That week, inside an empty facility, he asked Davis and a graduate assistant to log almost a full work day with him and him alone.

For six to seven hours a day, they studied film. They walked through plays. They sharpened his techniques and conditioning. Campbell wanted to start as a freshman, something Davis knew from the first time they met and entertained even though LSU’s history said 18-year-old linemen wait their turn.

But by the time Campbell’s chief competition, a fourth-year senior with game experience, returned to resume their position battle in practice, the war was over. It took Campbell less than a month to graduate from third-string backup to undisputed starter.

“By the 12th or 13th practice, it was a consensus as a staff that he was our best tackle,” Davis said. “It wasn’t even close.”

Campbell finished the season a freshman All-American. He started every game but the one he missed because he had been hospitalized the day before due to what the team announced as dehydration. That season, Davis remembered, a few teammates remained skeptical of his rise, claiming Campbell was a coach’s pet. They ridiculed him.

But the following summer, even the agnostics had seen too much not to believe.

“Everything Will does is about work. Hard work,” said former LSU edge rusher and fifth-round Patriots draft pick Bradyn Swinson. “That’s a guy that’s going to do everything right.”

As a sophomore, Campbell became a captain and earned a unique LSU honor: the jersey No. 7, which according to the program reflects the “most impactful player on the roster from the state of Louisiana.” Indeed, his early arrivals to meetings and exhaustive film study were as real as the pancake blocks he delivered on Saturdays.

Underneath all of his achievements and accolades, Davis discovered something new. Campbell is a pleaser at heart, especially for those closest to him.

“If he felt like he let me or his teammates down, it absolutely crushed him,” Davis said. “Absolutely crushed him. I mean, almost to a point where it was a detriment, because you could just see his entire demeanor change.”

Late in Campbell’s sophomore season, as LSU traded touchdowns every quarter in a shoot-out with Florida, Davis poked at his pleasing nature, hoping to stoke a fire within the captain and his team.

After one drive, Davis went down the bench addressing his offensive linemen. He complimented the right tackle, then slapped the shoulder pads of the right guard and praised the center. Finally, he reached Campbell.

Davis said nothing, and walked away.

His silent scorn lit a fire of frustration in Campbell. He barked at his coach as he walked away, ironically toward a scoreboard that proved LSU’s offense had already done its job and done it well. Davis ignored him, fueling the blaze he had left behind.

“I knew that I made him feel like he wasn’t living up to my expectation or his,” Davis remembered. “He went out the rest of that game, and when I tell you, he f— these kids up he was playing against, he went out there and tried to annihilate them.”

LSU rolled, 52-35.

Immediately after the game, Campbell bee-lined for Davis at midfield. He knew what his coach had done.

“Oh, is that good enough for you now? Are you satisfied?” Campbell asked.

Davis smiled, promising never to withhold his affection again. LSU eventually finished 9-3 that season, while Campbell clinched All-SEC honors. The Tigers capped their season by edging Wisconsin, 35-31, in a bowl game on New Year’s Day, a time to celebrate, if there ever was one.

But four days after the bowl game, the Campbells’ phone rang early in the morning.

All celebrating stopped, and so did life as they knew it.

Family and football

Shortly before dawn broke on Jan. 5, 2024, a fire broke out at a hunting camp in Jefferson County, Mississippi.

It started on the porch of a trailer, then consumed everything around the six friends housed inside. Five were left burned or lacerated upon their escape, including Campbell’s younger brother, Thomas. The other, Tarver Braddock, passed away.

Tarver was 16 years old. He was handsome. Funny. Athletic. A light in the lives of those around him.

A cousin by blood, Will considered Tarver a brother because their mothers, sisters Holly Campbell and Lindsey Braddock, wanted it that way from the beginning. They raised all of their children together, including Tarver’s older sister, Stella, in a unit that grew, loved and learned together in Monroe.

Five days after the fire, the family held services for Tarver, where Will and Thomas served as pallbearers. His death came three months after the loss of their shared grandfather, Holly and Lindsey’s father Billy Husted; a pain Will silently held onto through the season.

But after Tarver’s death, Campbell chose to broadcast his latest loss to the world.

“Today has officially been the hardest day of my life,” he wrote on Instagram. “You were my heart.”

Not long after, Campbell began pouring his pain into the field.

“Will dove into his football even more than he already was,” Holly said, “and just kind of used that as his avenue to deal with everything.”

