Matt Campbell’s tenure at Penn State could not possibly be off to a worse start. The Nittany Lions are 3-3 and 0-3 in Big Ten play after a 31-23 loss to USC on Saturday night in front of the biggest crowd in Beaver Stadium history.
After the loss, Campbell began with an appeal to the fanbase before running back his staple postgame press conference clichés, saying, “I think my disappointment is that we can’t give them the result that they deserve. But the reality is we will, and we will find a pathway forward.”
Penn State fans are all-too-familiar with that type of talk around, just six games into Campbell’s tenure. Another comment that will sound familiar immediately followed: “We do have great humans in that locker room that stand for what’s right, and there was growth forward. We’re not where we need to be yet, but we are growing forward, and we’ll demand a pathway forward.”
Out of that mess of coach speak, the phrase, “ stand for what’s right,” jumped out at me. It sounded like nails on a chalkboard.
Not because I think college football coaches should abandon their morality at the altar of victory. But because the things Campbell is seemingly juxtaposing his team with are simply the mechanisms by which you build a championship-caliber college football team in the NIL and revenue-sharing era. And in the process, they’re the mechanisms currently enriching a long-exploited, primarily minority labor force on which college football and coaches like Matt Campbell have accumulated their wealth.
There’s no valor in losing the “right way”
Campbell is very much feeding into the framing of “right” and “wrong” that the framers of the Protect College Sports Act, a bill designed to limit the earning potential, freedom of movement, and leverage of a labor force without any input from that labor force while reestablishing the exploitative power structures of college sports and tilting the balance of power back to the coaches, universities, and most importantly, protecting the value proposition of the sport’s media partners.
There’s nothing wrong with building a team through the transfer portal, which Campbell had to do this offseason as he imported much of his roster from Iowa State, by the way. When Campbell saw a more lucrative coaching opportunity at a higher level available to him, he jumped at it. That’s his right to do as much as it is for college football players.
There’s nothing wrong with players making millions of dollars to play college football; it’s a billion-dollar industry and has been for a long time on the back of unpaid players. For them to get a share and exercise the leverage that has been established for them by lawsuits deeming the NCAA’s amateurism rules illegal is “right” from the perspective of the labor class, which both the millionaire 19-year-olds and almost certainly you reading this are a part of.
There is value in players staying put to earn their degrees. But if, to that player, that doesn’t outweigh the value of leaving for a more lucrative, or potentially more lucrative opportunity, who is Campbell or Ted Cruz to frame that as what’s “wrong” with college sports? That’s capitalism. It’s just capitalism in a truly competitive free market working to the benefit of the labor force, so it’s scary.
Matt Campbell must embrace the "new way" to fix Penn State
The coaches, like Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, who have clutched their pearls in the face of change in college football, are getting passed by. So, beyond my frustration with the disingenuous framing of “right” and “wrong” in college sports, there’s a fear that Campbell clinging to “what’s right” might just mean Penn State got the wrong guy.
And maybe that’s not what Campbell meant by his “what’s right” comments. I’ll leave room for that possibility. But what great injustice is college football facing right now? What else would lead a coach to say “what’s right” or talk about building a program “the right way” as Campbell so often did this offseason?
Whether they realize it or not, what coaches mean when they say that is “the old way” and, unfortunately for Campbell, Swinney, and even Nick Saban, one of the biggest mouthpieces for the PCSA, who left the sport just as the new era took hold, you can’t win that way.
That’s not the reason Penn State is bad this year. Campbell was hired after the early signing period, and his late start forced him to be overly reliant on his former Iowa State players to build his new roster. But if he doesn’t adapt this offseason and embrace the portal to overhaul this roster, it will be the reason Penn State is forced to undergo a multi-year rebuild in the era when Curt Cignetti turned Indiana into a 16-0 national champion in Year 2, and Bob Chesney has UCLA humming in Year 1.
Add us as a preferred source on Google