No regrets: Arnette happy he postponed NFL
Defensive back says he wants to end college career on better note.
Damon Arnette COLUMBUS — could be toiling in relative anonymity at an NFL training camp this August.
Instead he is working on rewriting his story as an Ohio State football player — and doing what he can to help some of his teammates avoid mistakes he’s made along the way.
“Truly I feel like a lot of it with me has been off-field things that reflect on the field,” he said after Ohio State’s third practice of the preseason. “So once I cleaned up everything, everything else started to shine a little bit more. And other things are being noticed once I got certain things right in my life.”
Asked what that meant, the senior replied, “Just calming down,” a lesson he is trying to pass along to other Buckeyes.
“Once I just realized that playing with fire, you will get burned a lot of different ways, it just ain’t worth it,” he said. “So I feel like a part of learning from that stuff is going through certain things
and just learning from those mistakes.
“I try to use my experiences to help a lot of young guys now that I’m a senior,” he said. “Just going through some of the certain things that I went through — and just maybe the message should come off a little bit differently than maybe I received it. So I try to just use what I know I rejected and what I accepted to help others.”
Arnette, a three-star recruit coming out of St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, four years ago is already a two-year starter, and he earned All-Big Ten honorable mention from conference coaches last season when he totaled 40 tackles and one interception in 13 games.
He felt he was ready to try his hand at playing for pay until he talked to incoming Ohio State secondary coach Jeff Hafley upon returning to Columbus from the Rose Bowl.
“I came back to Columbus just really to get my stuff and my dog, but after talking with Coach Hafley, just really after one conversation with him I told him mid-conversation I would just stay,” Arnette said.
Hafley, who spent the past seven seasons in the NFL, has revamped Ohio State’s scheme in the secondary, and he is teaching some new coverage techniques players are excited about.
“Just seeing the technique he teaches is what a lot of us do naturally, I would have hated myself if I would have left and saw everybody else doing what we’re doing now and I was somewhere else so I wanted to be a part of that,” Arnette said.
He also admitted he wants to end his career on a better note after an up-and-down 2018.
“The question was if I was the best player I know I can be,” he said. “Did I leave everything out there, and do I regret everything? I couldn’t check all of those boxes so then I was like, all right can you live with that? And then I realized, nah, I can’t. I feel like I’m not doing Buckeye nation and my teammates a service if I left on the note, if I would have left last year.”
Of course, head coach Ryan Day viewed Arnette’s return as good news.
He said the staff encouraged Arnette to stay in school and rejoiced when he decided to do so, but that wasn’t the end of the story.
“He also had a bunch of (academic) work to do this spring, and he dug himself out of that hole and got a whole bunch of credits,” Day said.
That hard work in the classroom has already paid off as he received a degree in communications Sunday.
“This is one of those stories that I hope we’re saying at this time next year about how he dug himself out of a hole academically, came around and had a really great senior year because I’m proud of where he’s at,” Day said.
■ Robert Landers’ life has been directly affected by gun violence, and the Ohio State senior defensive tackle took the time to send condolences back home following shootings in Dayton and El Paso, Texas, over the weekend.
“It all, to me, circles back to mental health,” said Landers, a Wayne High School graduate whose father was shot to death in Trotwood in 2006, a crime that remains unsolved. “You’ve got so many people in the world today struggling with this disease called mental health that a lot of people don’t want to talk about. It’s a real thing, and it really does affect people in a negative way, and a lot of people don’t know how to handle it.”
Landers, who spoke to the Dayton Daily News in December about his personal battle with depression, said in a video posted to Twitter on Tuesday his brother, Trey, was in the area early Sunday morning when a gunman killed nine people in the Oregon District.
While Robert Landers is a fifth-year senior at Ohio State, Trey is a fourth-year senior for the University of Dayton basketball team.
“I can say, me personally, I’m one of those people who have suffered from mental health on many occasions,” said the elder Landers. “God has continued to bless me and put me in certain positions, but it’s still an uphill battle on a daily basis.
“We’ve all got to walk strong, walk with our heads up high. For me, the best way I’ve learned to deal with this issue and this disease is by surrounding myself with the best people — people that no matter what’s going on in my life, no matter what’s going on in their life, if I need them, they’ll be there.”