The Carolina Panthers have selected an Army veteran and Special Forces captain as their vice president of development.
In his new role, Brian Decker, 51, will evaluate both incoming and developing players and coaches for the NFL team based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Decker and Panthers Head Coach Frank Reich spent five years working together in Indianapolis for the Colts.
"Some people, you just rub shoulders with, and you say, 'Wow, I want to be on that guy's team, or I want that guy to be on my team," Reich said in a release.
Decker served two tours in Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq in 2004, His wife was within a month of delivering twins when he deployed, and he was in charge of a 12-person team when he got to the Middle East.
"I spent the better part of the next three years in Iraq, and I learned more about myself; I learned more about human nature and what it takes to be resilient and to handle that immense stress and responsibility," he said in the release. "Because not only when I leave, my wife is eight months pregnant with twins. And I'm going off to war.
"So I'm responsible for a wife and these two kids on the way, and I'm responsible for those 11 men and their wives and their kids. And that's an immense responsibility."
For three of his 22 years of military service, Decker ran the Special Forces assessment and selection program.
"I was essentially the general manager for Special Forces," he explained. "I was responsible for running our selection process for all future Green Berets."
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Decker is a voracious reader of leadership books who discovered audiobooks while he was training for marathons. He is also obsessed with the small, incremental improvements that can make a big difference over time.
“I wanted to read anything and everything that I could read on leadership, character, psychology, and everything about that,” he said “I had a theory going into it that if you take the sport-specific requirements away from it, and you look at people who go on to be great in any field become that top one percent; my theory is that they would be the same person.
"So if you're going to be an elite golfer, an elite quarterback, or an elite baseball player, or an elite CEO, I bet they thought a lot alike, and that's kind of what I found over time is that the demands placed upon greatness in any field are very similar from a makeup perspective."
Following his military service, Decker was asked a simple question by former Cleveland Browns CEO Joe Banner: Why do teams make so many mistakes in the draft? Why do talented players who have exhibited physical mastery fail to become great players?
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Decker had an answer that drew on his military experience.
"I was really quick to say, Listen, you're not going to erase human nature," Decker said. "You know, that's what human nature is. The more that people factor comes in, the more uncertainty there is. But I said I do believe that if we can improve the process and reduce that uncertainty. And let's just hypothetically say that uncertainty's 3 to 5 percent, if we can be 3 to 5 percent, better than the competition and compound that annually over time, you know, that's going to result in more hits."
Following his stint with the Browns, Decker was hired by the Colts, where he met Reich. Eventually, that meeting led them both to the Panthers.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.