Penn State's new head coach, Matt Campbell, was caught in a tough spot, but his old players showed how much he meant to them.
Leaving a program as a head coach is never, ever easy. No matter how easy a guy like Lane Kiffin makes it look, it is always a very hard thing to do for many reasons. But, as the cliche goes, that's just business.
The business of college football sucks more times than not, and for Penn State's new head coach, Matt Campbell, he lived it this winter.
Campbell truly loved what he had going on in Ames, Iowa. He had the Iowa State Cyclones winning football games and competing at the top of college football. Well, one January day, the phone rang, and he had the opportunity to improve his career and become the head coach at one of the most storied places in all of America.
He took the job, but tried to keep all of the promises that he made to his guys who were still at Iowa State.
The good coaches have a relationship with every player on their roster, not just a surface-level relationship, a real one. When that is the case, it is natural to feel like you are leaving those guys that you poured into, but more importantly, they trusted you and poured into you, high and dry.
In the old days, when Campbell left, he would have packed his car and waved into the rearview mirror as he left for a career-changing opportunity that literally and figuratively left his guys in the dust.
In today's day and age, his guys can stay his guys.
On Andy and Ari's show on On3, Campbell talked about how he just wanted his guys to be taken care of by the next coach. He then told the story of how, in his first recruiting meeting after getting settled in, the room was full of at least 20 of the players and their families from Iowa State.
Campbell said that the experience was "overwhelming" and led him to break down. Not only did Campbell feel that he had a huge responsibility to make sure that those guys and their families were taken care of, but the fact that they sat again in front of him showed exactly what they thought of Campbell, the coach and mentor.
He hammered down the point he was making by saying that yes, a coach's job is to win football games. That is the business, that is the name of the game. However, their actual job is to take care of 18-22-year-old kids in the most critical and formative time in their lives.
A good coach leaves every room he goes into better than how he found it. A great coach can go anywhere and turn around and see a line of his players following him.
That's the type of guy that Penn State has in Matt Campbell.
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