Greenspan wouldn't get into specifics. But Campbell, the gridiron Cadet who was called back to West Point, did. Before his 2008 graduation from Army, as his effort to go pro (behind the Academy's ASO exemption) was becoming national news, he received an anonymous handwritten letter. "I want you to muster up the balls to walk over to the West Point cemetery and stand in front of each headstone of recent graduates who were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan and tell them that you are going to face just as much pressure as they did," it read. "I doubt you'll do that. You'll kiss them off like you're kissing off your classmates."
The trolling might've broken Campbell, now 32, if he hadn't also been so strongly backed. "People can scrutinize, but they were not sitting at a round table with two-, three-, four-star generals," he says. "And then there were all my superior officers from the United States Military Academy, giving me advice, telling me what I should be doing. And I'm just saying, 'O.K., I'll go for it."
In the end, though, perhaps it was better for Campbell that he was called back to West Point. That year the Lions became the first NFL team to lose 16 games in a season. For the next two years he operated on the fringes of the Robinson Rule—first as a grad assistant on the West Point coaching staff, then as a bobsledder in the Army's World Class Athlete Program (an Olympic and Paralympic training ground), then in officer school at Fort Sill, in southwest Oklahoma.
In 2010, upon satisfying his active duty obligation, Campbell circled back to Detroit, signing a one-year contract. Relegated to special teams, he played three games before being cut in '11. From there he bounced from Indianapolis to Kansas City—sabotaging himself, he says, at every stop. "I was so afraid of being exposed as this person that didn't have what it took to make it in the NFL," he recalls. "But if I can sabotage my career, I'll always have an excuse on why I didn't make it. I can sleep at night saying, well, if I would've studied, I guarantee I would've made it in the NFL. At the end of the day I just didn't have the balls to quit."
In August 2012 the Chiefs put Campbell out of his misery, serving him a final NFL pink slip. He resettled in Buffalo, found work with a marketing and design firm and joined a church just across the Niagara River, in Fort Erie, Ont. There, he would become so rehearsed in sharing his testimony—a soul-searching allegory—that he would respin it into a side career as a motivational speaker.
Not surprisingly, Campbell, because of his Army experience, views the abandonment of the Robinson Rule more diplomatically than most. "For us to continue to have the maximum influence [as an institution], I think it's pivotal that we are able to recruit better athletes," he says. "For us to be able to compete at the Division I level, it's necessary for us to recruit."
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