For the second season in a row, we've reached the time of year when Penn State fans are asking if the New York Yankees' famous "Pinstripe Pass" is also on offer for college football bowl season.
Because as another season filled with unmet expectations carries on, Yankee Stadium's Pinstripe Bowl is once again beginning to feel like the absolute best-case scenario destination for the Nittany Lions come December.
The 2026 season under first-year head coach Matt Campbell has followed almost the exact same pattern as the 2025 season under James Franklin: beat three non-conference cupcakes convincingly (despite not playing particularly well in any of the three games), and then drop game after game after game in Big Ten competition.
Franklin, just six games removed from a trip to the College Football Playoff semifinals, was fired after an 0-3 start in Big Ten play.
Saturday's loss against Michigan's backup quarterback dropped Campbell to 0-4, and Penn State's top win of the year is still against a team barely ranked inside the top 100 of the FPI.
Naturally, Penn State fans have grown restless, and even for as unrealistic and tiring as the whole overused "championship or bust" mentality is these days across the world of sports, it's hard to blame them.
Franklin was always criticized for never winning the "big game", even though Penn State was more often than not the underdog in those games. Then he dropped two not-so-big games, and it took less than 24 hours for Pat Kraft to pull the plug.
Between unranked Wisconsin, unranked Northwestern, and unranked Michigan, Campbell has yet to demonstrate an ability to win the not-so-big game that Franklin, up until October 2025, had historically known how to dominate.
2026 expectations were always unrealistic for Penn State
Not too long ago, Penn State was supposedly going to ride an "easy schedule" to an undefeated season and a College Football Playoff appearance as they put the Franklin era behind them.
The only "hard" games on the schedule were against USC and Michigan, and that was before Michigan showed the world their inability to win a fairly contested 60-minute football game against the same kind of Group of Five team Penn State actually does still know how to beat.
Instead, Penn State is faced with a second consecutive 0-4 start in Big Ten play, and the "winnable" games that remain on the schedule don't seem nearly as "winnable" as they did when the Nittany Lions were supposedly national championship-bound because they beat the likes of Marshall, Temple, and Buffalo.
First, the elephant in the room: Campbell's shortcomings have been undeniable.
Whether it's the conservative decision-making, the unconvincing explanations for questionable decisions and play calls, the fact that he has been loyal to a fault to a much higher percentage of his Iowa State transfers than anybody would have liked to see, or any other reason that my colleagues at Victory Bell Rings and FanSided have already discussed at much greater length, there is absolutely room for objective criticism based on how things have gone through the first seven games of the 2026 season.
What worked in the Big XII at Iowa State clearly hasn't translated to the Big Ten, even against the so-called "easy" teams, and we're not completely sure he recognizes that.
Having said that, something else can be true at the same time: he was always subject to completely unreasonable expectations.
While it's easy to look back now and make that kind of excuse-like claim, the reason those expectations were unreasonable is not necessarily because of what they were, but because of what they were based on.
Curt Cignetti 2.0 was always a pipe dream
Curt Cignetti turned Indiana around immediately, so there couldn't possibly be any excuses for Matt Campbell not to do the same at Penn State. Right?
Since that seems to be the popular narrative going around on all the Reddit posts and message boards about why Campbell is already a failure, why he doesn't deserve time to orchestrate a turnaround, why he needs to be fired ASAP, and why Pat Kraft supposedly ruined Penn State football permanently by hiring him and needs to be ousted as well, let's pump the brakes here for a second.
Yes, what Cignetti did with Indiana goes to show what is possible during the NIL and transfer portal era. You can't dispute what that undefeated 2025 run, off the back of a surprise 2024 CFP appearance, proved.
It's not as if it can't be done. But even though this new era is still relatively young, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see why that is an exception to the rule, rather than the rule.
If it were really that easy, every single team that fell short of the previous season's national title game would fire their head coach, embark upon a historic turnaround, and win the national championship within two years, amid an inevitable culture shift and an influx of new talent.
Penn State? 2026 national champions. Virginia Tech? 2026 national champions. You get the idea.
Sure, we get that Penn State is supposedly a "better" program than a school like Indiana, but what does that word "better" mean at this point? Does it have the same definition as it did 15 or 20 years ago? Did that interpretation mysteriously manage to remain the same in this new era of college football while everything else surrounding it changed?
Or is that very interpretation the reason why all those "Cignetti to Penn State" rumors were downright absurd to begin with?
Bottom line, Campbell needed time. Campbell still needs time. While the team's major struggles have absolutely warranted their own fair share of criticism, the idea that a coach needs time should not be totally invalidated straight from the get-go by the lazy "but Cignetti did it!!" line.
Just because it happened once does not make it a realistic expectation. It's an unreasonably high bar to clear, or to even come near.
Perfect storm, lack of middle ground set Penn State up for failure
Another reality of this new era is the fact that you're not going to "schedule-merchant" your way to an undefeated season, much less in a Power Four conference (or more specifically, in the Big Ten or the SEC). It's just not going to happen anymore.
In other words, even those who expected immediate success likely had a hunch that Penn State wasn't going to be a serious contender this year anyway. Amid the hype about the new coaching staff and a supposedly favorable schedule, it ended up taking the start of the now four-game losing streak to admit it.
A combination of Campbell, an allegedly "easy schedule", and the idea that somehow any new coaching hire made by Penn State was going to be Cignetti 2.0 was always a recipe for disaster and extreme disappointment.
Penn State is 1-5 in their six most recent conference home games, including 0-2 in the Campbell era. Those five losses include two White Out losses and one in which they blew a three-possession lead. All five losses featured blown second-half leads. In other words, nothing has changed from the same kind of start that ultimately got Franklin fired.
The problem is that there was never a widely accepted middle ground. Yes, it was always going to take time, but again, even an acceptable iteration of "bad" still would have looked a heck of a lot better than the on-field product we've witnessed for the past month or so.
Matt Campbell deserves time, even if he also deserves criticism
It would be foolish to turn around and say that Penn State should've kept Franklin, and if you can honestly say that after the criticism he faced, I would challenge you to ask if you're not basing that claim on recency bias and recency bias alone. Because we all know exactly what many of those same fans wanted 12 months ago.
Sure, the fact he went 4-0 against a Wisconsin team that's already beaten Campbell is extra convenient to point to, but it was always low-hanging fruit after how that game turned out.
Although neither side has particularly excelled (and that's putting it nicely) since the split, it had become clear that both parties needed to turn the page. There was no longer a feasible path forward. Criticize the way Kraft handled the coaching search all you want to, but at that moment in time, it was a coaching search that needed to happen.
That page has been turned, and we're now just seven lines into the new chapter. It hasn't been pretty; it hasn't been much different than it was during the same bitter end to Franklin's 12-year run in State College. And 0-4 is not an acceptable standard.
But to pretend that a new coach no longer deserves time to right the ship "because Cignetti did it" is about as questionable as the idea that this team was somehow going to go 12-0 with a roster full of ex-Cyclones in the Big Ten.
Sometimes it really does take patience.
Add us as a preferred source on Google