Tony Rojas’s D’Anton Lynn comments say as much about Penn State’s old DCs as its new one

Matt Campbell wasn’t the only Nittany Lion who spoke at Big Ten Media Days on Tuesday. The three players he brought with him to Chicago, Rocco Becht, Anthony Donkoh, and Tony Rojas, also got a chance to share their perspective on the state of the program. 

On a segment with Big Ten Network, Rojas, the lone defensive player of the group, was asked about his new defensive coordinator, D’Anton Lynn, whom Campbell hired after his longtime DC Jon Heacock opted to retire rather than head to Happy Valley. 

Lynn, a former Nittany Lion himself, is now the fourth different defensive coordinator Rojas, a redshirt junior who missed much of last season with a torn ACL, has played for. Rojas will be counted on as a veteran leader, not just by his teammates, but by Lynn, too. And for Rojas, that was a major difference from Manny Diaz, Tom Allen, and Jim Knowles, his previous play-callers. 

“He's the first coach that, if there's a play call that we don't like, we can go and talk to him about it because he's gonna call the play that we're most comfortable with."

D’Anton Lynn’s collaborative approach is exactly what Penn State needs right now

In hindsight, one of the big mistakes of James Franklin’s final offseason at Penn State was paying Jim Knowles $3 million a year to leave Ohio State and run his defense. Franklin acknowledged as much this offseason. Sure, in an all-in year, adding a proven championship-caliber DC seems like a smart move, especially when all the talent is in place. 

However, Knowles runs a notoriously complex defense, which took time for Ohio State to fully integrate. Even with a veteran group in Happy Valley, it was obvious that the Nittany Lions weren’t fully grasping the system, even by their midseason collapse. Now, Tom Allen wasn’t perfect in 2024 either, so letting him leave for Clemson was defensible, but Knowles was clearly the wrong fit. 

Allen and Diaz produced top-10 units during their tenures in Happy Valley, so it’s hard to criticize their more rigid approach, but they entered the program under starkly different circumstances than Lynn. 

Now, Penn State doesn’t have a veteran group that has played together for much of its career. It is essentially stitching together half of the Iowa State defense with half of the Penn State defense, with a few outside transfers thrown in the mix as well. And, to add to the complexity, it’s a new defense for all of them, aside from Siale Taupaki and Keanu Williams, who played for Lynn when he was the DC at UCLA in 2023. 

That is not an easy task for a coordinator. Coming into a new program under a head coach you’ve never worked with before and teaching your system to an entirely unfamiliar group. So, it’s smart that Lynn is willing to be flexible and is willing to run what Rojas and the other leaders of the defense are comfortable with. 

Offensively, Campbell brought Taylor Mouser with him to call plays, along with Rocco Becht and his top five leading pass-catchers from last year. So, the playbook is wide open on that side of the ball. 

Defensively, things may need to be a bit more vanilla, especially early. And that’s okay, because Penn State has enough talent to keep its head above water. 

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow