Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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It's time to make your voice heard.
C-SPAN Student Cam Documentary Contest 2025 is here.
This is your chance to create a documentary that can inspire change, raise awareness, and make an impact.
Your documentary should answer this year's question: your message to the president.
What issue is most important to you or your community?
Whether you're passionate about politics, the environment, or community stories, StudentCam is your platform to share your message with the world.
With $100,000 in prizes, including a grand prize of $5,000, this is your opportunity not only to make an impact, but also be rewarded for your creativity and hard work.
Enter your submissions today.
Scan the code or visit studentcam.org for all the details on how to enter.
The deadline is January 20th, 2025.
Next, a conversation about the Army and Navy football rivalry, sportsmanship and democracy, moderated by sports commentator Brad Nessler.
During the discussion, former Army and Navy players also discuss mental health in the military and gamesmanship versus sportsmanship.
This event was hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Rose Bowl Institute.
Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats.
The program is about to begin.
Please welcome to the stage, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, Mr. Fred Ryan.
Well, good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to the Reagan Foundation Institute headquarters here in Washington, D.C.
We have recently launched the Center on Civility and Democracy as a nonpartisan effort to help move the country past our divisions and restore the values of civility that are so essential to the health of our democracy.
One way we do this is to highlight ways that we, as Americans, find common ground with our fellow citizens, despite the political differences we may have with them.
As we see too often, especially in politics, we come to consider our opponents to be our enemies.
That's why sports, especially the Army-Navy game, sets an excellent example for all of us.
Athletes from our service academies know the differences between an opponent working to outscore you on the football field and an enemy out to kill you on the battlefield.
It's an important distinction that we can all better apply in our daily lives as we engage with those who disagree with us.
Today, we're launching our Common Ground Forum, which is about bringing together leading voices with different points of view from government and from business and media on a national stage.
And future events will include senators and governors, CEOs, and media personalities.
As we launch this new series, I would like to thank the founding underwriter of our Common Ground Forum, Marcia Carlucci, as well as Gloria Diddis, for their support.
Please join me in thanking them.
So, today is the kickoff of this new program, and what could be a better kickoff than America's greatest sports rivalry, the Army-Navy game.
Today, we're delighted to partner with the Rose Bowl Institute, a great group that's doing important work promoting sportsmanship and leadership.
And special thanks to Rose Bowl Institute President James Washington for your support and for your leadership.
We're delighted that James is with us today, and I'll tell you, he's very easy to recognize.
He's the only person I know who has a Rose Bowl championship ring and two Super Bowl championship rings.
Well, our two special guests today have led on the football field in service to their academy and on the battlefield in service to their country.
Carlton Jones is a distinguished Army officer.
He served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and was four-year starting running back with West Point's Army Black Knights.
Clint Bruce, also a veteran of the Army-Navy game, is a former Navy SEAL, decorated NFL, and Navy midshipman athlete, and a seasoned entrepreneur.
In these two gentlemen, we have athletes who now know how to do their best on the game field as well as on the battlefield, and they know the difference between the two.
To moderate this conversation today, we're delighted to be joined by CBS Sports Brad Nestler, seven-time play-by-play announcer for the Army-Navy game.
He'll be broadcasting the game this weekend when Army and Navy take the field here in Washington.
Brad is the perfect person to be with us as Army and Navy go head-to-head here today at the Ronald Reagan Institute.
So please join me in welcoming Carlton Jones, Clint Bruce, and Brad Nestle.
Thank you, Fred.
I'm honored to be here today, and as with the Army-Navy game every year, not only honored but humbled to be with guys like this and with the young guys that are going to play about 48 hours from now, 47 hours from now.
That's when my real job begins.
I've got a production meeting as soon as we get out of here, and I was telling these guys that our crew on a normal basis doing the Big Ten game of the week is probably 85 people, something like that.
With CBS Sports and CBS Sports Network and the pregame show and the march-ons and all of that, we probably have 150 people, so we have a lot of meetings and they start tonight.
But anyway, honored to be here.
And Fred already told you about these guys and what they did in their football careers.
This guy's a middle linebacker.
He's eating his way out of that at this point.
We'll talk about that after.
Yeah, I know.
I shouldn't have said that.
Keep being funny.
I feel funny.
I know.
Yeah.
I made a big mistake already, didn't I?
But no, he was captain, four-year starter at running back, had the single-season touchdown record until this year.
Oh, my gosh.
Daly took care of that.
Is that one of those Army quarterbacks?
Here's what I ask the young guys when we interview them, be it in person or on Zooms.
So when you guys chose Navy and Army, did Army choose you or did you choose Army?
And same question to you, just from where you came from and the football aspect of it.
You go first.
Well, for me, Army chose me because being from small town, North Carolina, wasn't on my radar initially, but the coaching staff head coach at the time, Todd Berry, came down, sat in my living room talking to my parents and kind of highlighted what the opportunity of going to West Point, what it could be, just not only football field, but off the field as an Army officer, as a graduate, what it provides.
And once I got one of my visit and saw the team, saw the camaraderie and what they, as a team, what they did, I was sold.
I think I committed on that visit that day.
It must have been summertime.
No, it was actually in the middle of a snowstorm.
Oh, my God.
In the middle of a snowstorm.
Well, then, I question that decision now.
North North Carolina, if you took a visit to West Point and found the weather to be favorable for you.
How about you, Clint?
A little bit of both.
You know, one of the questions I get asked often is when did I first want to become a Navy SEAL?
And I never really could remember the answer to that.
I just don't remember not wanting to be one.
And then during COVID, you know, I don't think there's a lot of redemptive qualities to COVID.
We learn a lot about ourselves, but I got to spend a tremendous amount of time with my kids, my daughters.
I have three daughters, because why not?
Why wouldn't I?
And my oldest goes, Dad, you want to watch Magnum PI?
I'm like, yeah, absolutely.
Made you turn on the new one.
I'm like, stop.
We're not watching that.
So we watched the original Magnum PI, and there's an episode in the second season, and some of y'all watched Magnum PI already know where I'm going in this, where they kind of revealed that the character Magnum, Thomas Magnum, played football at the Naval Academy.
And he was a Navy SEAL.
And I remember having this hyper-lucid memory of being a little chubby little fifth grader in Little Rock, Arkansas, watching Magnum PI on Thursday nights at 8 p.m. with my dad and just turning and looking at him go, hey, I don't play football at the Naval Academy and be a Navy SEAL.
And my dad was like, all right.
So you were more into Tom Selig.
No, no, not Tom Selick.
But it's an amazing show when you really go back and look to it.
You look at just the diversity of TC and Magnum and the relationship they had and some of the topics they addressed.
But when I was towards the end of my senior season, my junior season, my father got sick and eventually passed away.
