Matt Campbell and his players openly questioning Penn State's toughness is an unexpected low

Penn State’s roster is not one of the most talented in the Big Ten. Despite its estimated cost of around $30 million, it seems to be a bottom-half roster in the conference. However, Northwestern spent considerably less on its roster this year, and while spending doesn’t necessarily equate to talent, the way the Wildcats punked the Nittany Lions 34-13 on Friday night indicates that the problems in Happy Valley are much deeper than just talent or even scheme. 

A week after first-year head coach Matt Campbell lauded his team for their “attitude, effort, and toughness” against Wisconsin, the three pillars of the culture he’s hoping to transport from Iowa State. He crushed his team in the postgame press conference for a lack of all three:

"The frustrating thing for me is the standard of what this program plays football with — the attitude, the effort, the toughness. We lacked in every way, shape and form in it.”

Matt Campbell isn’t living up to his reputation

Matt Campbell was billed as a program builder. He went to Iowa State and doubled the program’s all-time bowl wins from three to six in his 10-year tenure and, just two years ago, delivered the only double-digit winning season in program history. He did it with under-recruited players, overperforming a relative lack of resources behind development and, at least from the outside looking in, with a strong culture. 

But that toughness Campbell and his players have talked so much about was not on display as Northwestern cracked 400 yards rushing after Indiana held the Wildcats to just 32. 

"I put a lot on me, because there’s somehow some way that I didn’t get this team prepared to play the physical brand of football that we need to play," Campbell told reporters. "And it showed up on both sides, especially on the line of scrimmage.”

How the culture in Happy Valley is seemingly so rotten this early into his tenure is something of an open question just two games into Big Ten play, but it’s clearly a problem, and one of Campbell’s longest-tenured players posed a theory. 

"We just didn’t practice physical enough, and we’re going to fix that as a group as players and as coaches," Brahmer said postgame, as reported by ONSI’s Mark Wogenrich. "Everybody’s taking their own accountability, and we’re just going to stick together and change our mentality going through the week."

"In football, you don’t want to get guys injured in practice… The coaches are obviously leery about that, but sometimes when you get your backs pushed against the wall, you’ve just got to go at it.”

Penn State might already have a culture problem

Caution is understandable for a team that is already down two of its most important players for long stretches: Koby Howard and Max Granville, who is done for the year. Penn State doesn’t have the depth it needs to compete in the Big Ten, which again is understandable in the first year of Campbell’s tenure. 

But a player who has been with Campbell since 2023 at Iowa State, calling the lack of physicality in practice out so plainly, is alarming. 

This team doesn’t look tough. It doesn’t look well-coached. And its head coach is passive at every possible moment; declining to onside kick down three scores with under eight minutes left was just the latest example. 

Penn State is staring down a lost season in Year 1, wasting the easiest possible schedule in the Big Ten, and long-term, Campbell might need to gut this roster again, not just to upgrade the talent, but to finally fix the culture of a program that wildly underperformed in 2025 under James Franklin and hasn’t won a big game since about 2016.

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