He aimed to become the No. 1 overall pick in the upcoming NFL Draft, a new goal for his widely expected final season at LSU. According to Davis, Campbell pulled a freshman teammate along for the ride; a player who showed up late to meetings and never grabbed the right equipment in the weight room.

Campbell committed to calling him around 5 a.m. most days during the season, ensuring he arrived early enough for breakfast and treatment. Then he sat with him in meetings and confirmed his feet and hands were properly taped before practice.

“He probably saved this kid’s career, to be honest,”

said Davis, who declined to reveal the young player’s identity. “One day, that kid will call Will and thank him for caring about him as a person. And it was, it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Every morning before LSU games, Campbell and Davis broke bread at the team hotel. Without fail, their talks started with the score of the Neville football game the night before. Most times, Campbell would later address the offense at his offensive coordinator’s request, rousing his teammates ahead of kickoff. In quiet moments, between the fiery speeches and personal chats, two questions often surfaced in Davis’ mind.

What drives Will?

What does he want?

After the season and careful thought, Davis turned to Tarver’s memory.

“It’s almost like he feels like he has to fulfill his cousin’s legacy by going out and having success,” Davis said. “It’s amazing.”

Since Tarver’s passing, Campbell has run football camps and pickleball tournaments in his cousin’s memory. He’s posed for billboards around town to draw attention to the Tarver Braddock Foundation. He’s spoken about Tarver in the media countless times.

Herndon, who dealt with Tarver’s passing every day back at Neville High, pondered the same questions Davis did. But he landed on a different answer.

“I think everybody wants to be remembered for something. And the first thing that comes to my mind, I think Will wants to be remembered as being a really, really good teammate,” Herndon said. “Of having the ability to motivate everybody around him and get everybody moving in the same direction.”

Meanwhile, almost 3,000 miles to the north, the Patriots found their own answers to these questions. The front office considered Campbell a viable option for their No. 4 pick throughout the pre-draft process, which included Vrabel and new vice president of player personnel Ryan Cowden shaking up the pecking order upon their arrivals in mid-January.

Two months later, during his March visit to Foxboro, Campbell sat inside a Gillette Stadium conference room for a common Vrabel test involving more than a dozen Patriots staffers. Each staffer introduced themselves for 30 seconds or so, starting with their names and then background information involving their families, hometowns and work histories. By the time all introductions had completed, Vrabel asked Campbell to repeat what he had learned.

Campbell aced the test.

There was only one question left: the significance, or lack therof, of Campbell’s short arms. His arms measured 33 inches at LSU’s Pro Day, and his wingspan recorded as the shortest of any offensive tackle to attend the combine since 2011.

Campbell also allowed two sacks in his final season. His film showed a small tendency to set aggressively to his left in pass protection, perhaps trying to compensate for his lack of length which let wily opponents slip inside and generate pressure. Some evaluators believed Campbell was best suited as an NFL guard.

Not that he, nor those close to him, agreed.

“An issue (the media) created,” Davis said of the arm length. “We never ever even thought about it here. His film speaks for itself.”

“Whatever doubt people may have had, he’s gonna shut that up,” Stewart answered. “I guarantee it.”

“For two years, nobody had any measurements on me, and nobody said anything about my play. So now all of a sudden arm length decides if I’m a good player or not?” Campbell said at his Pro Day. “I think it’s BS.”

With days left until the draft, there was one way to find out.

Running no more

So, there they were.

Vrabel, 49 and the son of a coach and northeast Ohio, across from a kindred football spirit less than half his age. Two men born into a life they chose to run with, now colliding.

The punches Campbell delivered were less muscles contracting than generations of Louisiana firing. Legacy means inheriting a shared past, and the obligation to move it forward.

“He shoulders that every time he goes on the field,” Herndon said. “He knows exactly who he represents.”

This was for Monroe. For Bull. For Holly. For Thomas.

For Tarver.

Vrabel opened with run-blocking drills. Then he went after Campbell’s arm length, testing his ability to recover in pass protection. Vrabel offered feedback after every rep, sometimes about hand placement or footwork.

Campbell sweated throughout the workout next to Miles Frazier, an LSU teammate and future third-round pick of the Lions. Some reps were purely technical, others more of a brawl. Campbell even put Vrabel on the ground.

At last, the head coach slipped his blocking pad off. He got what he wanted: a decisive, yet sanctioned, defeat. The workout ended.