And so for me as the oldest son, I had opportunities to play at a lot of different schools.
I was very fortunate in a big program in Texas, had great coaches that advocated for you and incredible teammates.
But I had to make a 40-year decision and not a four-year one.
And the service academies and the opportunity to become a Navy SEAL.
You know, the coaches said, yeah, you tell him you want to be a Navy SEAL.
And that's not true.
That is not how that one works, right?
I've been looking for him for a long time.
And it's a little bit harder.
But yeah, so it was a little bit of both.
I reached out to Annapolis, and Annapolis said they had me on their board.
And it saved me in a lot of ways.
Not many guys make a decision to say, okay, I could play in the NFL or I'll go be a Navy SEAL.
I mean, like, you know, Pat Tillman did that with the Cardinals, you know, and ended up losing his life 20 years ago right now, I think.
How'd you make that decision?
Well, I played the same position as Ray Lewis at Baltimore, which, you know, there was a point in practice where I was like, it might be easier to become a Navy SEAL than I did.
It turns out it was.
But, you know, I wanted to serve.
There was no part of me that didn't want to serve.
And this was pre-9-11.
This was 1997.
And I remember there was a couple moments, you know, Marvin Lewis was the coordinator, and Ozzie's incredible, and Phil Savage is a GM.
And, you know, I got to go where it hurts, and I got to go where it's hard.
And I remember there was a moment in the NFL where I was like, listen, everything I'm going to learn about myself is something I already know.
It's going to be a deeper dive.
And I got to go where I don't know.
I'm not going where I need God less.
I'm not going where I'm not going to have to learn myself.
And I had no idea if I could become a member of the SEAL team.
So for me, it was pretty easy.
It was pretty easy to go, you got to go where you don't know, because that's where you're going to need your brothers.
That's where you're going to need your faith.
And I wanted to serve.
That's why I went in the first place.
Was it as tough as you thought it was going to be or worse?
Yeah, it was difficult.
And I remember 250 guys started in our class and 12 of us made a tie.
And I had just left camp.
So I came to Buds as like a 250-pound little linebacker with that type of physiology.
You have a different kind of physiology.
And then you're supposed to become a triathlete.
And I wasn't.
I was not a triathlete.
But I will, anybody watching right now, if you're a big guy and you got to make it through a nutrition process, I'll tell you the secret to running.
Here's the secret to running if you're a big guy: lean forward until you're about to fall over, then don't.
For however far you got to go, it's like, you don't look cool, but you make the time.
It's a controlled fall, right?
Well, you miss football?
I mean, you're a lieutenant colonel, now correct?
Right, correct.
So you're still in the business at the Pentagon.
Tell us.
Still at the Pentagon, still in, still active, still going.
But do I miss it?
Yeah, until I look on Sundays, I see a big hit, or I see a running back getting crushed by a D-tackle by, you know, I'm like, no, maybe not.
Maybe not.
Not as much.
I don't miss it as much now.
But yeah, I miss it every now and then.
The best part, I would think, because this is how I feel in my job, is I like being part of a team.
Teamwork is the coolest thing in the world.
And when I decide I'm not going to do this anymore, I will miss the juice of my team.
And that's what it's all about, both military and the money.
The locker room is working this.
Miss practice more than games.
Really?
Miss practice more than games because at practice, you're talking to your teammates.
You involve, you have the interaction, you have the coaches.
I miss the practices because, you know, competitive juices between one another, you're pushing each other, and you have the games going on.
It's games inside of just practice.
You know, against this middle linebacker, oh, he got me last play.
Okay.
I got something for you next time.
I know exactly what you're going to do.
It's a piece of our game every day against our brothers in our own service academies.
How did that carry over to what you do now?
Just the football aspect of it, the teamwork part, I guess.
Oh, it translates directly to what we're doing.
Like, I'm on part of a team.
Like, I was a platoon leader.
I'm in charge of men, have kids, families, and so I'm in charge of them.
I have to lead them just like I led my teammates on a field every Saturday.
So you take that and you go with the same discipline, the same responsibility that you take with that, going onto a field every day.
You take that into your next job.
You know exactly what you're going to do.
Everybody has their own job to complete the overall mission.
On Saturdays, it's to beat Navy.
Every Saturday is to beat Navy.
Especially Saturday.
But for us, it's like everybody has a job to complete a mission, whether it's in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever we were at, wherever the mission is, that's what we're doing.
And you've got to trust the other dudes you're working with to do their job.
Otherwise, it could be a catastrophe for you guys, Navy SEALs.
I think for me, it's, you know, I tend to, one of the questions you get asked a lot, especially about young men, is, hey, what's your favorite gun?
It's a natural question due to my background.
But I always go, are you asking me what my favorite gun is, what my favorite weapon is?
And sometimes there'll be a little bit of a ripple in the audience, like, just happened here.
And people totally know there's a difference.
And I always grab these young men.
I go, listen, a gun is a tool.
A weapon is what I use to win.
So my favorite weapon is a map.
Because if I have a map, I have everything.
I know where the bad guy will be, what to command, what to bring, what to leave, how to get home.
And if I have a map, the worst I'll ever be is wrong, but it won't be lost.
And wrong and lost are different animals.
And kind of biographically, we could describe our lives.
I've lived on the ball field, the battlefield, now the boardroom, and the breakfast table.
And there's a meaningful percentage of the things we learned on that ball field season of our lives that exported perfectly into the battlefield and into the boardroom as we enter the professional season lives.
And at the breakfast table as we try to build and lead and love our families.
So I'd say the game made us in many ways.
And the truth, I think the more talented you are, you have to surround yourself with people to tell you the truth.
Because a lot of times the world will tell a talented man or woman anything you want to hear.
And you've got to be around people that will tell you the truth.
And the weights tell you the truth.
And violence tells you the truth.
And brothers tell you the truth.
And sisters tell you the truth.
And so I think the vast majority of our best of us that was built on the ball field exports seamlessly into the other maps that we're on.
So kind of kind of piggybacking what he was just saying, like the weapon versus the gun, like he says, a map.
I think the greatest weapon we have, a radio.
So if I have a radio, I can communicate to anybody anywhere within the battlefield.
So the communication between a quarterback and his O-line, middle linebacker, and his entire defense.
For us in the Army, like, you got a radio.
If we can't do it, if we're stuck somewhere, we don't do it, I can communicate to all of my, whoever's I can reach, I can reach out to somebody, I can call to somebody else, and they're coming to help me.
So that's why a radio is so important.
So you guys spent 364 days a year getting ready to beat each other, and in between you played Air Force.
So the goal is, I mean, that's the whole goal is a Commander-in-Chief trophy.
So it's a CIC, that's the goal.
And anything, well, there is nothing above that, I don't think, because, and I'll get back to my question in a minute, but I talked to Jeff Muncling yesterday.
