After phasing Marcus Neal Jr. out of the safety rotation and benching him flat-out in the Week 6 loss to USC, head coach Matt Campbell hinted that Neal could be the next Iowa State transfer to move to a new position on defense. Now, coming out of the bye week, that’s become a reality.
Campbell told reporters after practice on Wednesday that they moved Neal to off-ball linebacker during the bye week, adding depth to a position group that has struggled to find a steady partner for Tony Rojas and is lacking depth after Alex Tatsch suffered a season-ending injury.
“It allows his talent and his ability to be at a place where we can use it even more,” Campbell said, more than a few weeks too late.
Penn State wasted half the season pounding square pegs into round holes on defense
It’s not just the structure and alignment of the defense on the chalkboard that makes the 3-3-5 defense that Matt Campbell’s Iowa State teams ran under his longtime DC Jon Heacock so different from the 4-2-5 system Campbell’s Penn State team has in place under first-year DC D’Anton Lynn; it’s the types of players who fit into that structure.
That’s a particular issue for a program that imported seven transfers from the 3-3-5 defense in Ames and, after Heacock’s retirement, had to find a way to make them work under Lynn.
In the offseason, there was some recognition that not only were the second- and third-level players making the jump from the Big 12 to the Big Ten, but that they were being asked to cover much more space against superior athletes. 6-foot-4, 242-pound linebacker Caleb Bacon moved to defensive end, but that wasn’t enough.
The first half of the season proved that not only is Penn State’s defense lacking athleticism for the Big Ten level, but it’s asking players to play positions they’re simply not equipped for. So, the shuffling has continued with Neal, and if Penn State had more options at linebacker, Kooper Ebel and Cael Brezina might be phased out of a MIKE linebacker role they’re no longer equipped for, as sideline-to-sideline speed becomes almost a requirement in a 4-2-5.
Ebel and Brezina were perfect to play downhill and plug gaps in the run game as a 3-3-5 MIKE, especially with Neal practically acting as another linebacker. Neal played 432 of his 697 snaps in 2025 in the box. He was a linebacker, but for some reason, Campbell and Lynn had him play the majority of his snaps as a deep safety, and he didn’t stand a chance in coverage.
In some cases, as with Ebel and Brezina, there’s nowhere else to move them other than to move on from them this offseason. But with Bacon and Neal, it was fairly obvious where they should be playing in this type of defense. Bacon moved in fall camp; Neal should have too.
Zion Tracy is likely to stick at safety with Marcus Neal at LB
Because they didn’t move Neal and trusted Jeremiah Cooper, who has been just as bad a safety but doesn’t have the body type to make a position change, Zion Tracy also had to make a midseason position change, away from nickel and back to safety to stabilize the position.
Lynn confirmed on Tuesday that Tracy was moved to safety against USC because of the Trojans’ scheme, but stayed there against Michigan because “he’s a guy that we trust at that position.” So he’s likely there to stay.
This current iteration, with Bacon on the edge, Neal at linebacker, and Tracy at safety, is probably the best possible deployment of the available talent on defense. How it took Penn State so long to realize it needed to make these changes is baffling. It also might be one of the biggest reasons to question Campbell’s ability to adapt quickly enough to build a College Football Playoff-caliber program in the fast-paced NIL and transfer portal era.
For now, he gets a mulligan. It was a tough transition, and the staff was hired with little time to prepare for the portal, and Heacock’s retirement seemingly threw a bit of a wrench in the plans. But if he doesn’t spend this offseason correcting those personnel mistakes with aggressive moves in the portal, he’s out of breakfast balls.
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