Campbell took the Patriots out to lunch at Phil’s, one of his favorite local joints that has treated his family well for years. Officially, it’s a Baton Rouge oyster bar and seafood restaurant. Unofficially, it’s a shrine to campus heroes past and present, with LSU memorabilia draped all over the walls.

The lunch lasted two hours in a back room. Once the Patriots left, Campbell still had eight days to wait for the draft. He called his dad.

“What’s your gut telling you?” Bull asked.

“My gut says I’m going to New England,” he replied.

On April 24, the Patriots selected Campbell with the No. 4 overall pick. The decision had been made days earlier, settled by Campbell’s performance in the workout.

“We coveted this player,” Vrabel admitted on draft night.

Two weeks later, on a drive to uproot their son in Baton Rouge and begin his move to New England, Holly and Bull retold the story of draft night in Green Bay.

How they had huddled backstage in the green room, together with Will, Thomas, the Braddocks, more family and LSU coaches. How they roared after the phone call, a release after years of Neville football games and Louisiana dreams. The moment of a lifetime paid for by lifetimes working for a moment.

A minute passed between the time Will’s phone lit up, and his selection was announced. Holly said it felt like 30.

The celebration rolled off stage and back to the Marriott hotel where they were staying. The next morning, Patriots staffers met the Campbells in the lobby at 7. The family was escorted to a nearby airport, where a private jet waited to rush them to Foxboro.

The Campbells climbed aboard. Will could finally stop running.

It was time to fly.

Minutes before the last job interview of his life, Will Campbell ran.

He pumped his arms in a white hooded sweatshirt and pounded his cleats into green, artificial turf. Sweat slipped from his dark walnut curls, down his 6-foot-6 frame, soaking the hoodie. Then, he stopped.

Campbell scanned the white domed ceiling above and the familiar football field stretched out ahead. A glare accented his thin goatee; the first sign of many this 21-year-old is an old soul.

A hundred yards away, out-of-town visitors entered through the opposite end of LSU’s practice facility ready to start the interview. Campbell walked over in a froth, dripping with a confidence that said he knew he belonged.

He has always belonged here. Be it a football field, the LSU campus, virtually anywhere in his home state. Campbell, all 310 pounds of him, is a breathing testament to the belief geography is destiny.

Campbell hails from northeastern Louisiana, a city called Monroe where his mother, Holly, sat in the same seats watching high school football games as her mother and her mother before her. Holly’s game-day parking pass is older than both her sons. She runs a sporting goods store that’s been in the family since 1937 and sits less than two miles from their church.

Campbell’s father farms and cooks, sometimes Cajun seafood stews like étouffée. He played football in college after begging his parents to move closer to Monroe, where he could play at Neville High School and where he eventually met his wife. Today, he works in agriculture retail and grows soybeans, corn and cotton on his own time. They call him Bull.

Bull is a natural storyteller, especially tales like the LSU-Georgia game he and Holly attended months before Will was born. Late in the game, the marching band played LSU’s fight song, and a future Tiger started kicking inside the womb.

“You could see him jumping up and down in there,” Bull says.

To know Will is to reckon with his home. The soil beneath his family tree is the same he’s walked since he was born; it’s the dirt where he laid irrigation pipes at his father’s farm; the backyard earth his cleats sank into before Neville High School and Tiger Stadium; the land he spilt blood for sport, hunting ducks, deer and alligators.

Yet with days left before the NFL Draft last month, the Patriots believed there was still fresh ground to cover.

On April 16, coach Mike Vrabel led a contingent of a half-dozen Patriots evaluators into LSU’s facility to meet Campbell. Vrabel had heard from his scouts and read their reports on this three-year starter, two-time captain and consensus All-American. He’d met Campbell at the NFL scouting combine in late February and again during a March visit in Foxboro.

Still, Vrabel wanted more. Something he could not see, nor hear.

Vrabel wanted to “feel” Campbell. His violence and grit. To learn what drives a man beyond destiny, and to find out if he could break it. To determine whether Campbell can help power the Patriots back to the place he believes they belong.

So Vrabel, still around the 6-foot-4 and 260 pounds he was listed during his days as an outside linebacker, wrapped a yellow blocking pad with black straps around his torso. After some pleasantries, he ordered Campbell to hit him. Block him. Fight him.

A crowd of curious, fresh-faced LSU players gathered 20 yards away with Campbell’s former position coach, Brad Davis. More than anyone standing in that group, Davis understood what was coming.

