Matt Campbell spent years being linked to bigger jobs and then staying put at Iowa State anyway. Oregon.
Tennessee. Florida State.
The Detroit Lions. The list kept growing, and so did the sense that one day he’d finally leave Ames.
That day is here. Campbell is now at Penn State, taking over one of the Big Ten’s biggest brands after building Iowa State into a program that became defined by toughness, development and consistency. The real question now is whether the same formula can travel with him.
Campbell said Tuesday at Big Ten media days in Chicago that he’s not planning to change the core of how he coaches.
“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.”
“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.”
That approach worked because Iowa State had to build the hard way. When Campbell arrived from Toledo after a 9-2 season in 2015, the Cyclones were not operating like a football heavyweight. In a part of the country where programs such as Iowa, Kansas State, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin have long had the edge, Campbell had to lean on development and culture to close the gap.
And it did close. Iowa State turned David Montgomery, a running back from the Cincinnati area, into a third-round NFL draft pick.
Breece Hall came next and was even better, becoming the program’s first two-time All-American since Troy Davis in the 1990s. Brock Purdy, an unheralded recruit from Arizona, also became a major success story and the NFL’s greatest Mr.
Irrelevant.
Under Campbell, Iowa State became a team that was hard to handle. The Big 12 watched a program that had five 10-loss seasons from 1994 to 2014 turn into one of the league’s most reliable problems.
Campbell often sold that identity as “five-star culture,” a phrase Hall helped popularize. At Penn State, though, the challenge shifts.
He’ll now have blue-chip talent on the roster, and that changes the message. The Nittany Lions are set to add six four-star recruits in 2027, with at least one more coming in 2028.
That creates the central tension of Campbell’s new job. Push too hard on the old underdog pitch, and it may not fit the kind of talent Penn State can attract. Move too far away from it, and he could be stepping into recruiting battles with Michigan, Ohio State and others without the same edge that made Iowa State work.
There are reasons to think he can handle the transition. Campbell’s name already carries weight in Big Ten country, especially given his ties to Massillon, Ohio, where he went to high school. He’s also brought a large Iowa State contingent with him - two dozen former Cyclones, according to Rittenberg.
Penn State should also give him some breathing room early. The opening stretch is manageable, with Marshall, Temple, Buffalo, Wisconsin and Northwestern lined up in that order. And with James Franklin’s firing still less than a year in the past, Campbell is likely to get a little runway before the schedule tightens.
If things go as expected, the Nittany Lions could be 5-0 by mid-October. Then comes the real test: USC and Michigan back-to-back. That stretch should tell the story of whether Campbell’s familiar formula can work in a very different place.
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