At no point in Week 4 was Penn State the better team than Wisconsin; Colton Joseph just kept giving the Nittany Lions the ball. In Week 5, Northwestern quarterback Aidan Chiles never did, and the Wildcats ran through Penn State in the debut of the new Ryan Field.
Penn State didn’t just get blown out on the scoreboard, allowing 34 points to a Northwestern team that looks frisky with Chip Kelly running the offense and that nearly upset Indiana a week ago. The underlying metrics are disastrous. Penn State gave up 507 total yards and 414 on the ground with a 58% success rate and 7.7 yards per play.
Simply, Penn State isn’t close to as good a team as Northwestern. Northwestern might be better, but even with Penn State’s soft schedule, the College Football Playoff is out of reach, and there’s no guarantee that the Nittany Lions get to a bowl game.
There’s a lot of blame to go around, and a lot of big losers from a second consecutive loss to the team that ended James Franklin’s tenure last year. But I just picked the five biggest losers.
5. The White Out
It’s hard to zoom out after a loss like that, but Penn State is now 0-2 in Big Ten play and heading toward a disastrous Year 1 of Campbell’s tenure after a disastrous final year of Franklin’s. Ticket prices are higher than ever, and Beaver Stadium has hardly been filling this year. The program is a bad place heading into its best tradition and biggest recruiting showcase.
4. Rocco Becht
There are so many issues on the Penn State offense that it’s hard to pin it on any one thing: Rocco Becht didn’t have receivers open downfield much of the night, his protection wasn’t good, and the run game never got going. But Becht, the most experienced quarterback in college football, has continued to prove that he doesn’t belong in the Big Ten.
Becht has been inaccurate, uncomfortable, indecisive, and has had multiple balls tipped at the line of scrimmage for the second week in a row. He’s undersized with below-average arm strength and underwhelming athleticism. He needs to trust his receivers and let the ball rip, but he has no confidence that they’ll separate or win at the catch point. So all his worst traits are magnified.
Becht isn’t even doing the little things well, setting protections for an unfamiliar offensive line with a young center, or getting the offense into the right play. Though, right now, there are no right plays for this offense because it’s so untalented without Koby Howard. That’s the only reason Taylor Mouser hasn’t landed on this list.
3. Ikaika Malloe
The buck really stops with D’Anton Lynn for giving up over 400 rushing yards, but let’s focus on the interior defensive line, which is Malloe’s department. He was hired to replace Deion Barnes, who gutted the room, replacing Barnes’s undersized gap-shooters with 300+ pounders, built to eat blocks and keep the linebackers playing fast and free.
There’s a trade-off with the pass-rush when you target those types of defensive tackles, and Penn State’s pass rush has been terrible this year. That’s survivable if the D-line does take on double teams and allow Lynn to stop the run with light boxes and be as diverse in coverage as he would like. But they were getting blown off the ball the entire night.
Kooper Ebel and Tony Rojas were not good. They were overly susceptible to all the eye-candy Chip Kelly was attempting to manipulate them with, but they were also playing with Keanu Williams, Armstrong Nnodim, and the rest of the defensive tackles in their lap all day.
Lynn refused to load the box, and that’s on him. But that’s also not how this defense was constructed, and much of that philosophy hinged on Malloe’s vision for the interior defensive line.
2. Matt Campbell
As we make our way to the top of the Penn State hierarchy, we, of course, have to land on Matt Campbell. We can talk about the roster construction, leaning far too heavily on Iowa State transfers, but even just in-game, Campbell has been a disaster. A week after blowing a 17-point lead to Wisconsin despite winning the turnover battle and getting a defensive touchdown, Penn State got run off the field. And while game-management decisions in a lopsided loss are hard to analyze, the ones Campbell did make were overly conservative for the second straight week.
On the second drive of the game, Penn State punted on 4th-and-2 from its own 44-yard line. Not a terrible decision, but leaning conservative already down 10-0 in the first quarter. Then, after finally scoring a touchdown in the second half, making the score 31-13 after a disastrous attempt at a “Philly Special,” Campbell opted to kick the ball away rather than attempting an onside kick with 7:53 remaining, down three scores.
1. Pat Kraft
It’s too early to make any sweeping proclamations about Penn State’s decision to fire Franklin one year removed from a run to the College Football Playoff and the messy coaching search that ensued and seemingly enriched most of the established coaches in the country. But those conversations are now impossible to ignore after an 0-2 start to conference play because this team that Campbell has put together is just flat-out bad.
Let’s even set aside the Franklin of it all because it felt overwhelmingly like it was time to move on and that both sides needed to wipe the slate clean. The coaching search was not handled well by Kraft and Penn State. He was intent on big-game hunting, ignoring younger, up-and-coming head coaches, maybe most notably Bob Chesney, a Northeast guy who parlayed a CFP appearance at James Madison into the UCLA job and now has the Bruins looking better than anybody could have anticipated in Year 1.
There were also top coordinators like Will Stein, who already has a marquee win on the road at Kentucky, beating Texas A&M in College Station, though that win isn’t aging particularly well. Instead, Kraft, after whiffing on a very public pursuit of BYU’s Kalani Sitake, settled on Campbell, and at least at this very moment, that’s questionable.
And in Campbell’s defense, Kraft’s drawn-out coaching search put him behind the eight ball with the 2027 recruiting class.
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