“It was like watching a prize fighter walk out of the tunnel and into the ring,” he remembered. “Will had this look on his face that I had seen so many times pregame. It didn’t matter who lined up across from him. He was going to battle.”

No spectator said a word in a silence of reverence.

“Everybody understood what was at stake,” Davis said.

Vrabel beckoned.

“Let’s go.”

Monroe-made

Three weeks after the workout, Eric Herndon took a Saturday morning stroll around Monroe.

Herndon is 49, built, bald, bearded and the longtime strength and conditioning coach at Neville High. He likes to open conversations by joking he feels better than he deserves, but today Herndon deserved to soak in a pleasant day, knowing

summer humidity will soon swallow Louisiana whole.

Herndon strolled past the Campbells’ house, a white ranch with black shutters and a large oak tree out front looming over a small yard. The tree branches shade trimmed grass and tidy bushes and a flag holder jutting out of its trunk often flying LSU purple and gold. A driveway runs roughly 20 yards up the right side of the property, with a basketball hoop at the top.

A few minutes and blocks later, Herndon stared out at the Ouachita River that snakes through town and wondered what’s in the water; how and why greatness seems to sprout here every generation or so.

Bill Russell was born in Monroe. Delta Airlines first took flight here, as did the careers of famous musicians, politicians and a few Major League Baseball all-stars. Herndon’s mind next drifted to Campbell, and the time he first showed up in his weight room.

Greatness was nowhere in sight.

“He was just like all the other freshmen,” Herndon says. “He was bigger, but he wasn’t 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds yet, either.”

Campbell, of course, has always been big. He was an infant who used to reach above the kitchen counter before age 2 to snatch a snack. Then he became a Little Leaguer who had to bring his bat, glove and birth certificate to tournaments so he could play. Come football season, parents begged Bull for his son not play so their boys could be spared from the violent, devastating runs of little “Jerome Bettis Jr.”

Sometime in those PeeWee years, Campbell also began smearing eye black all over his face before games, a tradition that lives on today.

“When he steps on the football field, it’s like a different human being,” Bull said. “Football Will is different from Thursday afternoon Will.”

A few years later, after Will moved to offensive line, started as a freshman at Neville, and angrily cried on the three-and-a-half-hour drive home from his first LSU recruiting camp when he wasn’t offered a scholarship, then returned two weeks later and secured it, he took on another new position: coach.

An assistant on Neville’s staff named Chad Johnson had flipped from coaching linebackers to offensive line before Campbell’s junior season of 2020. His background in offensive coaching was minimal, so an arrangement formed: Campbell would coach the tackles, while Johnson kept his focus on the centers and guards.

“He was just so smart and just so mature,” Johnson said. “I figured out pretty quickly that he knew what he was doing.”

Campbell applied lessons he’d learned from Roddrell Stewart, his personal trainer of more than a year. Stewart, another son of Louisiana who goes by the nickname Burger, speaks like Campbell is never too far from mind. He was among his first clients, a 15-year-old boy who changed how Stewart ran his business, forcing him to realize individualized coaching is the best coaching he could provide.

No other client, Stewart believes, could have pushed through a particular 2020 summer session when temperatures neared 100 degrees, a day that now lives seared into his memory. How they locked eyes as Campbell labored through his fatigue. His best guess is Campbell survived because of Bull and his farm.

“Where you’ve got to do manual labor, it gives you a different type of grit,” Stewart said. “Man, he didn’t cower. No matter how difficult it was, no matter how hot it was, no matter what it was, he was always willing to work.”

At Neville football practices, Campbell’s words still echo across the field, though this time it’s not a 16-year-old barking them. It’s Johnson.

“Sit on a stool! Sit on a stool!” he commands.

The phrase is a reminder for offensive linemen to keep their backs straight while jumping out of their stance. Johnson jokes his fondest memory of Campbell is when he jumped out of his chair to kick his senior captain out of a meeting for goofing off. The real answer is a famous story about Neville.

The quarterfinal state playoff game in 2021, Campbell’s senior year. A serious groin strain had sidelined him for the start of a game Neville expected to win, but trailed at halftime. So Campbell ducked under the stands and began to undress. Civilian clothes off, uniform on.

“What are you doing?” his coaches asked.

“I’m going in the damn game,” Campbell shot back.

He played the rest of the night. Neville won.

None of this surprised Davis, who had recruited him for years. Campbell looked the part of a starting left tackle, save for his short arms. But the ferocity and strain on his film attracted Davis more than anything.

