RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesIt 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.
Campbell has experience coaching much of this year's roster, but with a new locale and championship expectations, he said the team will need to continue to grow in terms of how it handles adversity.
"We're going to have to continue to grow at a rapid pace," he said. "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. That's really been my focus — not so much about what is success or what is failure. It's, man, what are the processes?"
Penn State has found success in recent years, winning 34 games under Franklin from 2022-24. It never quite managed to get over the hump, though, and Campbell is hoping his program-building strategy will prove to be the difference.
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This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: Matt Campbell believes Iowa State strategy will work at Penn State
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