
AMES, Iowa — So much has changed around Matt Campbell, but the head coach’s office has not. When Iowa State completed the $90 million expansion of its football facility in 2021, absent from the list of state-of-the-art features were new offices for the coaching staff. He saw no reason to relocate.
As he sat down on his same old leather couch in his same old office on a Wednesday morning in April, Campbell was reminded he has now entered Year 8 at Iowa State. He responded with a grin and added, “Shockingly.”
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“It’s completely unreal, to be honest with you,” Campbell said. “In a lot of ways, it still feels like you’re in Year 1 or 2 or 3 of the program.”
Maybe that’s because he’s still just 43. Maybe it’s this turbulent era of college athletics. Or maybe it’s that parental feeling kicking in, that the days are long but the years are short.
It’s hard to believe Campbell is still here, too.
His is the classic story of a rising coach who accepted a challenging job and inspired a team to start believing. The underdog started pulling off upsets, turning mediocre into magic on the journey to becoming a contender. He became a hot name in the coaching carousel, kept getting job offers and kept saying no.
The blueprint for The Process was clearly laid out throughout the rise: Build it the right way, win on the margins, be the best version of ourselves. Campbell surrounded himself with the right coaches and players and made it all come true. In 2020, the Cyclones reached the Big 12 championship game and won the Fiesta Bowl. They received preseason top-10 hype entering 2021 with Brock Purdy, Breece Hall and 19 starters returning. It was their big moment. They went 7-6.
Then came a rebuilding year with a young squad and a far more humbling 4-8 finish. Campbell faced a moment of truth. There were enough losses in a row and enough things going wrong to make a coach question whether he can fix it. Campbell made painful staff changes. He says he needed to “realign” his program.
“It was gut-wrenching in every way, shape and form,” Campbell said.
Sustaining success in college football has never felt more difficult. It’s why most head coaches in his seat would have moved on to bigger and better by now. Campbell doesn’t think like those guys. Maybe he should have. But here he is in Year 8, back in this office, back to underdog status. Except it has always felt that way for the Cyclones, even with their most talented teams. How do they get the magic back?
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“You’re always gonna have to go up the rough side of the mountain here,” Campbell said. “You’re gonna have to do the really hard things to have great success. I think it’s one thing I love about here. There are no shortcuts to greatness here.”
Campbell couldn’t hold back the tears on Senior Day. The emotion spilled out as he hugged his captains — Charlie Kolar, Greg Eisworth, Mike Rose and Purdy — before their final game at Jack Trice Stadium in 2021.
The coach had deep affection for that group. They ushered in a new level of national relevance at Iowa State. They went out in style on that Friday night with a 48-14 rout of TCU. It felt like a fitting ending for all.
Despite all that pro talent, the Cyclones had kept ending up in close games and didn’t win enough of them. Something was a little off. They didn’t play great team football, not consistently. They would hit a lull for a quarter or half that proved costly. Wins started to feel like a relief. Campbell was criticized late in the season for saying winning the Big 12 was never his goal. Players backed him because they knew what he meant: In their program, success came from never focusing on the end result. Still, the end result of 2021 was a letdown.
The timing might have been right to exit, but Campbell came back eager to keep building.
“We’ve set out to do something here, and we’ve done a lot of firsts,” Campbell told The Athletic last spring. “I think there’s still a lot out there that wakes you up every day and you’re springing to the office like we’re on the chase and we’re coming after you and we’re gonna try to get ourselves to the top of the mountain.”
No one game foreshadowed how rough the Cyclones’ 2022 season would finish. They didn’t know they were doomed. Iowa State started 3-0 and finally beat Iowa. Big 12 play opened with a tight loss to Baylor, but the Kansas game was more troubling. Running back Jirehl Brock exited with an ankle injury after his first carry. He was never fully healthy the rest of the year. Iowa State missed three field goals and lost by 3.
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It only got worse. The Cyclones endured eight losses over a two-month stretch. Six losses came by one-score margins. Nine games were within one score in the fourth quarter. They found excruciating ways to lose. Couldn’t score against Kansas State. A failed game-winning drive at Texas. Too many turnovers against Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. More missed kicks against Texas Tech.
“Those were some gut punches,” assistant coach Nate Scheelhaase said. “They were some low blows.”
Iowa State leaned on one of the best defenses in the country, a unit that finished No. 1 in the Big 12 in most statistical categories and was allowing 16.5 points per game entering the season finale. But the offense struggled mightily, scoring 14 points or less in seven games. The Cyclones had an inexperienced quarterback in Hunter Dekkers and an unreliable run game. They’d also never dealt with as many injuries as they did in 2022.
