Penn State went from title favorite to total mess in 2025. Its new coach is rebuilding an identity that feels very familiar

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

University Park, Pennsylvania (CNN) — Shortly after arriving at Penn State, Matt Campbell instituted a team competition that served him well in his days at Iowa State.

Intended to build camaraderie, the concept was simple enough: Divide the team into small groups, each headed by one OG Penn State player and one of the 24 transfers Campbell brought with him from Ames.

Teams earned points by winning weekly head-to-head battles – tugging a sled across the field the fastest, surviving a heated game of dodgeball – and by simply doing the right thing. Show up to class on time. Do a little community service.

On the flip side, doing the wrong thing meant point deductions. Being late for anything – breakfast, lunch, dinner, a team meeting, a training session – or parking in an unassigned spot, for example. A video board inside the Greenberg Indoor Sports Complex kept a running tally of the standings and each Wednesday at 6 a.m., what would otherwise be a day off, the weekly losers were summoned for a chore. Some lugged crates of water. Others scrubbed the training room. A few even polished silverware.

“Oh, it was awful,” said offensive lineman Anthony Donkoh, a PSU holdover.

Yet the punishment wasn’t even the worst of the consequences. No, the worst came on the phone. Every time a player screwed up, the coaching staff and his teammates received a text message, calling out both the infraction and the guilty party. Early in Campbell’s tenure, the practice facility sounded like an arcade, phones pinging on the regular.

“There were,” said tight end and Cyclones’ transfer Gabe Burkle, “a lot of minus 20s.”

From a helicopter vantage point, one that takes in the view of a 34-8 record in the three seasons before it all unraveled spectacularly in 2026, getting players to park in the right spot might be near the bottom of Campbell’s to-do list.

Given the keys to a football kingdom that has everything needed to succeed – a steady revenue stream, access to great players, facilities, fan base and tradition – Campbell also inherited a team that had a near-comic inability to beat college football’s best when it mattered most. In his 12 seasons at Penn State, James Franklin went 4-21 against top-10 opponents and 1-18 against the best in the Big Ten, spinning the Lions and their fans through the same laundry cycle every year.

Good? Yes. Good enough? Not quite. Rinse. Repeat.

Campbell’s charge, then, was to get the Nittany Lions over the Mount Nittany-sized hump that squandered every season.

But how, if you are Matt Campbell, do you figure out what’s missing for a team that seemingly has everything?

Looking out the window from his office inside a sprawling facility, upon a practice field backing up to the mountain rise and just across the way from a perennially packed, 110,000-seat Beaver Stadium, Campbell articulated a simple answer.

To achieve the one big thing, he needed to go backward. Penn State needed to relearn how to do the little things.

Setting a new standard

This June, Penn State football players lined the on-campus baseball stadium to greet athletes competing in the Pennsylvania Special Olympics. They posed for pictures and fist-bumped the participants throughout the Opening Ceremonies.

It was the first time in more than five years the Nittany Lions showed up for the annual festivities.

At the end of the 2025 fall semester, the Nittany Lions team GPA dipped all the way down to 2.3. Players hopped golf cart rides to class, on the rare occasion that the class wasn’t online. At the end of spring 2026, five months after Campbell arrived, the team bumped its GPA to a program record 3.32.

Players are also now required to sit in the first two rows of the classroom. And while in some cases online classes can’t be ignored, the preference is that players attend in the classroom.

Donkoh says prior to this spring, he could count on one hand the number of times he frequented the coaches’ offices. Now, he and his teammates use the sofas outside to do their homework or just loiter. So hellbent is Campbell on an open-door policy, he recently shrunk his own office space, knocking down a wall to enlarge a neighboring conference room.

No one will string the words together and actually say it out loud, but as former players and Campbell tap-dance around the uncomfortable question about what’s changed, the message hovering between the lines is not difficult to read.

In the last few years, Penn State’s singular focus – to win a national championship – clouded everything else. Hellbent on winning the games that eluded them, the Lions defaulted to a very human reaction. They turned insular, shutting out everything but football. And into the abyss of checks and balances, entitlement crept in.

“A little bit of ego and that kind of stuff in the building,” said quarterback Rocco Becht. “Whether it was like missing a lift or being late – just not a lot of accountability. I just don’t think they had a lot of direction, to be honest.”

By societal standards, they weren’t behaving poorly. This was, by no means, a program run amok. But the burden of trying to achieve something everyone craved unintentionally, but perceptibly, skewed their priorities.

Nothing mattered as much as winning.