“This kid went out there and exhausted himself,” Davis said. “You were watching the game from the opening kickoff until the last snap, and this kid was playing full tilt.”

Oklahoma was the only school that tugged at Campbell hard enough to give him pause during his recruitment. But the beckon of Baton Rouge proved too strong.

He was off to LSU. Destiny called.

Breaking the norm

In March 2022, LSU’s football team paused its winter workouts for the greatest week on the academic calendar.

Spring break.

Davis watched every player leave campus to bask on beaches in Florida or Texas or the simple quiet of home. That is, except for one lineman — his freshman left tackle from Monroe.

Campbell had enrolled in January, a semester early, and was in the process of packing on 17 pounds of muscle to push himself over 300 pounds for the summer.

Minutes before the last job interview of his life, Will Campbell ran.

He pumped his arms in a white hooded sweatshirt and pounded his cleats into green, artificial turf. Sweat slipped from his dark walnut curls, down his 6-foot-6 frame, soaking the hoodie. Then, he stopped.

Campbell scanned the white domed ceiling above and the familiar football field stretched out ahead. A glare accented his thin goatee; the first sign of many this 21-year-old is an old soul.

A hundred yards away, out-of-town visitors entered through the opposite end of LSU’s practice facility ready to start the interview. Campbell walked over in a froth, dripping with a confidence that said he knew he belonged.

He has always belonged here. Be it a football field, the LSU campus, virtually anywhere in his home state. Campbell, all 310 pounds of him, is a breathing testament to the belief geography is destiny.

Campbell hails from northeastern Louisiana, a city called Monroe where his mother, Holly, sat in the same seats watching high school football games as her mother and her mother before her. Holly’s game-day parking pass is older than both her sons. She runs a sporting goods store that’s been in the family since 1937 and sits less than two miles from their church.

Campbell’s father farms and cooks, sometimes Cajun seafood stews like étouffée. He played football in college after begging his parents to move closer to Monroe, where he could play at Neville High School and where he eventually met his wife. Today, he works in agriculture retail and grows soybeans, corn and cotton on his own time. They call him Bull.

Bull is a natural storyteller, especially tales like the LSU-Georgia game he and Holly attended months before Will was born. Late in the game, the marching band played LSU’s fight song, and a future Tiger started kicking inside the womb.

“You could see him jumping up and down in there,” Bull says.

To know Will is to reckon with his home. The soil beneath his family tree is the same he’s walked since he was born; it’s the dirt where he laid irrigation pipes at his father’s farm; the backyard earth his cleats sank into before Neville High School and Tiger Stadium; the land he spilt blood for sport, hunting ducks, deer and alligators.

Yet with days left before the NFL Draft last month, the Patriots believed there was still fresh ground to cover.

On April 16, coach Mike Vrabel led a contingent of a half-dozen Patriots evaluators into LSU’s facility to meet Campbell. Vrabel had heard from his scouts and read their reports on this three-year starter, two-time captain and consensus All-American. He’d met Campbell at the NFL scouting combine in late February and again during a March visit in Foxboro.

Still, Vrabel wanted more. Something he could not see, nor hear.

Vrabel wanted to “feel” Campbell. His violence and grit. To learn what drives a man beyond destiny, and to find out if he could break it. To determine whether Campbell can help power the Patriots back to the place he believes they belong.

So Vrabel, still around the 6-foot-4 and 260 pounds he was listed during his days as an outside linebacker, wrapped a yellow blocking pad with black straps around his torso. After some pleasantries, he ordered Campbell to hit him. Block him. Fight him.

A crowd of curious, fresh-faced LSU players gathered 20 yards away with Campbell’s former position coach, Brad Davis. More than anyone standing in that group, Davis understood what was coming.

“It was like watching a prize fighter walk out of the tunnel and into the ring,” he remembered. “Will had this look on his face that I had seen so many times pregame. It didn’t matter who lined up across from him. He was going to battle.”

No spectator said a word in a silence of reverence.

“Everybody understood what was at stake,” Davis said.

Vrabel beckoned.

“Let’s go.”

Monroe-made

Three weeks after the workout, Eric Herndon took a Saturday morning stroll around Monroe.

Herndon is 49, built, bald, bearded and the longtime strength and conditioning coach at Neville High. He likes to open conversations by joking he feels better than he deserves, but today Herndon deserved to soak in a pleasant day, knowing

summer humidity will soon swallow Louisiana whole.