So we said, you know, coach, awesome year, 11-1.
Won the conference championship, and now getting ready, you know, for Navy, and congratulations.
And he said, yeah, it's been a good year.
But if we don't win on Saturday, it's not going to be a great year.
So, I mean, that's the mentality.
But you spend all that time year-round preparing to play in those CIC games.
And then when your career is over, football-wise, at least, now you're obviously on the same team.
There's three teams.
Did you have any interaction where, okay, I'm going to be with some Navy guys and I'm going to be with some Army guys.
I'm going to be with some Air Force guys.
Yeah, in the Special Operations community, we operate in a joint environment.
And so a lot of the great Army football players, you know, Pat Work and, you know, just one of the ones off the top of my head.
And, you know, you run into those guys in the special operations community all the time.
And there's a lot that you know about them.
And you work for them.
You work for guys that you competed against.
And it was a real privilege because you're always trying to learn about your leaders and trying to learn about your team.
And when you walk into someone who played at Army or even Air Force, there's some things you already know about them.
Especially if you played against them.
There's some things I already know about Tim Booth.
There's some things I already know about Ronnie Makeda.
There's some things I already know about guys I competed against.
And a lot of times you're trying to make these high-speed trust decisions and then the inherited trust of competing against someone, it transitions to fast decision-making on the battlefield.
So it was a huge advantage for us to be working next to people we'd fought against.
Same thing, Carl.
Same thing.
So I was an air defense officer initially commissioned.
And so on deployments, I worked closely with some Navy, a Navy unit.
So they were the mechanics on one of the platforms I was working on.
And so I had to work on it every day.
But I already knew they had our back.
It was no issue.
A little bit when I first heard about it, I was like, I don't know about working with Navy.
I don't know.
That's just the fear.
Insecurity is the son of the gun.
But we get over it.
Everybody does their thing to do their job and complete the mission.
But I always cross lines with somebody working with Air Force.
They're probably my least favorite.
Well, let's say you're playing golf.
You're playing golf.
You want those guys to play.
Oh, absolutely.
They have the best courses.
Yeah, best handicaps.
Best gallery.
Best O-clubs.
You know, like, rivalries are rivalries.
I've done every rivalry in the NFL.
Duke, North Carolina basketball, Celtics, Lakers, and NBA.
I don't broadcast baseball, but I assume people would say Yankees, Red Sox, whatever.
This is it.
Right.
I mean, this game.
Best rivalry ever.
I think this game stands apart.
I was interviewed by someone, I can't remember, it was 10, 12 years ago, and they asked me about rivalries, right?
And it was a little bit of a loaded question because it was out of respect.
They wanted to acknowledge the Army-Navy game, but this is closer to Red River rivalry and all this other stuff.
And I listened to him.
I said, hey, what do you think?
And they list all these great rivals.
I'm like, those are wonderful.
I love those rivalries.
But Army Navy stands apart.
And they go, what do you mean?
I said, well, you show me a game where everyone playing is willing to die for everybody watching.
And I'll tell you, we have company.
And that's the truth of it.
The truth of it is, everybody on that field has sworn to know it to defend everyone watching that.
And I think in the annals of a rivalry, this is a unique one and it stands apart.
It's pure, it's beautiful, it's violent.
It's all these other things.
But it is in many ways the best of us as a nation.
And I marvel at guys like Carlton.
You know, I joined the Naval Academy right after Desert Storm and it was a successful war followed by great leaders.
And when I say I hope for violence, I just mean that's the parish.
Like I hope for a run as a linebacker.
Like that's just what I do, right?
I want to be relevant and matter.
But Carlton's there, and I'm so amazed by those guys because those guys enlisted knowing full well that they were going to go to war.
And I admire that so much that there's no question what they're going to do once they graduate.
And I marvel at the fact that our nation still produces men and women willing to do the harder thing from the time they're 18 to the time they're 26, 27, 30.
That's why I have great hope in this nation.
I don't, a little bit like Reagan, I'm an optimist.
But there's data that drives my optimism.
And the data that drives my optimism is the number of men and women still applying for service academies, knowing it's going to be the harder thing.
I think the last thing I checked, it was 20,000 applicants for 1,200 positions at West Point.
That's not 20, that's 20,000 per service academy.
And so we have an amazing generation, and it's been that way since 9-11.
So I'm so encouraged and so grateful.
Greatest rivalry.
Absolutely.
I don't want to interrupt you.
Did you know it when you got there, or did you know it before you got there?
Or is it getting ingrained as soon as you get there?
You can't really fully understand it until you're in it.
Right.
Until you understand it completely.
Because everything that Clint said, it's like, I didn't know because the academies are hard.
Every day is hard.
Being an athlete, harder.
It's even harder because you get everything expected to you academically, militarily.
It's hard.
And then to be an athlete at a Division I level to perform at such a high level, it's hard on a daily basis.
And so I could probably say the same thing happened to you.
Like, freshman, sophomore year, it's tough.
Like, you go through these periods and low times where you just want to quit.
You don't want to be there, and you almost have your paperwork drawn up.
But what draws you back in is your teammates.
That brotherhood between you look at it, you talk to a friend, you talk to a teammate, and like, we got this.
We're here together to get this.
And it's because you still think about, okay, we need to make it to the next practice, the next game, the next season.
And that's what draws you in.
And that's what makes the rivalry, that brotherhood, so strong.
Because it's not just, okay, we compete together on the football field.
It's like this is on a daily basis.
We're competing.
We're together on everything we do.
And that's life.
And the faster you learn it, the better you are.
And I've always told my daughters, like, hard now, easy later, easy now, hard later.
That's only two ways of it.
And so we front load that hard into our lives.
And I would say it blesses us and those depending on us for sure.
I got asked a question, like, hey, what did you learn going through SEAL training?
And my answer is always a little bit, it comes out of the left field, I go, nothing.
They go, what do you mean?
I said, I learned how to be a SEAL, but I didn't learn anything.
They go, what do you mean?
I said, what I learned was who has told me the truth my whole life.
Because when you're doing something like that, you don't have time to learn.
You only have time to remember.
And so when you're going through SEAL training, I had a chance to remember who told me and if what they told me worked.
And so it's a proving ground.
And those lessons we learned from those battles.
You know, I played in all four like you did.
And They've exported into every other aspect of a life, but I don't know that you can experience the gravity of it until you're there and you're seeing presidents and you're seeing, you know, there are seasons when either of those one's very good, but that stadium is still full of 80, 90,000 people that want to be there.
And in this day and age, people are craving for something to be proud of.
And every year you look in the stands, you see people that are proud of you, even though they don't even know you, which is there's symmetry there because you want to die for them, even though you don't know them.
And it's a powerful thing.
