The runway at State College Regional Airport — all 6,701 feet of it, a length of over 20 football fields — was more than long enough to accommodate the Cessna Citation Latitude jet that carried Matt Campbell, his wife Erica, and their children from Ames, Iowa to Happy Valley on Sunday.
When Campbell — Penn State’s next head football coach, pending final Board of Trustees approval on Monday morning — got off the plane, he was wearing a blue jacket emblazoned with “Penn State Nittany Lions” on the back. And now, he carries a dazed, fatigued and finally mostly ebullient fanbase on his shoulders.
Touchdown was at 4:35 p.m. — in all senses of the word. As soon as the 46-year-old Campbell stepped onto the tarmac, he was met by an exultant Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft, who thrust his arms into the air, slapped hands with Campbell and embraced the new coach with the squeeze of a man who was given new life.
No doubt about it: Campbell, a four-time conference coach of the year in the MAC and Big 12 who was 72-55 in 10 years at Iowa State and 35-15 in five years at Toledo before that, arrived just in the nick of time.
His plane touched down exactly eight weeks and three hours after Kraft went into the Lasch Building — the home of the Penn State football program — on Sunday, Oct. 12, climbed the stairs to James Franklin’s office and then fired the 12-year head coach. It was on the heels of Penn State’s 22-21 loss the previous day to Northwestern, the Nittany Lions’ third defeat in 15 days and their second in eight days to a team that was as an underdog by several touchdowns. That launched Kraft on a 54-day odyssey of a dizzying coaching search that took him across the country, including stops in Utah, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey and…at long last, Iowa.
Last Sunday, it appeared that Kraft had found his man in BYU coach Kalani Sitake. But, at the 11th minute of the 11th hour, the Provo community and the BYU athletic department rallied around Sitake, a former BYU football player, and convinced him to stay. Lots of dough from such power Cougar boosters as Crumbl founder Jason McGowan turned the marathon search into what appeared to be a Kraftastrophe.
Then along came Campbell. Kraft & Co. had reached out to the Iowa State coach early in the search. Or so they thought. Instead, their messages went to Campbell’s former agent. So, they moved on.
Last week, after Sitake fell through, they tried again. And finally they made the right connect.
Which brings us to Sunday afternoon, as a crowd of over 150 fans watched Campbell’s arrival at the airport from behind a chain link fence. The very vocal group was a mixture of the most ardent Nittany Lions boosters — two-thirds were Penn State students and one-third were hardcore PSU fans who were most definitely card-carrying members of the AARP. The Nittany Lion mascot was there, plus several Penn State PR folks and athletics administrators.
After Campbell and his family were whisked off to campus, the boisterous crowd surrounded Kraft when he made his way through the private jet terminal. As he headed to his car, Kraft shouted to the throng of students: “Let’s go win a national championship.”
A national title. That is why Campbell is in State College. And Franklin is not. Over the past several years, as he did more with less in Ames, Campbell had been courted by countless colleges and numerous NFL teams. But he always stood pat. Until he met Pat.
For Campbell, an Ohio native who played collegiately at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, after one season at Pitt, the timing was finally right.
“This was entirely a personal decision that [Matt] was wrestling with about, ‘Is this the time to go home?’” longtime Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard told a group of reporters Friday. “He’s got a mother who has cancer. Erica’s mother has been sick. Their eldest daughter, Katie, is going to school in college next year out in D.C. So, the opportunity for all of them to be there. He was just abundantly clear from the get-go with us that he didn’t want us spending any time on that because that didn’t matter to him. This was a personal decision for him on a family level.”
The official hiring of Campbell is not yet in the can. On Monday morning, the Penn State Board of Trustees’ Committee on Equity and Human Resources must approve his contract — reported to be in the neighborhood of $10 million annually for eight years. It’s a chip shot. Committee members include former Nittany Lion football players Dan Delligatti and Brandon Short, and Penn State soccer legend Ali Kreiger.
Pending approval, at noon Monday Penn State president Neeli Bendapudi and Kraft will introduce Campbell as Penn State’s 17th head football coach at a press conference inside Beaver Stadium. After that, Campbell will get to work. He has a lot to do.