Herndon strolled past the Campbells’ house, a white ranch with black shutters and a large oak tree out front looming over a small yard. The tree branches shade trimmed grass and tidy bushes and a flag holder jutting out of its trunk often flying LSU purple and gold. A driveway runs roughly 20 yards up the right side of the property, with a basketball hoop at the top.

A few minutes and blocks later, Herndon stared out at the Ouachita River that snakes through town and wondered what’s in the water; how and why greatness seems to sprout here every generation or so.

Bill Russell was born in Monroe. Delta Airlines first took flight here, as did the careers of famous musicians, politicians and a few Major League Baseball all-stars. Herndon’s mind next drifted to Campbell, and the time he first showed up in his weight room.

Greatness was nowhere in sight.

“He was just like all the other freshmen,” Herndon says. “He was bigger, but he wasn’t 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds yet, either.”

Campbell, of course, has always been big. He was an infant who used to reach above the kitchen counter before age 2 to snatch a snack. Then he became a Little Leaguer who had to bring his bat, glove and birth certificate to tournaments so he could play. Come football season, parents begged Bull for his son not play so their boys could be spared from the violent, devastating runs of little “Jerome Bettis Jr.”

Sometime in those PeeWee years, Campbell also began smearing eye black all over his face before games, a tradition that lives on today.

“When he steps on the football field, it’s like a different human being,” Bull said. “Football Will is different from Thursday afternoon Will.”

A few years later, after Will moved to offensive line, started as a freshman at Neville, and angrily cried on the three-and-a-half-hour drive home from his first LSU recruiting camp when he wasn’t offered a scholarship, then returned two weeks later and secured it, he took on another new position: coach.

An assistant on Neville’s staff named Chad Johnson had flipped from coaching linebackers to offensive line before Campbell’s junior season of 2020. His background in offensive coaching was minimal, so an arrangement formed: Campbell would coach the tackles, while Johnson kept his focus on the centers and guards.

“He was just so smart and just so mature,” Johnson said. “I figured out pretty quickly that he knew what he was doing.”

Campbell applied lessons he’d learned from Roddrell Stewart, his personal trainer of more than a year. Stewart, another son of Louisiana who goes by the nickname Burger, speaks like Campbell is never too far from mind. He was among his first clients, a 15-year-old boy who changed how Stewart ran his business, forcing him to realize individualized coaching is the best coaching he could provide.

No other client, Stewart believes, could have pushed through a particular 2020 summer session when temperatures neared 100 degrees, a day that now lives seared into his memory. How they locked eyes as Campbell labored through his fatigue. His best guess is Campbell survived because of Bull and his farm.

“Where you’ve got to do manual labor, it gives you a different type of grit,” Stewart said. “Man, he didn’t cower. No matter how difficult it was, no matter how hot it was, no matter what it was, he was always willing to work.”

At Neville football practices, Campbell’s words still echo across the field, though this time it’s not a 16-year-old barking them. It’s Johnson.

“Sit on a stool! Sit on a stool!” he commands.

The phrase is a reminder for offensive linemen to keep their backs straight while jumping out of their stance. Johnson jokes his fondest memory of Campbell is when he jumped out of his chair to kick his senior captain out of a meeting for goofing off. The real answer is a famous story about Neville.

The quarterfinal state playoff game in 2021, Campbell’s senior year. A serious groin strain had sidelined him for the start of a game Neville expected to win, but trailed at halftime. So Campbell ducked under the stands and began to undress. Civilian clothes off, uniform on.

“What are you doing?” his coaches asked.

“I’m going in the damn game,” Campbell shot back.

He played the rest of the night. Neville won.

None of this surprised Davis, who had recruited him for years. Campbell looked the part of a starting left tackle, save for his short arms. But the ferocity and strain on his film attracted Davis more than anything.

“This kid went out there and exhausted himself,” Davis said. “You were watching the game from the opening kickoff until the last snap, and this kid was playing full tilt.”

Oklahoma was the only school that tugged at Campbell hard enough to give him pause during his recruitment. But the beckon of Baton Rouge proved too strong.

He was off to LSU. Destiny called.

Breaking the norm

In March 2022, LSU’s football team paused its winter workouts for the greatest week on the academic calendar.

Spring break.

Davis watched every player leave campus to bask on beaches in Florida or Texas or the simple quiet of home. That is, except for one lineman — his freshman left tackle from Monroe.

Campbell had enrolled in January, a semester early, and was in the process of packing on 17 pounds of muscle to push himself over 300 pounds for the summer.