This is, as Fred said, this is my seventh game.
And I was telling you this the other day, and I'll just tell the story quickly.
A lot of what we do is not just the game, and there's a lot of homework involved, obviously, in all of that.
But during the course of the week, wherever we're doing a game, Big Ten or if it's Army, Navy, or if it's whatever, you know, part of our responsibility is dealing with the other media, radio stations, local affiliates, CBS affiliates, you know, newspaper outlets, whatever.
And so we do a lot of interviews about this game leading up to it.
And there's Radio Row all day tomorrow over here in Taiwan.
There.
There.
And the first year I was going to do this game, people were calling me left and right.
And what's it mean to you to do Army-Navy?
And I'm like, God, I don't know.
I haven't done it yet, you know?
And so a lot of you might know that I replaced Vern Lundquist when Vern stepped, when Vern retired.
So Vern had done it many times.
So I called Vern.
I said, Vern, I got a problem.
He said, what's up?
He said, all these newspaper and radio outlets are calling me and saying, what's it mean for you to do the Army-Navy game?
And I said, I don't know what to tell him.
And he said, as soon as you get there, brother, you'll understand.
And you do one of those games, and I'm getting this right now, thinking about two days from now.
Because the emotion of the moment, the emotion of the game, it's America's game, which I think is the greatest title ever.
You can have America's team all you want.
This is America's game, you know.
And from the march-ons, you know, I'm sitting there taking pictures like a little kid or movies, and I send them to my daughter.
I go, she's going, Dad, you've showed me six march-ons.
I know, but this is this year.
You know what I mean?
And so I'm getting tingly just thinking about the game.
But when you work so hard and you get to it, the sportsmanship, we're here about sportsmanship.
And when you get to the game and win or lose, the greatest moment in sports, and I don't think you guys, and I'm not trying to delve in, but I don't think you guys were that successful.
So you didn't get to sing second.
You're going to ask Al-Qaeda.
We're pretty, Al-Qaeda will tell you that.
There you go.
You sing after that?
God bless America.
Al-Qaeda would disagree.
Okay.
Well, just talk about the football thing because it's a big deal, man.
No, I mean, I lost all four in a row by a total of seven points in the combined last minute and a half of all the four games, and two of them are my fault, but I'm over it.
I'm fine.
I mean, you can kick a puppy on the way out of the right team.
I'm going to bring that up.
But, you know, I remember after my senior season, just not having anything left.
It wasn't my best game, and I was getting lifted up off the field.
And I assumed it was going to be my teammates, guys I served with, and it was some of our main offensive lines.
Really?
And it was just this commitment we made to each other, not knowing we would go to war together, but it was a commitment we made to each other about what we knew about each other and how we were willing to go to war with each other based on what we learned about each other the last four years.
And it's one of the more special moments of my entire athletic career to have had those moments and to still stay in touch.
Mitch size love and I played high school football together.
He played at West Point and some of my great friends and teammates are from Army West Point.
Singing the, I mean, that spectacle.
So the beginning of the game, I have a hard time because we have basically a, we call it a tease, but it's about a four-minute open, and whoever does it every year does an unbelievable job.
And so I have to be the first voice coming out of that, and I'm choked up, and my wife can tell I'm choked up.
And then I get to the game, and then it's just two and a half hours, not three and a half, two and a half, two and a half hours of just kicking each other's ass, and then I get to the end, and now we're going to go sing.
And I get all choked up again.
And so I just think that's one of the coolest things in sports I've ever seen.
All the emotions, whether you sing second, sing first, all the emotions going through your body.
If you won, you're happy, you're elated as you're singing second.
But if you're sing second like we did, I didn't win one either.
So it's anger, it's frustration, it's all those things, those emotions are going through your mind as you're sitting here singing first.
Especially your last one.
Your last one, the magnitude, the weight of it, the appreciation for what you've been a part of and the heartbreak that you're never going to get to do it again and the hope that the ones that come behind you play it the way you try to play it.
It all hits you.
I tell you, there's one person that does not like the Army-Navy game, and it's my bride.
Because her birthday is on the same day as Army-Navy.
And for the two years that we were dating, she's my ring dance date.
We've been married for almost 27 years, been together for 30.
She's just like, Army, Navy ruined two of my birthdays.
Because I'm not over it.
I'm not one of these.
Like, I'll send you a cake, leave me alone.
My wife's birthday is tomorrow, and I've missed every birthday for as long as I can remember.
And it's 46 years.
Let's keep our wives apart.
Just keep them separated.
But, yeah, you know, the singing, and I think that should be, I have a friend that I was just with watching NFL football at the local dive that we do on Sundays.
We got together and he said, he said, you know, I think there should be a rule.
He loves Army-Navy game.
I think there should be a rule.
Every game, they should have to do that.
Not just Army, Navy, but every college football game.
Win, lose.
You should go watch them sing their alma mater, whatever.
Stand there, you know, crying through your eye black if you lost and big smiles if you won.
And he said, and if they don't do that, take away their NIL money.
It's like, that's not a bad idea.
Or beat them.
Yeah.
The woodshed cures a lot of ills.
Yeah, I know.
But you think about, what, three weeks ago, let's say, Michigan, Ohio State, Arizona, Arizona State, Florida, Florida State, North Carolina, North Carolina State.
You know, they all go in trying to plant the flag and all of that.
And I realize there's a lot of 18 to 22-year-old testosterone flying around at a football game, and you don't want people doing something on your logo.
But, I mean, that compared to what you guys do at the end of your games, it couldn't be farther apart.
And it should be the way you guys do.
Well, I think the thing we know in some of those rivalries, that's your ultimate enemy adversary.
Like, for he and I, like, we're adversaries, but we're not enemies.
Because enemies, that outside agent, that enemy of the nation that we're united against.
We have this looming third-party actor that hates both of us.
And it's easy to rally towards each other when that happens.
And so I think we're advantaged because we're aware of the circumstances and the institutions that we serve and the nation that we serve.
So it's easy to scan the horizon and find someone that wants ill for both of us.
And we can get shoulder to shoulder on that one pretty quickly.
There's a legislator yesterday in Ohio that produced a bill that, I don't know, and he wanted to call it the OHIO Sportsmanship Act.
And if anybody tries to plant a flag on the horseshoe in Columbus, it's illegal and it's against the law.
And I was like, okay, there's a politician that's trying to make a name for himself.
But it's not a bad idea, but just the fact that sportsmanship's what we're here about, and it's the biggest thing.
And the society should learn a lesson.
I'm not a guy that can talk politics.
You talk about sportsmanship.
This recent presidential election, is that the biggest lack of sportsmanship you've ever seen leading up to something?
Here's just quieted the crowd.
Here's what I will tell you, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Love will give you a gear that hate won't.
There you go.
