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Rick Campbell, on joining new Ottawa Redblacks: ‘I didn’t want to be a head coach at all costs’
Always open with a joke. Rick Campbell did so in his introduction Friday as the man who will guide Version 3.0 of three-down football in the nation's capital, which might hint at how the son of CFL legend Hugh Campbell filled his boots for 15 years as an assistant coach before being hired to lead the new Ottawa Redblacks.
"I had a look at the depth chart this morning and I'm going to maybe guarantee — I'm not a guy who makes guarantees — that we're not going to take a penalty for too many men on the field right now," said the 42-year-old Campbell, late of the Calgary Stampeders, where he was defensive coordinator under John Hufnagel.
In Calgary, Campbell built aggressive defences and emerged as a rising star within the CFL's tight-knit coaching network. With the Redblacks, who have five imports under contract ahead of the Dec. 16 expansion draft, he gets to put his imprint on a new team.
"It is a dream come true," said Campbell, who is signed through 2016. "You never take an opportunity lightly. My mindset is I wanted to be a head coach. I didn't want to be a head coach at all costs, though, and just interview for every job and hope that one worked out. My wife [Jeri Campbell] asked me, I had been talking about Ottawa for over a year. About how interesting that is going to be with the new team and a great city and all that stuff. I'm a pretty logical guy, I try to be practical, but I always had a feeling in my gut that it could be something special."
The Saskatchewan Roughriders won the Grey Cup two weeks ago under Corey Chamblin, who was also a first-time head coach at the time of his hiring. The rumour mill included possibilities such as former CFL head coaches Doug Berry, Marcel Bellefeuille, the TSN analyst Paul LaPolice, Danny Maciocia and Greg Marshall. Bellefeuille and Marshall have each coached in the nation's capital.
The determining factor with Campbell was the blueprint he brought to his interviews.
"It really came down to, particularly in an inaugural season where nothing is in place, he came to his interviews with multiple levels of detail," Redblacks GM Marcel Desjardins asaid. "How he wanted to approach it be it from a staff perspective or a player perspective. What the general environment and culture was going to be. In a lot of those areas we felt the same way. That was one of the key things that he brought to the table."
Atypically, Campbell's CFL C.V. includes working in all three phases of the game. In 2010, he signed on as Calgary's running backs coach, spending a year there before moving north to Edmonton for a season before shifting back to the Stamps just prior to 2012 campaign as the defensive coordinator. That was by design, with an eye cast toward avoiding the pratfall of being a defensive guy who struggles to adjust to making offensive decisions.
"I purposely took a job on offence for a year because I wanted to be as well-rounded as I could," he said. "Now if ask someone to do something I have a better understanding of what I am asking. Absolutely it helps me that I've coached on both sides on the ball."
"It was different, offensive guys are weird," Campbell quipped, with a disarming chuckle. "No, offensive guys are very precise people. The defensive guys are more aggressive and freewheeling, I guess you could say. I learned a ton. You know stuff, but until you're really into it, game-planning, and that stuff, you don't really know."
Campbell gravitated toward the defence as a graduate assistant at the University of Oregon in the late 1990s and "just kept progressing there... it was a natural fit." An off-shoot is that gave him a chance to secrete his own identity apart from his father. Hugh Campbell was renowned first as Gluey Hughie of Saskatchewan Roughriders receiving fame, then went into coaching and guided the Edmonton Eskimos on their five-year Grey Cup run from 1978-82. He then spent 20 years in Edmonton's front office, where Rick Campbell was on staff for '03 and '05 Grey Cup wins.
"He was an invaluable resource," Rick Campbell said of his father. "I look at it as a positive. I am doing my own thing here. I got to be around football my whole life and got to learn from a lot of people who have had a lot of success in football. The thing, as I get older, and appreciate more and more in football, which I think he was good at, was managing people and understanding people. Football is unique in that we're gonna bring people from all over North America from all different walks of life, all that stuff. You try to put all those people together and have them work as a team. That's the challenge and that's the attraction."
Desjardins has maintained Ottawa did not need to hire a head coach before it makes its expansion picks on Dec. 16. Meantime, Ottawa is already into the process of interviewing for offensive, defence and special teams coordinators, with Montreal Alouettes linebackers coach Mark Nelson rumoured to be a candidate for the DC job. Campbell indicated he will have a say over coordinators.
"The coaching staff will be everything," he said. "If I was ever going to become a head coach, I wanted to make sure I could bring people who are guys I could believe in — hopefully guys who are smarter than I that make me look good and everybody look good. We're all in this together."
Campbell's path to the job parallels the long road to Ottawa's return to the CFL. The ill-starred, undercapitalized Renegades came into the league in 2002 under rather penurious terms for the expansion draft and floundered through four seasons before folding prior to '06. In 2008, the Jeff Hunt-fronted Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group was granted a conditional expansion franchise. Stickhandling a stadium revitalization plan through Ottawa city council, over opposition from well-organized resident groups in Ottawa's tony Glebe section, also took years.
The way Hunt, and by extensions Desjardins, have not rushed ahead willy-nilly struck a chord with Campbell, who's bided his time to be the man on the hot seat.
"I think they really set the tone with their patience and persistence for wanting to do it right from the stadium to everything," he said. "They want to take the time and do this right. For guys like me and the guys we want to bring here, that's important.
"We're going to turn into a real football team fast, and away we go."
Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet. Please address any questions, comments or concerns to btnblog@yahoo.ca.
