Coach Matt Campbell was not supposed to stay at Iowa State as long as he did.
In 2017, speculation connected him to openings at Oregon and Tennessee. In 2019, it was Florida State. In 2020—at which point Campbell’s Cyclones were on their way to an AP Top 10 finish—it was the Detroit Lions. The list goes on and on.
Fast forward to the present day. Campbell has finally taken the plunge, having departed Iowa State for Penn State as the Cyclones’ greatest and most beloved football coach. The question is whether Campbell can adapt his unique approach to coaching to one of the Big Ten’s biggest brands.
The coach addressed that subject at length Tuesday at Big Ten media days in Chicago.
“We’re going to have to continue to grow at a rapid pace,” Campbell said via ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg. “We’re going to have to experience success and failure, and how do we respond to that? That’s ultimately where we'll be defined, and so I love the challenge of that.”
Campbell bet on culture at Iowa State—he aims to do it again at Penn State
“I’m not wavering,” Campbell told Rittenberg. “I think the misnomer has been [it’s] not about results. The reality is, we have chosen to focus on the process and the people, aligning those two things as good or better than anybody to be the best we truly can be, and I think it's really why we got the results at Iowa State, and I don't know any other way.”
Let’s be clear: the Cyclones were not a name football brand (or even a middle-class football brand) when Campbell arrived from Toledo after posting a 9–2 record in 2015. Like their Great Plains and Upper Midwest peers—Iowa, Kansas State, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin, to name a handful—any Iowa State breakthrough would have to use player development and program culture to cancel out Ames, Iowa’s distance from football’s centers of power.
Mission accomplished.
The Cyclones plucked running back David Montgomery out of the Cincinnati area and turned him into a third-round NFL draft pick. They replaced him with Breece Hall, an Omaha-born, Wichita-raised running back who turned out even better—he became the program’s first two-time All-American since running back Troy Davis in the 1990s. Don’t forget about quarterback Brock Purdy, either—an unheralded recruit out of Arizona who became the NFL’s greatest Mr. Irrelevant.
With Campbell’s Iowa State teams, you knew what you were getting. The Big 12 could only watch as a team with five 10-loss seasons from 1994 to 2014 became one of the toughest outs in the league.
How can Campbell make that strategy work at a name brand like Penn State, anyway?
Campbell liked to tout the Cyclones’ “five-star culture” (a term Hall helped popularize). Here’s the rub, though: Now, Campbell actually will have blue-chip recruits on his roster, rendering the adversarial stance “five-star culture” implies obsolete. In 2027, six four-star recruits will join the Nittany LIons; at least one will follow in 2028.
How, then, can Campbell square his past and his present situation? If he leans too heavily into the “five-star culture” sales pitch, blue-chip recruits and transfers may be hard to come by. If he leans away from it, he may find himself out of his depth in Mid-Atlantic recruiting knife fights with Michigan, Ohio State and others.
There are several reasons to believe he can land the plane. First and foremost, Campbell’s reputation precedes him—particularly in Big Ten country, where his roots reach back to his high school days in the football-crazed Massillon, Ohio area. He’s brought a gaggle of ex-Iowa State players with him—two dozen in all, per Rittenberg. Penn State’s opening stretch is light—Marshall, Temple, Buffalo, Wisconsin and Northwestern, in that order. With ex-coach James Franklin’s shock firing less than a year in the rearview mirror, Campbell will probably get a bit of a runway.
Assuming all those factors coalesce, the Nittany Lions will likely enter mid-October 5–0. When Campbell and Penn State play USC and the Wolverines back-to-back that month, we’ll get our first inkling of whether his approach makes sense—and cents.
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