It’s been a roller coaster week for Penn State on the recruiting trail. Just two days after losing out on four-star QB Peter Bourque to James Franklin and Virginia Tech, the Nittany Lions landed their 2027 QB, Will Wood.
While Bourque is the more highly-rated player, Wood appears to be a perfect fit for Matt Campbell’s program. It’s a program that the two-time state champion from Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood, Massachusetts, thinks he can do a lot more winning with.
“Relating it to my high school, I feel that is the No. 1 thing you have to have to succeed, a good culture. Now that he’s at Penn State,” Wood said of Campbell in a post-commitment interview with Steve Wiltfong of Rivals, “he’ll be able to bring in the talent around that, and I think they’ll be a perennial Top 10 team.”
Will Wood thinks Campbell has laid the foundation of a consistent contender
A perennial top 10 team has become the expectation at Penn State. It’s an expectation that James Franklin established, hoisting the program out of its darkest time and quickly competing for championships. He was so successful at rebuilding that it ultimately cost him his job because he couldn’t get over the hump.
Now, that task falls to Campbell, who is intimately familiar with leading a program to punch above its weight, but like Franklin, has never parlayed that success into a championship. That was at Iowa State. Now, if Campbell brings the same identity he had in Ames to Happy Valley, with top-tier resources, that could be the perfect recipe.
That’s what Wood sees. Beyond his expectations for the program, Wood also hinted at Campbell’s desire to build a strong culture in a place that just last season fractured under the weight of immense expectations.
“His No. 1 priority is finding guys that fit his culture and his culture is always going to be strong,” Wood told Wiltfong.
That’s how Campbell found his way to Wood. He may not be the highest-rated QB in the country, 29th at his position in the 2027 class and 490th overall. But Campbell and his staff went all-out to land Wood after offering him on April 20 because they identified the 6-foot-2, 220-pound passer as the right guy for their culture and their system.
The fact that Wood understands the importance of finding the right cultural fit only reinforces that Campbell got the right guy. Now, it falls on Wood as one of the centerpieces of Penn State's 2027 class to continue building out that culture, as he told Joe Smeltzer of Nittany Sports Now.
"The staff was fired up,” Wood told Smeltzer. “Coach Campbell told me to enjoy the day and then in a day we were going to sit down on the phone to go through a plan of guys we have to go get to join this class.”
Penn State currently has 18 commits in the 2027 class, and the fifth-ranked class in the country.
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