“People don’t think team GPA is a big deal. I mean, it gets all of the moms excited, but in my opinion, GPA is a standard,” said lineman Cooper Cousins, a four-year player who is the fourth Penn Stater in his family. “Can you be a good team with a low GPA? Sure. But a team with a high GPA, to me, that shows there is a standard in your program, and everyone is aligned to it. And when everything is aligned to a standard, good things happen.”

One of the good ones

Campbell is a standards guy, a meat-and-potatoes Midwesterner raised to believe that good values rate more than razzle-dazzle. He grew up in Massillon, Ohio, a blue-collar town that gets its ethos from the high school football team.

Campbell’s coach, Keith Wakefield, ran the throwback Wing-T straight up through two state title games in 2015 and ’16 and through retirement in 2020. Now in retirement, Wakefield remains a man who isn’t afraid to speak plainly but also won’t overstep in areas outside of his purview.

Mostly, he deflects praise as if it were poison.

Wakefield first met Campbell in junior high school, back when Campbell was “ornery” and “feisty” by the coach’s estimation, a kid so hell-bent on competition and winning that a basketball hard foul often led to a shoving match. Wakefield refuses to take any credit, but Campbell will tell you that his high school coach helped repurpose, if not soften, his edges.

He stressed simple but attainable things, such as hard work and a good attitude, and gave Campbell purpose when he struggled as his parents divorced during high school.

“He was an anchor for me,” Campbell said. “He taught me the value of attitude and effort. He stressed the consistency to show up every day without ego. So much stuff didn’t matter. It was more than wins and losses; it’s who you could become in the journey.”

Wakefield’s messaging stuck with Campbell through college, when he eschewed the bright lights of Division I at Pittsburgh for understated D2 powerhouse Mount Union, convinced that the former housed only dysfunction and the latter offered all of the discipline and structure he craved.

And it followed him as he climbed the coaching ladder. Campbell has been a voracious reader his entire life. He loves historical fiction and has devoured books by Ryan Holiday (“Ego is the Enemy” among them). These days, his office bookshelves are stuffed with actual books he’s read, not interior design fillers, and he usually reads with a highlighter so he can underscore a passage he wants to share with his team.

He pursued football information with the same thirst, attending clinics and camps on the regular. But unlike so many, who see the events as a place to network, Campbell approached them as a place to do the work.

“You could see the good ones,” Jim Tressel, former Ohio State head coach and now Ohio’s lieutenant governor, told CNN Sports. “Some of the guest coaches, at the end of the day, they’d go one way to get a libation, and others went to talk football on the chalkboard. Or you’d have guys say, ‘I want to learn from you,’ except they’d have no questions. It’s like they were looking for you to knight them.

“Matt always went to the chalkboard to talk football and he had 54 questions.”

Along the way, the values and knowledge all coalesced into a man who has found a way to somehow evolve in college athletics without losing sight of who he is.

“He’s real. He’s a real guy,” Wakefield said. “Maybe that sounds weird today, in our current culture, but to me that means he tells the truth. He’s honest with people. He’s not afraid of telling people the truth and that hasn’t changed. This profession can change a lot of people. He remains true to who he is and what he wants to do.”

After the wheels fell off

Donkoh remembers the team meeting in October of last year. He wishes he didn’t and desperately hopes he never experiences it again.

“Pin drop,” he said quietly. “When they walk in and tell you that your coach got fired, how can it not be about you? Everything we do, or don’t do, is a reflection on our coach.”

Penn State dismissed Franklin a mere six games into the season and four months after the Nittany Lions debuted in the preseason rankings at No. 2. It was a crash-and-burn worthy of Icarus after a horrific unraveling.

A fevered night game environment against Oregon rapidly turned into a 110,000-person airing of grievances, the Nittany Lions getting pantsed at the hands of the Ducks in the week’s biggest game, those 60 minutes turning into a near-referendum on Franklin’s tenure. Fans left for the gates and spilled back to their tailgates, some muttering under their breath but plenty chanting, “Fire Franklin!”

A week later, an uninspired Penn State team fell to UCLA and a week after that lost to Northwestern. Externally, it looked like the wheels were flying off; internally, it felt like the chassis was sitting on the pavement.

“When guys are down, it brings other guys down, but when the coaches are down?” Donkoh said. “That makes it 20 times worse. We had so much pressure on us. Nobody wanted to say it, but you could feel it. There was so much tension.”

The unraveling exposed Franklin’s fatal flaw. Despite nine-plus years in State College, he never quite got the place.

