Pat Kraft has to be feeling the pressure after Matt Campbell’s disastrous 0-2 Big Ten start

Pat Kraft arrived at Penn State from Boston College, replacing Sandy Barbour after she announced her retirement. Until 2025, Kraft’s biggest moves had been pushing for a major renovation to Beaver Stadium and hiring men’s basketball coach Mike Rhoades, which has proven to be disastrous, though largely due to a lack of investment. 

The most successful programs at Penn State during Kraft’s tenure were largely led by head coaches he inherited from Barbour’s tenure: Cael Sanderson, Katie Schumacher-Cawley, and James Franklin. He took his big swing last year, firing Franklin just six games into the year after a 3-3 start, only one season removed from a trip to the College Football Playoff semifinal. 

Now, two games into Matt Campbell’s first season, Penn State is staring down another 3-3 start after falling to Northwestern 34-13 on Friday night, with USC heading to Happy Valley in Week 6, and is seemingly in a worse spot than it was a year ago, even as the season was spiraling after it began with national championship expectations. 

Campbell is facing more pressure than he ever did at Iowa State, scrutinized for his overly conservative game management and the jarring lack of talent on the roster, heavily constituted of transplants from Ames. 

However, that pressure isn’t just reserved for the head coach of the 3-2 team that looks to potentially be the worst to don the blue and white since 2004, when Joe Paterno missed a bowl game for the second straight year at 4-7. There might be even more pressure on the man who hired him, not just for that decision, but for the dysfunctional process that led him to it. 

This fan in Evanston on Friday night certainly thinks Kraft deserves the added pressure:

It’s too early to declare Matt Campbell a bad hire, but the conversation has started

This isn’t necessarily even about the decision to hire Matt Campbell, which, in a vacuum, made a good amount of sense. He’s been a successful coach at an under-resourced program, significantly punching above his weight, so with better resources, he should be more successful. 

One of the problems is that his resources aren’t close to the level of his primary competition in the Big Ten. Penn State spent $29-32 million on this roster, according to The Athletic, while Ohio State and Oregon are spending around $50 million in 2026. There are fundamental differences between Penn State and those two powerhouses that are hard to overcome, but the gap is much bigger than it should be. 

That has to be Kraft’s biggest priority, but while everyone else is spending on their roster, Penn State is in the midst of a $700 million renovation to Beaver Stadium while raising the price to watch the inferior product it is putting on the field. 

Then, there’s the fact that Penn State is outspending Northwestern this year, and it clearly isn’t close to being on Northwestern’s level, which does say a lot about the coach Kraft hired. A coach whose team allowed over 400 yards rushing in Week 5 and who didn’t onside kick down three scores with a little under eight minutes left and who punted from the +43 with 6:55 left in the third quarter down 17 points. 

None of that is the worst part, either. The worst part is that Kraft was so hell-bent on hiring a big-name coach that he overlooked up-and-coming candidates like Will Stein and Bob Chesney as he systematically secured extensions for Curt Cignetti, Matt Rhule, Mike Elko, Brent Key, Clark Lea, Eli Drinkwitz, and Jeff Brohm before whiffing on his very public pursuit of BYU’s Kalani Sitake. 

That left Penn State, despite being the first of many teams to fire its coach in 2025, without a coach when early signing day arrived in early December, and ultimately left Campbell scrambling to salvage a 16-player class primarily constructed of Iowa State signees. 

Even if you leave room for Campbell to turn this bad start around and build Penn State into a program that exceeds the ceiling Franklin continually bumped his head on, which, though it feels considerably less likely than it did eight days ago, is still possible, that’s still a horribly flawed process. 

If Campbell tenure does continue to trend in this direction and goes south quickly, Kraft will likely be shown the door before Campbell, and while that’s too far down the line to speculate about right now, that would inarguably be the correct order of operations.

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