiting. After coordinating the Charger defense for the past six years, he was included in a winter housecleaning of coaches after the 1991 season.

That’s football, so Lynn shrugged his shoulders and found another job--directing the Bengal defense.

He couldn’t help but feel nostalgic when he returned here Saturday, and he couldn’t help but feel proud of the job the Chargers did on the Bengals.

“Obviously a lot of time went into getting all the pieces of the puzzle together,” Lynn said. “And it looks like they have them all together now. . . . This is as fine a team I’ve seen in the AFC this year, and I hope they win the rest of their games and go all the way.”

Before he showered his former players with words of praise, he received from them a symbol of their respect. Several Charger defenders--Gill Byrd, Blaise Winter and Gary Plummer among them--approached their old mentor after their victory and presented him with the game ball.

“All those veteran guys over there,” Lynn said, “they paid a hell of a price to get to where they are--and they deserve to be there.”

The pendulum has swung. When Lynn was with the Chargers he, the other coaches and players often had to dodge debris hurled at them by angry fans after games. Now players remove their helmets when they leave and wave them to a crowd, which unleashes only applause.

It’s a reward that came one year too late for Lynn.

“You always like to enjoy the fruits of your labor,” Lynn said. “But that’s the nature of the game. I have no regrets. I thought the organization treated me very well. I stayed through three different head coaches and three different general managers. I think Mr. (owner Alex) Spanos treated us very well.”

Besides, it wasn’t all bad news when he was fired by the Chargers. The next day his wife, Cynthia, gave birth to the couple’s third son, and dad was reminded that happiness does not hinge on the outcome of a football game.

This year Lynn’s emotions do not ride the NFL’s roller-coaster. He is gaining an appreciation of life through his baby boy, who contracted chicken pox shortly after the move to Cincinnati, and this past summer was diagnosed as having leukemia.

“I’ve always prided myself for keeping a perspective on things,” Lynn said. “Maybe going through this gives me even more of a perspective. It’s certainly not over and we’re sure sometime along the line something positive will come out of it.”

It’s that kind of optimism Lynn left with his players, and now the Chargers are putting it to use. The defense, under coordinator Bill Arnsparger, no longer self-destructs in the waning minutes of a half or game.

That’s something Lynn still must deal with, and something that happened Sunday when the Bengals took a 10-3 lead with 1:41 remaining in the first half.

A seven-point halftime advantage was theirs, or so it seemed. To that point, Lynn’s defense had stopped two Charger drives with interceptions and forced the Chargers to settle for a field goal on another nine-minute possession.

But the bugaboo that haunted Lynn in his years with the Chargers was about to taunt him again. Quarterback Stan Humphries maneuvered the Chargers down the field and with 20 seconds showing hit Anthony Miller with an 11-yard pass in the corner of the end zone. 10-10.

“I wasn’t thinking ‘Here we go again,’ ” Lynn said. “Because our players were still going hard. It wasn’t a matter of us blowing coverage, or anything. It was just a matter of the Chargers making the plays.

“Those are the breaks of the game, and they go both ways. It just might take six years for them to even out.”