Though the undoing of Joe Paterno’s final years made the memories complicated, Penn Staters still like to believe they are the basic black-shoes-and-ordinary-jerseys in a world full of showboats. Like swallows returning home, more than 100,000 Penn State faithful flock to the fields surrounding Beaver Stadium six times a fall. They do not need to be summoned or cajoled or, above all else, sold so long as the team on the field is something they can take pride in.

It is a place that gave the 2012 team a place of honor in the stadium because they chose to stick around after the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Franklin’s seemingly insignificant decisions – to stop the Special Olympics appearances; to offer guys rides on golf carts – flew in the face of what the place liked to think it stood for and made his abrupt dismissal a lot less painful to swallow.

“People here, they’ve been parking in the same places next to the same people for years,” says Jay Paterno, Joe’s son, and a member of the Board of Trustees. “So, all of a sudden, when you entirely divorce yourself, or ignore that history, there’s a disconnect. Any fool with a checkbook can assemble a great roster. But can you build a team?”

Campbell was not Penn State’s first choice for the job. Coaching searches are, at best, farcical, the truth lying somewhere between fans’ fanatical wishes, reported contacts and actual interviews.

That Penn State failed to use the long runway given with Franklin’s October dismissal didn’t help things. Fifty-four days to find a CEO of a multi-million-dollar entity isn’t that long in the real world; it’s an eternity in the rumor mill of a coaching carousel. Penn State appeared floundering and foolish, as rumored coaches inked extensions. A flirtation with BYU head coach Kalani Sitake, a good coach but an odd fit, read a little desperate.

Athletic director Pat Kraft won’t go into details about the actual search, saying only, “You get to the right result at the right time when it shows itself to you. I really believe things work out for the right reasons, and you have really good conversations with people, and things turn on a dime.”

More than a few people believe that, despite the messy route to get there, Penn State landed on the right guy.

“He suits us,” Paterno said.

That said, the protracted search and the commotion of Franklin’s dismissal added to Campbell’s to-do list.

Asked why, after turning down several other opportunities during his time at Iowa State, he finally jumped, Campbell lands on a very telling answer.

“It was always going to take the right community,” he says. “I felt drawn here because I wanted to see if I could unify. I wanted to see if I could help heal things externally and internally. I wanted to remind everyone how special it was to walk into that stadium and why 110,000 people show up to support this program.”

Focusing on today, not on the playoff

The book sitting on the coffee table inside Campbell’s office feels intentional.

“Captain’s Letters to Joe” is a compilation of reflections collected on the occasion of Paterno’s 400th win. Sensing a disconnect or worse, a feeling of being forgotten, Campbell this summer invited some of the men who wrote those letters to campus. Through regular luncheons with former players of each decade, he aimed to give his players both a sense of what it was they were playing for, and maybe a dose of humility.

It is the gift of youth to believe that you have alternatively discovered or changed the world, and Penn State players were no different in their lofted opinions of themselves. Nor were they entirely wrong.

They had achieved a great deal, including a Big Ten title in 2016 and a spot in the 2024 College Football Playoff semifinals. But the Nittany Lions also won two national titles, in 1982 and 1987 and finished undefeated in 1994.

A history lesson, he believed, could provide some much-needed perspective and appreciation. Selfishly, he knew it could help him, too.

“Our players are our superpower,” he said. “But my message to them was, ‘I don’t want your money. I want your time. I need you back involved in this program, so our players understand the power of what they are a part of.’”

None of that, of course, wins football games and the best way to put the joy back in Happy Valley is by winning. Despite his failures to win the big games, Franklin won at a level plenty of schools and fan bases would welcome.

While their itchiness to be relevant might be tempered by a willingness to give Campbell time, fans won’t wait forever. Penn State football lacks nothing it needs to build success. Kraft made waves last month when he bluntly proclaimed that he’d never spend $20 million on a basketball team because “it’s not a good investment” – the football team is under no such budget constraints.

“He will get whatever he needs,” Kraft says of Campbell.

Yet in and around the Lasch Building, where the players chat during a summer practice break, no one talks about needs and wants. Money only comes up when Campbell is asked directly about it, insisting instead he only recruits “OKG: our kinda guys,” and maybe the biggest omission of all: No one talks about winning a national title.

“I can count on one finger the number of times coach has brought up winning a Big Ten or national championship,” Donkoh said. “Of course, that’s the goal. That should be the goal of every Power 4 team. But it’s about what are we doing today? What are we doing in this moment, at lift, or at practice? We don’t need to talk about winning a national championship. We need to be about it.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.