Pat Kraft is already under the microscope, and Matt Campbell’s rough start has only turned up the heat.
Penn State’s first-year coach is 3-2 after a 34-13 loss to Northwestern on Friday night, and the Nittany Lions now look headed toward another 3-3 start with USC coming to Happy Valley in Week 6. That’s a nasty place to be after Campbell inherited a roster that was supposed to stabilize the program, not send it backward.
But the pressure isn’t landing on Campbell alone. It’s landing on Kraft, too - the athletic director who made the hire, then built a process that now looks shaky from top to bottom.
Kraft came to Penn State from Boston College and replaced Sandy Barbour after her retirement. For a while, his biggest moves were the push for a major Beaver Stadium renovation and the hiring of men’s basketball coach Mike Rhoades, a decision that has turned disastrous, though largely because of a lack of investment. The most successful Penn State programs under Kraft have mostly been the ones he inherited from Barbour: Cael Sanderson, Katie Schumacher-Cawley, and James Franklin.
Then Kraft made his biggest football swing. He fired Franklin six games into last season after a 3-3 start, just one year removed from a trip to the College Football Playoff semifinal. Now, after only two games in Campbell’s first season, Penn State looks worse than it did a year ago even as that previous season was unraveling from national championship expectations.
Campbell is taking plenty of heat himself. His conservative game management is drawing scrutiny, and so is the lack of talent on the roster, which is heavily made up of players who followed him from Ames. The loss to Northwestern only sharpened that criticism.
Still, the deeper issue is how Penn State got here. Kraft was so focused on landing a big-name coach that he passed on rising options like Will Stein and Bob Chesney while other programs locked up extensions for Curt Cignetti, Matt Rhule, Mike Elko, Brent Key, Clark Lea, Eli Drinkwitz, and Jeff Brohm. He then missed publicly on BYU’s Kalani Sitake.
That sequence left Penn State without a coach when early signing day arrived in early December, and Campbell had to scramble to piece together a 16-player class built mostly from Iowa State signees.
The hiring itself isn’t the only question. In a vacuum, it made sense.
Campbell had success at an under-resourced program and consistently outperformed expectations, so the theory was that bigger resources would lead to bigger results. The problem is that Penn State’s resources still aren’t close to the level of its biggest Big Ten rivals.
According to The Athletic, the Nittany Lions spent $29-32 million on this roster, while Ohio State and Oregon are spending around $50 million in 2026.
That gap matters, and it matters even more when Penn State is also pouring money into a $700 million renovation to Beaver Stadium while raising the price to watch a team that isn’t delivering on the field.
And if the Northwestern loss didn’t make that obvious enough, the details did. Penn State allowed over 400 yards rushing in Week 5.
Campbell did not onside kick down three scores with a little under eight minutes left. He also punted from the +43 with 6:55 left in the third quarter while trailing by 17.
None of that is ideal. None of it makes Kraft look better.
It’s still too early to label Campbell a bad hire, and there’s still a path for him to steady the program and build something better than what Franklin kept bumping into. But after this start, that path looks a lot narrower than it did eight days ago.
If this keeps going south, Kraft may be the one pushed out before Campbell. And at this point, that would probably be the correct order.
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Saquon Barkleys latest exit from a game with the Rams was the kind of sight that makes Penn State fans wince, because it came with an apparent hamstring injury and no return to action after the first quarter. For a player whose career has already included a major ACL tear in 2020, any lower-body issue carries extra weight, especially when it involves a part of the body that can linger for weeks before a running back is truly back to full speed.
For Penn State, the timing only adds to the unease. The Nittany Lions are already staring at a difficult stretch ahead with USC and Michigan on the schedule, and recent losses have left the seasons outlook cloudy. Losing even the conversation around one of the programs most recognizable stars to another injury scare is the sort of development that keeps the mood around State College uneasy, even before the next kickoff arrives. [Read more 🡒]
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The schedule does not offer much time to linger on the setback. USC and Michigan are next, and those matchups will give Penn State a chance to reestablish itself against high-profile opponents and climb back toward the top 25, but only if the Nittany Lions start looking like a different team than the one that just slipped against Northwestern. [Read more 🡒]