Yet every week, they were close. Coaches and players swear the locker room never got dysfunctional. “People outside probably think everything was hectic and everybody was against each other,” cornerback T.J. Tampa said. “It was really the opposite. It was good vibes. Everybody just kept pushing each other like, ‘We’re gonna get this.’” Campbell called it one of his most rewarding seasons yet and praised “some of the absolute greatest player-driven leadership I’ve ever seen.” Anthony Johnson Jr., O’Rien Vance, Xavier Hutchinson and the seniors ensured a young group stayed unified and kept fighting.
“Even with the injuries we had,” Campbell said, “you never felt like we never had an opportunity or this thing’s gonna tank or we’re not gonna be able to swing it around.”
Even in the finale, a road game against No. 2 TCU, they believed they could win. The Horned Frogs destroyed them 62-14 in the most lopsided loss of the Campbell era.
It validated a concern that had been on Campbell’s mind for more than a year: Iowa State was falling behind.
Campbell needed to fix The Process. The week following the TCU game was one of the toughest of his career.
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“He was sick to his stomach,” Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard said.
Staff stability has long been an essential element of Iowa State’s success. Many of Campbell’s assistants came with him from Toledo. They’ve all turned down opportunities to take other jobs. For Campbell, it wasn’t that they were 4-8 and weren’t going to a bowl game. It was how they got there. The way he describes it: “Everything has to be aligned to where you want to go.”
Staffers say the relationship between Campbell and offensive coordinator Tom Manning had become strained. After the Cyclones’ offense finished last in the Big 12 and No. 113 nationally in scoring, the two agreed it was time for a change. Campbell played with and coached Manning at Mount Union. They’ve been tight for 20 years and coworkers for 12. It was a difficult breakup. Manning has since re-joined the Indianapolis Colts staff. No less painful was moving on from offensive line coach Jeff Myers, who has been with Campbell since 2010 as a player, grad assistant and coach and is now at Memphis. Getting that unit right has been a struggle in recent years.
“It was really hard,” Campbell said, “because of how much you care about the people and how much you know they’ve had a great impact on the program.”
The most important change came in strength and conditioning. Dave Andrews was hired in 2020 and did a masterful job training the team during the pandemic. “We may never go to the Fiesta Bowl without him,” defensive coordinator Jon Heacock said. He took a different approach — maintenance over development –— and it worked. The mission in 2021 was trying to best serve the team’s proven players, keep them healthy and bring out their best on Saturdays. But that mentality moved them too far in the wrong direction.
“We went away from serving the team and the mission of the development of a bigger, faster, stronger team,” Campbell said. “We need to bench, squat, clean and grow and develop these 18- to 22-year-olds who are three-star guys and make them into four- and five-star guys.”
He started to notice the physical difference between Iowa State and its Big 12 opponents was a problem again.
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“We felt like by Year 2 or 3 here, we’d kind of caught up,” Campbell said. “Now all the sudden we’re back to where we were in Year 1. I think the telling sign for us was TCU. That team physically looked completely different than they did a year ago. To me, that doesn’t take talent. That’s not recruiting. That’s development. That’s being aligned with nutrition and strength and conditioning. I blame myself as much as anybody. It’s my responsibility to make sure that’s happening.”
Going through with those conversations felt surreal to Campbell and almost numbing. He deeply cares about these coaches and their families. “I felt like I failed them,” he said. The head coach talked through his decisions with his AD. If you’re looking at the same room of people every year, Pollard noted, things can get stale. That doesn’t make the changes sting any less.
“If you’re going to make these changes and it’s not hard, you probably need to exit stage left,” Pollard added, “because you’re probably not a good human being.”
It was a stressful, uncomfortable time for this tight-knit staff. Heacock, their longtime defensive coordinator, has been through it before as the head coach at Youngstown State.
“Being the head coach is a lonely seat,” Heacock said. “Nobody understands it unless you’ve been that guy. When things don’t go good, it gets real lonely. Because it’s your fault. You’re the head coach, so it’s your fault.”
The decision on the next offensive coordinator was easy. Scheelhaase was ready for a promotion after five years on staff and is a rising star who could someday be Campbell’s successor. He’s overseeing an offensive staff that’s almost entirely new after USF hired quarterbacks coach Joel Gordon. Campbell chose Northern Iowa’s Ryan Clanton for the offensive line job, North Dakota State’s Noah Pauley to coach receivers and Indiana Wesleyan’s Jordan Langs to coach running backs and special teams. It’s a young crew that brings new ideas to the table.
Campbell involved his players in each search. When team leaders got off a video conference interview with Reid Kagy, several asked Campbell, How soon can we get him here? Kagy, a former Mount Union player, was an assistant strength coach for the Cyclones from 2016 to 2018, worked at Oregon and had a successful stint as Boise State’s director of sports performance. Five months in, Campbell says his team already looks “completely different” thanks to Kagy’s offseason program.