Love will give you a gear that hate won't.
And for me, I've never hated anybody I played against more than I love the guys I played next to.
And sometimes it's the people I was playing against that felt like hate, but it wasn't.
That wasn't the hard vit.
I remember when I was in the league, there's guys like, you're the meanest guy I ever played against.
I'm like, I didn't hate you.
You're just in the way, man.
Like, there's this place that these guys I love and I said I wanted to go and you're in the way and that may have felt like hate, but it wasn't.
I just love these guys more than I hate anybody else.
And I think when you, when you, the performance advantage of love as fuel vice, hate for fuel is unrivaled.
I mean, like, you know, hate will allow you to run hard and fight hard against an enemy.
Love will make you run out of the street and pull a guy out.
And they'll pull you out.
And so I think that's one of the things that our school is so hard.
Our schools are so hard that only the way that you make it is if you love the guy next to you more than you hate anybody else that you're playing against.
And that transitions, that export.
I always say that tribes grow, teams flow.
And one of the things that tribes have is they have this kind of thread of love between them.
Like we know we're going to go to war.
When we say, hey, play like your life depends on it, like that's not a metaphor for us.
Like the things we're doing, our life might depend on it.
That precision, Carlton hitting the right hole, Carlton taking his juke step and then coming this way, me taking the rest of those commitments to precision, it's a way to show how much you love the guy next to you, how hard you want to play and the precision with which you're willing to deploy your skill.
And I think you don't make it to our institutions if you don't have that.
That's bigger than hate.
And kind of what you was talking about, like what makes this robbery so special is these two institutions, like from the moment you step on campus, you're not only a football player, but both sides, you're building leaders of character that are going to go on and lead nations, fights, wars.
And so you get that training, that discipline, that leadership, that ethics from the moment you step on either campus.
I can say that for both.
So it's not just, you're not just there to be a football player.
You're there to develop as a man, as a leader, and a leader of men.
So you learn that from the day you step on campus.
And so you continue that only when you're down academically, and you just continue to get that when you're on the football field.
So that's why they have no excuse to, okay, when you're on a football field, do something different that you wouldn't do anywhere else.
So that continues on while you're on a football field.
And it extends, I love what he just said.
It extends into our dorms.
Like, I loved my classmates because that's the only way I made it through calculus.
Like, I was like, my classmates, like, you are, we love, you're dumb, but we love you.
And we're going to help you spell this right.
I'm like, this math has letters.
What is that?
So the love kind of, this love kind of, it goes through the whole thing.
Like, I love my classmates, my company mates.
And for me, you know, Saturday in the fall was an opportunity to show my roommates how much I love them by the way I played.
So for me, football was a proven ground.
It was an opportunity to prove someone right or prove someone wrong every snap and show people that I loved them, that I meant what I said by how hard I played and the commitment to craft.
In the day and age now of the portal and all of that, there's not portal in Army, Navy, Air Force, whatever.
You can portal in, but you're starting over.
It's going to suck.
Well, Ray on safety, all kinds of safety for Navy.
We talked to him yesterday, and I said, hey, you know, you probably had a chance if you wanted to leave, go someplace else.
You got NFL aspirations and all that.
And he said, well, sir, he goes, you know, I looked at it.
I came in with 50 brothers and I'm going to graduate with 50 brothers.
It's remarkable.
Is that cool?
It's remarkable.
It doesn't surprise me knowing him since he got there a little bit and knowing the quality of coward.
Like, you know, I think sometimes guys go to the NFL looking for what we had at the service caddy.
You know, my little brother played Oklahoma State and I was sitting in the locker rooms in the league when I was in there for the brief time I was in there and none of them, very few of them would talk about their teams and their schools the way that we did.
And that's no disrespect.
That's not marginalizing it.
But there was always an element, I think, of, God, I wish I had.
My brother says all the time, I wish I would have had the brotherhood that you had.
And I said, but you would have had to go through what I went through to have it.
Yeah, right.
There's no, the only way you forge that level of camaraderie brothers is time and suffering.
It's the only two things to do it.
So if you don't have time, what do you got left?
Suffering.
And then you figure out who wants to be there and who means what they say.
This whole thing, sportsmanship, integrity, there's winning without being arrogant, I guess.
And there's not an art form to losing, but somebody's got to win, somebody's got to lose.
And I think society could learn a lesson there too a little bit.
Yeah, I've always taught my daughters, I said, you win, you lose, you get beat.
Losing is you beat yourself.
Getting beat is you just get beat and winning's winning.
Don't lose.
Don't lose.
Getting beat, you just get beat.
I mean, sometimes you just get beat.
Sometimes the other guy's better.
Sometimes the other gal can do it longer or kick it further.
I mean, I love the Olympics.
I love watching the women's rugby team kind of do what they did.
And sometimes you just get beat, but don't lose.
You can control whether you lose or not.
And losing is you beat yourself.
And if you lose and you learn, then you move that from the lost category to the get-and-beat category.
And if you're not willing to get beat, don't play.
Don't show up.
Because that's why we show up on Saturdays to figure it out.
And it's not this factory for perfection, right?
And again, I'll go back to it.
Easy now, hard later, hard now, easy later.
And some of these kids that are going to the portal, man, I get it.
I'm not judging it.
But if you're looking for something easier, you're going to pay for that later in some way.
So do the harder thing.
Always do the harder thing because you're going to learn more about yourself and life when you do it that way.
Don't you think Aretha Franklin got it right like RESPCT.
She got a lot of it.
She has.
I mean, really, isn't that what we're talking about almost?
Yeah.
And you earn respect through suffering.
I mean, that's the only way to do it.
Gamesmanship and sportsmanship.
Two different things.
Gamesmanship, you can try to, I've seen teams try to trick the rules that happened Oregon this year.
I know there's some Michigan people in here because I met, well, he's right there, Steve.
Michigan tried to steal signals.
Push Belichick just took the North Carolina job today, so Deflate Gate or Spygate will eventually up in the ACC.
So that's, I guess, gamesmanship, but they're two different things, aren't they?
Sportsmanship and gamesmanship.
I think I only focus on sportsmanship.
There's no cheat in the battle space, right?
Gamesmanship is, in some sense, is a shortcut, and shortcuts never really are.
When you run out the long game on a shortcut, a lot of times you find out it wasn't as short.
It costs you something else.
It may have saved you time, but it costs you something else, right?
And I think sportsmanship is just, if you compromise on the way there, you have to hold the trophy with an element of compromise too.
And I don't want to half-hold anything.
CIC trophy this weekend.
It's whoever wins, it's going to take it home.
It's going to stay home.
It's going to stay home.
Well, you went through a tough time.
Yes.
You went through, I think, part of a 14 stretch.
Yeah, we started that.
Let's not talk about that right now.
