Army Safety Caleb Campbell - NFL Bound?

[Umar Al-Mokhtār]

When my daughter (Specialist, MP, deploying to IZ soon) heard this her reaction was typical: "That's f****n b******t" and I belive she questioned the LT's manhood (the unfortunate byproduct of growing up with a lot of young Marines around).

Which makes me consider a change the wording of bumper sticker I was planning to get later this year to:

Don't worry LT Campbell...
my daughter's in Iraq so you don't have to go.

[Uboat509]

Personally, I couldn't possibly care less if West Point has a great football team, or even a football team at all. I also don't care about this kids dream to play in the NFL, I have a dream about dating Holly Hunter but that isn't going to happen either. On the other hand I would like to see some sort of cost benefit analysis on this whole thing. Duty, Honor and Country mean an awful lot to those of us who post here but it means exactly squat to a lot of kids out there today. If this guy playing in the NFL will convince (perhaps influence might be a better term) more kids to join up then maybe that is more important than having another 2LT in the ADA (actually I believe that virtually ANYTHING is more important than having more 2LTs in the ADA but that is a personal bias born of bitter experience so I shall refrain from commenting further). I honestly don't know if he would have that much influence on recruitment but I suspect that it is worth at least a look.

SFC W

[Tom Odom]

Holly Hunter? It could happen....

[Ken White]

Ken,

My entire retort/prose/response was based off the tenant of volunteer...Inuitive to the regard that if would (our angels) suffice our current need in forces.

serious stuff but an aside into the arcane like LT Campobell is okay on occasion, I think. I was in essence saying you were correct, no more. Just did it with tongue in cheek (which may be why my wife tells me to avoid trying to be a comedian... ).

As we (actually both) agree, if we are wrong, then there must be some other sacrifice of the 330 million of the USA.

Not the American way. Even in WW II, we at home did not sacrifice much, since then we have not suffered at all .

My personal belief is that's okay even if it is at times annoying. Those of us who wear or wore war suits mostly did it voluntarily, all voluntarily in the last 36 or so years, we pay a price to allow that to happen and we all have the option to pay it or quit. I did it for a long time and have no regrets. Everyone has to make their own mind up on the pros and cons...

-Just a young boy spilling words...

Mike

Old men have more words. They may make less sense but, by god, we got more!

Keep up the fire.

[RYNO]

This officer served as a graduate assistant wrestling coach for his first assignment after commissioning. These assignments are normally about 6-9 months and in my case I was starting AOBC on 2 JAN after a 30 MAY commissioning. I did it mostly because I wanted to start my life (paying bills, living on my own-not in barracks, new freedom) in a familiar place close to my hometown, not because of any serious professional thinking...it had the benefit (unknown to me at the time), I believe, of making me a much better teacher, coach, mentor as an officer in general, as a leader of troops, as an SGI to new captains, and in my current position, as a trainer of new Armor LTs.

It is routine for West Point to take a very small number of its more successful athletes, usually one per program, and ask them to stay for 6-9 months as a 2LT to be a Grad assistant. Some of the duties they are given (see how they apply to working in the force): recruiting (retention), planning and executing strength and conditioning workouts (PT), practices (training), breaking down film (AARs), mentoring freshmen (mentoring young Soldiers/Officers).

A majority of the people I know who served as GAs had some potential for a "professional" (term used loosely) sports career, whether it was football, baseball, whatever, or to continue representing the Army in the World Class Athlete Program or All-Army Teams. USMA will assign these types of folks both for the institution and the individual. I only know of three that continued trying to pursue that course, all the rest entered their branch.

Given 2LT Campbell's situation--I was behind it if the Army did it right: assigning a mentor/trigger puller to him from the Army's PAO and another from Recruiting Command to fully develop/utilize his potential as a recruiter. It didn't seem like we were going to do it right, so I am with the policy change. As for the core values at USMA or athletics at the institution, I think we beat those up enough...

[Uboat509]

Interesting article. According to this, it wasn't even his idea to take this exemption. He was going to transfer to another school before he incured the service requirement but the coach at WP convinced him to stay and seek the exemption.

SFC W

[wm]

Interesting article. According to this, it wasn't even his idea to take this exemption. He was going to transfer to another school before he incured the service requirement but the coach at WP convinced him to stay and seek the exemption.

SFC W

Tough to take the word of that head coach (Bobby Ross) for much. Didn't he bolt from the job a few months later, after his third losing season? USMA is not the NFL, an ACC school like GA Tech or Maryland, or even The Citadel (the other places Ross coached).

[Shek]

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=4416326

Updated: August 22, 2009, 5:05 PM ET
Campbell's bobsled hopes improve
Associated Press
Caleb Campbell is still in the Olympic bobsled picture.

Campbell, the U.S. Army soldier and West Point graduate drafted by the Detroit Lions last year before being told his NFL career needed to wait, finished 10th Saturday at the U.S. Bobsled Federation's push championship qualifier in Lake Placid, N.Y.

He's no cinch for the Vancouver roster, but Saturday's times likely earned him a spot in the national team trials, starting in Lake Placid in mid-October. Campbell said two drivers have already asked him about joining their teams.

[Jedburgh]

I'm resurrecting a five year old thread here, but its better to recycle than to waste, and the old discussion provides background to the article:

Washington Post, 23 Feb 14: West Point is Placing Too Much Emphasis on Football

Internal studies conducted in the past decade show that, once at West Point, recruited football players are more than twice as likely to fail courses, more likely to leave the Army early and less likely to be promoted to higher ranks in the Army compared with their non-recruited counterparts. There are exceptions, of course…...Yet the aggregate numbers demonstrate that loosening academic standards runs counter to the academy’s mission to prepare each graduate “for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army.”

[Granite_State]

Reopened for a nauseating postscript:

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."

http://www.si.com/more-sports/2017/0...ary-connection

The whole article is worth reading, in a bad way.