Matt Campbell deserves more time to prove he can win at Penn State. But what happened at Northwestern should scare you more than anything James Franklin ever did there.
Penn State lost 34-13 at Northwestern's new Ryan Field, and the final score undersells it. The Wildcats ran for 413 yards. Penn State managed 48 on the ground. Northwestern jumped to 10-0, led 31-7 going into the fourth quarter, and controlled the game from start to finish. CBS Sports called it the third-largest loss to an unranked opponent since 2000, the largest road loss to an unranked team since 2003, Penn State's first 20-point loss as a favorite since 2014, and the fourth-most rushing yards the program has ever allowed. This wasn't a bad bounce. A team that was supposed to win got physically embarrassed.
It lands differently than Franklin's exit did. Franklin's problem was a ceiling. He went 4-21 against AP Top-10 teams and 1-10 against Ohio State, and that's what got him fired a year ago, after a 3-3 start that ended with a loss to, of all teams, Northwestern. A ceiling problem is survivable. You can recruit toward it, scheme into one or two of those games, tell yourself the floor is solid. Franklin rarely got run off the field by nobodies.
Campbell's early problem is the floor, and you can't coach around that on a given Saturday. You cannot scheme toughness into a defense that surrenders 413 rushing yards. You cannot draw up effort at halftime. When a team gets outmuscled in the trenches by better than eight to one on the ground, that's about install and culture, about whether the guys in the room will hit people. That falls on the head coach. The schedule, the officiating, variance: none of it explains this.
Campbell gets it. "I think the frustrating thing for me is the standard of what this program plays football with, the attitude, the effort, the toughness," he said. "We lacked it in every way, shape, and form tonight, and I put that, and I put a lot of that on me." That's an honest coach, and he's right to eat it. He was hired, in part, to rebuild exactly the thing his team didn't show up with.
Maybe Northwestern is just good this year. Maybe this roster is a half-strength version of what Franklin left, stocked with Iowa State transfers still learning a new building. Nine months isn't a long runway, and Rocco Becht, who followed Campbell over from Iowa State, threw for 243 yards even in a loss. Fine. Give Campbell credit for the honesty and time for the rebuild. But opponent quality doesn't explain 413 rushing yards. Good teams don't let you do that. Rebuilding teams with a pulse don't let you do that. A number that ugly says something about your front seven and the standard it plays to, and no amount of "Northwestern's better than people think" covers for it.
This was Penn State's second straight loss, after a home defeat to Wisconsin, and the skid knocked them out of the AP Top 25 and down to 3-2 through five games, well short of where anyone expected. USC is up next, a chance to steady the thing before it spirals. Campbell has earned the chance to fix it. He hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt on the one job he was brought in to do.
Penn State spent a fortune to walk away from a coach who couldn't win the biggest games. Twelve months later, the same opponent exposed a program that still can't win the physical ones. Changing the name on the headset didn't change the thing that's actually broken.