Well, I'm just thinking.
Let's not talk about that.
I'm regurgitating all the stuff that I thought about.
You know, I didn't, you know, I want to win.
I want our Navy to win every game, but I think some of us loved it.
I love seeing the Army do well.
I love seeing the Army do well.
I want to beat them.
But even that, I want it to be a close game.
I want people to go like, God, man, thank God those guys are going to step up for us later.
This is what I love about the 12-team format.
I mean, there's a chance for Cinderella to show up, and Cinderella's always got a shot, right?
But I think that you got to run.
So, you know, we both lost all four in a row.
But I will tell you, I became, I think I would have been a better guy if we'd have won two.
But I know enduring that and overcoming that and not letting that be the definition of who I was as a player, who I am as a man, has made me better.
Because we're all going to have to recalibrate ourselves, right?
Same thing.
Kind of same thing.
And going back to the gamesmanship versus sportsmanship, gamesmanship, I look at it, it's like a gimmick.
You're looking for a gimmick at something that eventually they're going to figure out.
And then you're going to have to start from scratch and do it all over again.
For the sportsmanship, you're doing everything right the same way every day.
Then you don't have to go back and you're creating more work for yourself.
You're trying to find a gimmick or a shortcut.
That's a good thing.
That's right.
It's a shortcut.
Just do everything the right way.
That sportsmanship is doing everything the right way at the right time and just being better that day.
Yeah.
Doing everything the right way.
And so that's why we don't focus on the gimmicks, the tricks, anything like that.
You just do everything the right way every day, doing the discipline, not beating yourself.
And everything works out.
You just got to be better on that day.
Dude, it's also if someone tries to beat you at gamesmanship and you beat them with sportsmanship, it crushes their soul, which is kind of satisfying.
You beat a man's soul.
That's kind of what you're going for.
I'm sorry.
I'll pull it back a little bit.
But, you know, when I was doing powerlifting, I never wanted to wear a bench press shirt because I wanted to beat you and you wore your shirt and I didn't.
And I want you to wonder about that and worry about it for the next time.
I think sportsmanship is doing it right.
When these two teams get together, this year, both offenses have expanded a little bit and throwing the ball a little bit more and two really good quarterbacks.
It's not hard more.
More than two weeks.
Four times.
Four times.
So we're talking to the offensive coordinators yesterday.
And they said, well, we want to be risky, but we don't want to be reckless.
I said, please be risky.
So we have something to talk about instead of just, but it doesn't matter.
Mike Beatty, three yards.
Mike Deany, four yards.
Yeah, Carlton, 12 yards.
And then it's fourth down at two, and we're not playing.
We're going for it anyway.
That's the way it is.
With all the points these two teams have scored this year, I almost guarantee you that it will be 17 to 13 or something.
And that might be high score.
Am I right?
That's a good question.
I mean, it's like you said, it's for every blade of grass.
First, don't hit me.
Second, I thought we were.
We weren't.
You made that little chubby comment at the beginning.
Yeah.
I'm joking.
I could have said how many tackles I made over the four years.
I'm joking, but you didn't.
You could have and you didn't.
How many did you make?
A few.
Yeah.
That's the thing I love about this game.
The linebackers make like 20 tackles each year.
It's the best.
It's just like, remember, we played Cal Berkeley in the Loja Bowl my senior year, and they're like, Clinch, you're kind of recovering Tony Gonzales.
Like, at what point in four years did I shown the ability to do this?
And I think they ran it 16 times.
I'm at 12 tackles.
And we won 42 to 38, which means they threw it.
Wow.
Yeah, because I called Tony Gonzalez sir by the end of the game.
I was like, nice catch, sir.
Nice catch.
He's just a ridiculously great athlete and a high-character guy.
But, you know, I refuse to speculate on that game, man.
It's just going to go the way it's going to go.
And these men are going to learn about themselves and each other.
And those lessons are going to pay dividends for the rest of their lives.
I'm a better man on every front for having played in that game against guys like this and guys like that.
It served me more than I could have ever given to it.
And as I get older, I appreciate that more.
I was up at Annapolis today just walking around the campus and just realizing what a jerk I was in my early 20s to not appreciate what this place was.
And now that I'm there, I'm just so grateful.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to line up against these guys for four years and what I learned about myself, what I learned about goodness and rightness and the way we ought to be as a people.
So I'm grateful for it.
Well, let me speculate.
We're going to win.
I want to speculate.
We're going to win.
I lost four years.
We need to win as much as possible.
So we're going to win.
But just a great game, sportsmanship.
I'm just going to open it up.
You know, these guys, like I said, I'm honored to be up here with these dudes.
So I'm going to open it up to questions.
I know where Meredith is, but she said, Brad, if it gets to the point where you want to ask questions, go ahead and ask questions.
And I think these guys pretty much handle anything.
I can tell that right now.
I got on a Zoom with these guys the other day.
I said, man, I like these guys.
And now I get them in person.
I'm like, it's even better.
It's even better than I thought.
Gentlemen, thank you for showing up today.
Ellis Craig, former Marine Corps combat veteran.
Sure.
Summer five.
So you talked about leadership.
If you can kind of describe what's the one word you would put in front of leadership to describe your leadership style.
And tell me a story that's attached to that.
Well, you can't say servant leadership.
Oh, Dad Gummy.
You can't tell me what to do.
But I think servant leadership's the right word.
Or sacrificial leadership, which is just kind of another version of it.
But, you know, just having that lived out in front of us, right?
And I think, and I revere the Marine Corps for this.
I think the Marine Corps is perhaps one of the most unique branches of the military in all the world.
Like, you ask a SEAL what his second birthday is.
The Marine Corps does the best job of cultivating identity.
And relevance to your fellow Marines is what drives how much you respect it, right?
So I think servant leadership is the right way to describe it.
And I'm just so blessed in that.
It's hard for me to come up with one instance of that.
I was around it.
You know, there's a legendary Marine named Doug Zimbeck, the line of Fallujah.
And, you know, the stories about him leading from the front.
and you're not leading from the front from a from a vanity or a glory perspective you're leading i got i was working with a a big college football team and someone asked me like how do you be a great team And I'm like, be the first to the hurt.
If you can find a way to be the first to hurt and stay at the hurt the longest, if you're in a team that's arguing about who gets to hurt the most and for the longest, you got good stuff there.
And I think I was around that all the time.
You know, you get under that log when you're going through SEAL training and you try to rotate the burden for guys.
Like, hey, I got to shake your arms out and stuff like that.
And you know, you're in a good boat crew when you're arguing on who's going to take a break.
And it's not about who's going to take a break.
It's like, no, I got this.
You go, you take a break, you take a break.
But I think that's what the game teaches you.
The game teaches you that the mission matters most and the mission is in you.
