Devil Dish

 by Chris Ramirez
 published on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The similarities are eerie.

A hard-hitting college football player. Star of his team. Hoping to play safety for an NFL team on Sundays. Selected in the seventh round, an afterthought to about all draft diehards.

Caleb Campbell was the 218th player picked this past weekend in the NFL's annual draft, 10 years after the Arizona Cardinals used a compensatory pick to make Pat Tillman the 226th selection in the 1998 draft.

Now, Campbell, chosen by the Detroit Lions, must make the same decision Tillman once did: play ball or go to war.

Campbell is a senior at the U.S. Military Academy, better known as West Point, and was a member of the Army football team for four seasons. He stands to graduate in a month, and like most cadets, be shipped to the Middle East within a year.

But Campbell may avoid combat and even basic training for that matter, thanks to the Army's new Alternative Service Option policy. The policy allows cadets to become professional athletes so long as they remain on active duty as recruiters.

It looks like a win-win scenario in Campbell's case. He'll be allowed to stay stateside and play football, and the Army, fighting an extremely unpopular war, will get a new poster boy.

The truth of the matter, however, is the Army would have never been concerned with its Q rating in the first place if it hadn't malevolently mishandled and manipulated the death of Tillman.

Reach the reporter at: Christopher.D.Ramirez@asu.edu.