The winner of Penn State football’s cold and wet Blue-White Practice on Saturday in Beaver Stadium? Coach Matt Campbell, hands-down.
Campbell and his Nittany Lions got in a 15th and final practice, with drills, live kicking game opportunities, 7-on-7 drills and a bunch of 11-on-11 drives. All in front of a live audience. All without injury.
Bottom-line: The set-up created no real — or unreal, for that matter — expectations for the 2026 Nittany Lions, beyond what has already been in place for Penn State’s new head coach, who was 72-55 in 10 seasons at Iowa State, and was a three-time Big 12 Coach of the Year. That’s saying something for a program that a year ago had national title aspirations, then flamed out and fired its long-time head coach after a six-game dumpster fire of a start on what was supposed to be the Road to No. 1.
Now, folks are singing Kumbaya — on the message boards, in the soggy stands and in the Nittany Lion locker room. In many ways, Penn State’s glorified practice session on Saturday was just another opportunity to work on the blending of Cyclone transfers with a host of Nittany Lions who stayed, some new recruits and some other non-ISU transfers who have arrived in Happy Valley from such outposts as Christopher Newport, Tiffin, St. Francis, Texas State, Marietta College and Wagner. Penn State’s official 2026 spring roster features this breakdown of players’ roots:
+ 25 – Pennsylvania
+ 24 – Iowa State
+ 4 – State College
+ 2 each from – UCLA, Mississippi State
+ 1 each form – Ohio State, Syracuse, Colorado, Boston College, West Virginia
Talk about a blended family.
A small and hardy Penn State fanbase of about 10,000 actually turned out for the practice session in Beaver Stadium. (The west side stands, under construction, were closed.) Many more stayed out in the parking lots, under party tents, inside RVs and bundled up. By the end of the practice, about a third of the Beaver Stadium “crowd” — I walked the corridors and checked — were hanging out in the bowels and concourses of the stadium, staying dry and waiting for the free autograph session after the practice.
Campbell addressed the media afterwards, a few scant minutes after the practice was done (in stark contrast to his predecessor). CMC offered a few particulars about spring drills and where his team stands — 141 days since he was hired and 133 days until the Nittany Lions open the Matt Campbell Era on Sept. 5 in Beaver Stadium against Marshall.
Campbell, with drops of water dripping from the soggy brim of his soaked ballcap amid a dry, thick blue towel around his shoulders, answered a number of questions. His clothing was rain-soaked, but one thing that Campbell is not is all wet. Here, we’ll focus on his five answers that provided a broader view of where the coach thinks his program stands, and is also headed, 19 weeks before the season-opener:
1. HOW WAS PRACTICE, DESPITE THE RAIN? “I couldn’t have asked for better circumstances today. Fundamentally, have we grown? You got to have some precision and detail about yourself, especially in this kind of weather. To be honest, it was great to watch our guys execute out there. I thought we threw and caught the ball pretty well, had the ability to function in special teams really well, and the ability to be disciplined in the moment today. I thought that was a great opportunity for us to at least see where our growth and maturity is.”
2. WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT PENN STATE FANS’ SUPPORT? “To be able to play in a downpour today and to see this crowd and the amount of people that came out to support our football program, {is good to] just to think every opportunity to show our young men and their program how special it is to play here at Penn State and what it means.
“I don’t know if it’s anything that I learned, because I think it’s one of the things that I’ve been absolutely grateful for from the day that I’ve touched down here — it is understanding it’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than our players. What we get to represent, what we are training to be able to represent every fall Saturday is really powerful. So is being able to do the kids clinic last night. It was unbelievable — we had almost 500 kids and in our indoor facility. Then, being able to watch and see and feel the energy walking into the stadium today. There’s not many places that you get to be able to be a part of something like this.”
3. HOW HAS THE TEAM JELLED? “Again, I give our staff and our kids a lot of credit. The last 16, 17 weeks, there has been a lot of change. To have the ability to really come together, feel like we had the ability to get a base offense and base defense, really understand what we are, evaluate our football team — those are things we feel very confident about ourselves in. The reality is — we all know this — that the next 16 weeks of summer and fall camp, they’re going to be critical for this team to grow themselves forward. I thought it has been a really positive 15 spring practices.”
4. WHERE CAN YOUR TEAM GROW THE MOST? “I still think the biggest growth we can make is our discipline and detail, to be honest with you, in everything we do. You know, can we continue to have great discipline and detail in our academics and how we finish the classroom? Can we have great discipline in detail and some humility, myself and all of us, in terms of evaluating what we just did? I think the end piece of it is probably most important. Like the storms coming, we’re going to have adversity.”
5. WHAT’S NEXT? “We’ll meet with every player Tuesday. We’ve already met with almost every player. And then on Wednesday through the finals, I’ll meet with everybody. And I think the key is everybody being aligned to where’s the growth? What do you have to do? And then our coaches will recruit, and then when we come back at the end of May and all of June, we’ll put a lot of time and effort into it schematically. Where shall we have to go? What do we have to be prepared with as we come back July and August and really try to pound away as we kind of get ready for the early part of the season?”