You both took my answers.
So I think the word I would use is present, present leadership.
So yeah, I had time to think.
See, there you go.
I had time to think.
So just present leadership.
So even a daily task is if you want your leader, you got to be there first.
You got to be the first one.
You've got to be working on time, you've got to be there, not 8:30, 8 o'clock.
If you ask someone for a task, you ask them to do something physical.
Hey, you got to be the first one to do it.
Show them how it's done.
So being a present leader and being visible so that your subordinates, your peers, everyone can see you that, hey, I'm not asking you to do something that I wouldn't do myself.
So being that present leader, I think that's what I would say.
Yeah, I mean, the senior enlisted, man, the senior enlisted, I wish more of the people appreciated the senior enlisted man.
And all about the Avian gaze, and all about the aviation community, enlisted is what our enemies rightly fear.
The courage, creativity, initiative, valor.
And if enlisted are the backbone of the senior enlisted are the spinal cord.
And they're amazing.
And I had this one senior enlisted, and why I love present so much is he's like, hey, how you doing, sir?
And he'd just stare at you.
You're like, oh, like, you want to know?
Like, you're like, that's not a crazy, hey, how you doing?
He's like, hey, how you doing, sir?
You're like, man, how am I doing?
Like, I don't, you know.
Am I okay?
I know it's fine.
And I learned from that.
Now I'll look at someone and go, hey, man, how you doing?
And they look at me, I go, prove it.
Prove it.
Because, you know, I've lost almost as many friends of suicide as at the combat and training.
And coming home is a hard thing.
And I tell people there's different being here and being home.
And here's geography, almost knowing why you're here.
And I think part of being present as a leader is asking someone how they're doing and making them tell you the truth.
And then telling them it's going to be okay no matter what the answer is, right?
And I great coaches that did that.
Like I said, my coach is checking on me after I lost my father and lost a few of the really important men to me the first two years I was at the Naval Academy.
And Clint, how are you?
And they stare at me until I answer.
So I think present and servant leadership is the right answer.
Thank you, boy.
Yes, sir.
I don't know where the mic went.
There it is.
Thank you both for your service.
And Go Army beat Navy.
I apologize.
I love that question.
That's good from the back of the room.
I'm joking.
That's great.
I would expect nothing less.
I was across the line of scrimmage from you in 1993.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, Wake Forest played at Navy.
Yeah.
So my question is about college football and where Navy and Army go.
Will Army and Navy football rise or fall as a result of NIL and the portal?
I think we'll rise.
I think the NIL and the portal are going to run its course.
It's going to do what everything does.
Big ebb, big flow, and then it's going to normalize.
And I think what Army and Navy have the opportunity to promise young men is what NIL tries to promise young men.
And NIL is not the enemy here.
I love that guys can monetize their talent sooner because some of these gentlemen can radically impact their families' lives by monetizing their skill.
But I think when you look at career after the service academies, we have every advantage.
I mean, you know, look at a CEO.
Ask a CEO, hey, do you want to hire a West Point grad or a Naval Academy grad or an Air Force Academy grad?
There's very few CEOs that don't want a shot at that kind of talent.
And so I think because of, and listen, I think the Ivy Leagues are remarkable, right?
And so when a guy graduates from an Ivy League, you know he's smart.
When a guy graduates from a service academy, you know he's smart and he can lead and he can fight and he can take punishment, right?
And so I think our schools give us an advantage that NIL and Transport Portal try to give it as well.
So I don't begrudge the NIL and Transport Portal, but I don't think it's going to slow us down.
No, same thing.
I think it's going to level out.
Like Clint said at the beginning, you make a decision based on four years or 40 years.
And so guys that come to the academies, they set themselves up for a lifetime.
They set their kids up for a lifetime.
So it's one of those things that it'll level out.
We'll still get quality players.
We'll still get talented players and we'll still be able to perform and compete against anybody in the country.
Yeah, and our dental and medical is paid for.
And I need $75 a month as a midshipman.
I see a lot of kids chasing the money right now in the last couple years.
And I think the Academy athletes are a different breed.
They're going there for a reason, and it's not the money.
Well, no, it's not the money.
No, man.
I promise you that.
It's not the 20-hour days.
But these young athletes that are monetizing their skill, I get it.
I understand that, right?
And I think it's different between, like, you have an investment philosophy of kind of a short-term yield, kind of high transaction.
You have relational.
It's just a different investment philosophy, right?
Neither of them are right or wrong.
It's just what's right for you.
And investing five years in one of the hardest places on the planet, it's going to pay dividends.
It's different guys that I talk to.
I mean, I go all over the country, and the Service Academy athletes are, they're a notch above, I'm telling you.
You mean off?
Off is what you're trying to be polite about it.
They're just a little off.
They're a little off, right?
I was going to say different.
I get it.
I remember I was asking Gary Patterson one time, you know, great coach at TCU, and he coached at Navy.
And you look at who's coached at our institutions.
You know, Paul Johnson from Dick Bumpus to Gary Patterson.
And he goes, Naval Academy was the, he goes, he goes, I had to realize one time I was yelling at some of y'all, and I realized, like, wait, these guys are trained killers.
Like, I should throttle it back a little bit.
I'm like, not yet, but, you know, we have the capacity for it.
But, you know, and I talked to Saban one time about his, he had a funny, I said, what do you enjoy most about the Naval Academy?
He goes, I didn't have to worry about y'all after practice.
You have guys with guns keeping you inside the facility.
What harm can you do, right?
So there's some advantages there.
But I think every coach I've run across in the league or another, they all, all of them, anybody who's coached of the Service Academy, they look at one of the greatest times of their lives.
And I have a lot of NFL coaches that are like, hey, I want to end my career coach of the Service Academy because it's just pure football, man.
I forgot Bobby Ross is it?
Yeah, Bobby Ross.
Bob Sutton, I mean, one of y'all's greatest coaches of all time.
I mean, he was remarkable and had an incredible career in the league.
But he was an amazing coach, and it's a special place.
Yes, ma'am.
Not a question, a comment.
You know, the role of the sports figure right now is so important, not only in our U.S. world, but all over the world, whether it be basketball or football or soccer.
And I just appreciate your talking about the importance of this game insofar as sportsmanship versus to figure out the gamesmanship, as you say, in that gamesmanship is just whoever comes up on top, regardless of how they play.
And so I just wanted to thank you for that.
Thank you, ma'am.
Yes, ma'am.
Yep.
Most of the time, this might be one or a little bit.
Hi, Julie Hendricks.
I'm with We the Veterans Military Families.
And one of the things we do is we kind of capitalize on the fact that veterans and their families are a really trusted population in this country.
So, all this stuff that y'all are talking about, how do you translate that?
And I know you're not a civilian yet, but kind of in your local communities and kind of build that trust with some of the folks you're engaging in who don't necessarily have that military background.
And also, as Navy, go Navy, beat Army.
I don't think, you know, I would tell people, like, one of the most challenging seasons of my life is when I left the battlefield in Baltimore and came to the boardroom.
And because so much of my identity was bound up and physicality and all these other things.
And, but as I said earlier, the best parts of you come with you to whatever map you're on.
And so, what my bride and I have always tried to do, she's my ring dance day from the Naval Academy.
She's got the strongest eye rolling muscles on the planet.
I mean, she's just, oh, I guess it's amazing.
She's Arnold Schwarzenegger of eye rolls.
It's incredible.
But we try to live like we're still in.
You know, we try to live like we're still in.
We try to lead and love our girls.
You know, when my father died, I made him perfect and then I chased him.
And that's a recipe for failure in a lot of ways.
And I think one of the things your guys know you're not the best anyway, so you might as well be honest with them because then they're going to trust you.
And I've never, I've always wanted the girls to know who the dad really is and what the dad's really struggling with because that gives them permission to struggle as well.
So I think being authentic, I think authenticity is what you call vulnerability when you're not scared anymore.
I mean, that's what it is.
Authenticity is what you call vulnerability when you're not scared.
When you're scared, it's vulnerability when you're not scared anymore.
It's called authenticity.
I think we've always tried to be real authentic.
And I come from a community where you're measured by your authenticity.
If you speak but don't show, you're not long for that world.
So I think the things that we just brought that with us, and we try to bring that with us.
I hope to be authentic later tonight when I'm not scared of him.
You started it, man.
We're all good.
You got anything to add to that?
So I'm still in, but I think one of those things is kind of when you talk about we run into another grad, it's about, you know, being willing to help no matter what.
That's one of the things you get when you're a veteran of being in.
Is no matter who it is, no matter what they look like, you feel okay asking a question.
You need help with something.
Just extending that to the community that there's always a help, there's always a lending hand.
And not always, I feel like everyone on the outside is just always second-guessing or not willing to assist on then just because they don't know that person.
But if you're in the military, if you're a naval grad or army grad, it's, oh, yeah, you need what?
Oh, my car, sure, it's over there, my house.
Like, they don't, it doesn't matter.
That's our opportunity to show up.
That's our whole deal.
Show to the person next to you.
And just keep doing that in the community.
Like, hey, be open, willing to help.
And no matter what the help is, just doing that.
I think that's one thing I'm looking forward to doing as I, you know, see my second chapter.
Yeah.
You'll do great, man.
Yes, ma'am.
My brother played for West Point, and so we got shown to a lot of the games and enjoyed the parties and the pageantry.
So I'm wondering, what was it like when you became spectators?
I've only been back to one game.
So, because Bruce Crandall, Medal of Honor, invited me to go.
See, so here's the deal.
I already said I lost all four in a row.
So going back to those games is like driving my beautiful ex-girlfriend on the next day with a better-looking guy.
And I just can't handle that.
I have a really hard time with that.
My bride says, Of the dumb things you say, that's one of the dumbest, right?
And I'm an awful spectator.
And it's not because I'm questioning these kids now.
I just love it so much.
And there's so much of me that love the opportunity to prove myself to the guys to the left and right of me and the coaches and family watching.
So I'm a frustrated spectrator.
I have a good time.
And not because I think I can do it better than these kids.
These kids are so much better than I ever was.
It's just, you love it so much, it's hard to be around it sometimes.
So from my end, we take it as another reunion.
So I have a bunch of friends getting together.
We treat it like pre-game, not like we're not drinking a bunch.
We're going to lift.
We're going to prepping for the game like we're about to play.
And we're just getting together and just in the stands.
You're still young.
You wait.
I'm joking.
So I'm a little so athletic.
My son is an ashman talent.
But it's just another reunion.
That's a great point.
Yeah.
When I do enjoy it, it's when I'm around my brothers.
Like, it is a reunion.
That's when it's special.
So just another opportunity to get everybody together.
All my teammates coming from around the country coming together and just excitement to see them, you know, see the games, you know, watch hopefully for a win.
And we're very quick.
Even overseas, I mean, those are opportunities to get reunion.
Like, you'd be deployed overseas and Army-Navy game is coming up and you find a way to jump on a bird and you see some Army dude and it's like, hey, dude, let's watch the game together.
But you got to fly me back.
Like, if we win, you can't just take your helicopter and leave.
I'm technically AWOL right now.
But it's a special thing.
Did that answer your question?
Well, guys, thank you.
Thank you, all of you, for coming.
I wrote something down.
The Rosewell Institute National Constitution Center emphasizing fairness, respect, teamwork, integrity.
That's, I guess, what we're here about today.
And I know that the Common Ground Series, Fred can tell you more about this, or Lauren or somebody.
I think they're going to take this kind of thing out to the West Coast in the spring, and they're going to center it around USC and UCLA basketball.
So this is not the last one, and hopefully it'll be a whole series of these type of things because I shared a lot of thoughts, and we appreciate all of you coming.
Thanks a lot.
I bet we smoke check the rest of them.
They're going to be like, hey, we're good, but not as good as all day tomorrow on either CBS Sports Network or CBS Sports.
And we'll kick it off around three, and that's when I'll actually know what I'm doing.
I think.
I have confidence in you.
Okay, don't touch me.
Don't ever touch me.
Congress returns Monday for what's expected to be its last work week for the year.
Both the House and Senate are facing a government funding deadline and must pass additional federal spending legislation by Friday at midnight to avert a shutdown.
The House is back Monday at noon Eastern.
Lawmakers will vote on legislation barring members of Congress convicted of felonies related to their official duties from receiving their congressional pensions.
The Senate also returns Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern.
Senators will vote on the final version of 2025 Defense Programs and Policy Legislation, also known as the NDAA, and a bill authorizing water infrastructure projects to be constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Watch live coverage of the House on C-SPAN, the Senate on C-SPAN 2, and watch all of our congressional coverage with our free video app, C-SPAN Now or online at c-span.org.
New York City real estate developer Larry Silverstein acquired a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center just weeks before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, Mr. Silverstein, author of The Rising, shares stories about the rebuilding of the World Trade Center complex following the attacks and discusses the business, political, and engineering challenges he faced during his 20-year rebuilding effort.
I said, it's got to be replaced.
Because if you don't, Loman has going to become a ghost town.
People are going to leave it.
They'll never come back.
I said, secondly, if we don't rebuild it, we're going to give the terrorists exactly what they wanted.
I said, this is an attack, not on the Twin Towers, nothing like that.
Much more serious.
It's an attack on America and everything we stand for.
So we have an obligation to rebuild it.
Larry Silberstein with his book, The Rising, Sunday night at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.