Packers Sign Worldly Kalambayi to Practice Squad
GREEN BAY, Wis. – The Green Bay Packers signed inside linebacker Peter Kalambayi to their practice squad on Monday, a move made with special teams in mind.
A sixth-round pick by the Texans out of Stanford in 2018, Kalambayi spent his first three seasons with Houston. In 41 career games, he played 132 snaps on defense and 787 on special teams. He had eight tackles on special teams during each of his first two seasons in the league.
“Peter is a unique player,” then-Texans coach and general manager Bill O'Brien said in 2020. “He was an outside backer, he can play inside backer. He’s done a good job over the years on special teams. He’s a really good guy.
“He’s just a good person. He always has a smile on his face. He approaches every day in a very positive way and he’s a very solid, consistent player. You can count on P.K. to know what to do. When the play is presented to him, especially on special teams, he makes the play.”
The Texans released Kalambayi in February and he spent training camp this summer with Denver.
At Stanford, the two-year captain was an honorable mention on the all-Pac-12 team as a senior. In 2017, he had a career-high 61 tackles, which included four sacks and seven tackles for losses to raise his career marks to 18.5 sacks and 28 tackles for losses. He was an impact player all four season, starting with career highs of 6.5 sacks and 9.5 tackles for losses as a freshman. He impressed at the Combine with a 4.57 in the 40 with a 4.36 in the shuttle
In high school, Kalambayi had a 4.4 grade-point average. His only B in high school came in pre-calculus. His high school coach joked that Kalambayi is the only player he ever had whose 40 time matched his GPA. He speaks fluent French.
“My mom’s from Trinidad so she speaks English,” he said at the 2018 Scouting Combine. “My dad’s from Congo. I don’t know him, but they speak French in Congo so I just started taking French in high school, and I was pretty good, so I continued in college. I took a year off my freshman year, then my sophomore year I still had retained enough to place out of the language requirement for college, but I decided to take a second year of class to see what it was like, and I really liked it.”
He was raised by his mother and grandparents. When he was 5, he learned his multiplication tables with his grandfather.
“They were pretty strict on academics,” he said. “They didn’t really care about the sports thing until they realized in high school that it could be a vehicle to get me a scholarship. But in terms of my childhood, they always made sure I was in a good school, regardless of where we lived. The expectation was always As and Bs. Mostly As. If I had some As and some Bs, they’d be asking me like, ‘Well, why are you getting these Bs?’ I never got a C or anything like that. That would have been bad news for me if that ever happened. And there was always the threat of ‘You can’t play sports if your grades are bad,’ so that’s why I always tried hard because I liked to play sports.”
With a world view coming from his Congolese father and a mother who is from Trinidad & Tobago, he might explore journalism after his football career is over.
“It’s just good to have a worldview from three different perspectives,” Kalambayi told SI.com. “I hear what my Congolese family thinks about politics, religion and everything. Same with my Trinidadian family. And obviously I’m engulfed in American culture. I pretty much—I’m very in tune with three different worldviews.
“I think that’s good in a society that’s kind of torn these days in a partisan way. I think it’s good to be able to look at things from different perspectives. We don’t do much of that anymore.”
Meanwhile, the Packers had four players in for tryouts, according to NFL insider Aaron Wilson: tight end Cory Angeline, tight end Alize Mack, receiver Mathew Sexton and quarterback Kyle Sloter. Mack was a seventh-round pick in 2019 by the Saints. He spent training camp this summer with Detroit. Sloter, an undrafted free agent in 2017, has spent time with the other NFC North teams and served a stint on the Raiders’ practice squad this season.