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“There’s not one person who’s gonna say it’s been bad,” Tampa said. “It’s been perfect.”
Offseasons like these are in some ways the cost of staying as long as Campbell has. Building a staff, roster and culture is invigorating. Holding it all together is arduous. Success can conceal problems and create ego issues. In this business, there is such a thing as staying too long.
But for Campbell, it’s getting harder to leave.
When Campbell was 32, he became the youngest head coach in the FBS. He jokes that he “for sure wasn’t ready for it” back then. And he admits he cared a little too much about chasing the next job and climbing the coaching ladder.
He outgrew that. At this point, just 12 Power 5 head coaches have been in their current job longer. There were 28 coaching hires after the 2015 season. Only seven have not moved on or been fired. Just one Power 5 coach hired in that cycle has won more games than Campbell: Georgia’s Kirby Smart.
The speculation about Campbell’s next move began as soon as Iowa State started winning in 2017. The longer he does this, the more he appreciates what he has. It feels like everything is changing in his sport, but he can still do it his way at Iowa State. He doesn’t have to compromise.
“It is our job to build a program that loves, cares, serves, empowers and inspires young people to reach their full potential,” he said last year. “That’s really what our job is. The No. 1 thing is still that these are 18-year-old young men and it’s our job to help them become 22-year-old men. That’s our responsibility, but it has gotten skewed.”
Campbell feels the last three years have been testing him. All the time he spent at home in 2020 led him to reflect on his purpose. “What it helped me figure out is, man, what are you about? What do you want to gain out of this journey?” he said. Most of all, he wants to be a great husband and father. He’s grateful Ames is a place where he can have it all. He can coach a Thursday practice and still make it to his daughter’s softball game that night.
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When he has been contacted about vacancies, he listens carefully to how others sell their program. Campbell has an extremely narrow view of what he considers a better job. He’s not going anywhere where he can’t do it the “right way” as he sees it. He has already made more money than he ever dreamed, and it has never been about that. Campbell almost talks himself out of these opportunities to a fault, leaving even his longtime staffers to wonder whether there’s another job that actually fits.
Can you build a program that challenges Georgia and Alabama without going all-in on NIL spending and the transfer portal? Can you be a more selective recruiter at schools like Ohio State or Texas and not sign top-10 classes? Can you have the same connection with players and sense of purpose as an NFL coach?
These high-profile jobs he’s supposed to covet tend to come with a win-at-all-costs kind of existence. Sure, Campbell wants to compete for national titles. He just can’t help but wonder whether it’s possible to do so without betraying his values.
“Can you just try to be who you say you are?” he said. “That’s really what it’s been about for me.”
At the end of December, Campbell flew to Las Vegas. He couldn’t pass up a chance to watch Purdy play. His quarterback leading the San Francisco 49ers to the NFC title game felt validating. His staff turned defensive end Will McDonald IV into a first-round pick, something Iowa State hadn’t produced since 1973. Campbell and his assistants have developed some of the best players in school history, almost all of them three-stars. They haven’t been hit hard by unexpected transfer attrition. They must be doing something right.
The Cyclones are playing in a Big 12 that’s about to lose Oklahoma and Texas. They’re about to enter the era of the 12-team College Football Playoff. From that standpoint, there’s more upside than ever. Campbell’s veteran teams will have a shot to play on the biggest stage of all. How about a frigid December home playoff game in the snow? It’s not impossible.
Campbell believes he has the foundation to build something special again. It starts with the locker room culture he witnessed last season and how players stuck together and stayed the course. “I think what it did, and what it will do for the future of Iowa State football, is it got the most important part right,” he said. The coaches love this freshman class, too. Somehow, even in a 4-8 year, they signed a group that could eventually be as good as the 2021 seniors. JJ Kohl, Ben Brahmer, Jack Sadowsky, Abu Sama, Beni Ngoyi and the rest will be leading sooner than later.
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As challenging as the last two seasons have been, there’s nowhere Campbell would rather be. He has to pour everything into this every day, he says, or he won’t get it fixed. That’s why he’s still here after seven years. He knows no other way. All those close losses and tough changes? They’ve only deepened his dedication to this job.
“From Day 1, I feel like that’s what they’ve said about this place: You can’t sustain it. It’s not doable,” Campbell said. “The more things change, the more they say it can’t happen. You’ve got to be uncommon here and be willing to do it in an uncommon way. That’s the thing I love about this place. I know this program is really what I believe, or at least how I believe you should run a college football program. We still get to do that here.
“It’s not easy. We know it’s not easy. But I think I relish that it’s not easy.”
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories examining the 2023 college football season’s most intriguing programs. Which teams are primed to break out? Struggling to find consistency? What’s gone right — or wrong — and what comes next? Also in this series:
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: David K Purdy, Matthew Visinsky, Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
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