It was a wild and winding coaching search at Penn State last season, but it ended up with one of the most quietly successful coaches in college football in Iowa State's Matt Campbell.
The Nittany Lions made the somewhat surprising decision to fire coach James Franklin less than a year removed from a trip to the College Football Playoff semifinal, and Campbell, the winningest coach in Cyclones history, faces immediate expectations of success.
Though the pressure may be a bit higher in Happy Valley than it is in Ames, Campbell isn't changing the strategy that worked so well for him at Iowa State, where he won 11 games in 2024 and reached the Big 12 Championship Game twice.
"I'm not wavering," Campbell said at Big Ten media days, per ESPN. "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."
The attempt to maintain the same systems and strategies will be easier because the Nittany Lions added many of Campbell's former Iowa State players via the transfer portal — 24 of them, to be exact, headlined by quarterback Rocco Becht.
#college #results
The Nittany Lions made the somewhat surprising decision to fire coach James Franklin less than a year removed from a trip to the College Football Playoff semifinal, and Campbell, the winningest coach in Cyclones history, faces immediate expectations of success.
Though the pressure may be a bit higher in Happy Valley than it is in Ames, Campbell isn't changing the strategy that worked so well for him at Iowa State, where he won 11 games in 2024 and reached the Big 12 Championship Game twice.
"I'm not wavering," Campbell said at Big Ten media days, per ESPN. "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."
The attempt to maintain the same systems and strategies will be easier because the Nittany Lions added many of Campbell's former Iowa State players via the transfer portal — 24 of them, to be exact, headlined by quarterback Rocco Becht.
#college #results
3 months ago
