UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Trusting the process is what seems to be an overused cliche in sports and in life, but at Penn State it’s exactly what’s allowed the team to go from the basement of the Big Ten to bowl eligible in three short weeks.
PSU started Big Ten play with four straight losses including three by one possession, but since the bye week following a three-point loss to Michigan, it’s been a much different team.
It’s fair to say Penn State hasn’t quite faced murderer’s row in Purdue, Washington and Minnesota, but three wins in a row in this era of college football is far from something to scoff at.
Shockingly, programs do take time to build and get to where they need to go and Campbell’s program is no different. For him, it’s all about continuing that belief and not giving up even when adversity hits.
“I don’t think I’ve wavered from my belief in what this football team could become and who they were,” Campbell said in his postgame presser. “I think there’s been a lot that this group, coaching staff included, has had to work through to kind of just navigate this whole journey. And I said it from the beginning that we weren’t going to shortcut this process. We weren’t going to try to win at all costs. We’re going to try to build the right foundation, and we were going to do it the right way.”
Doing things the right way is far from doing things the easy way and it’s come at somewhat of a cost for Campbell and crew. There’s been growing frustration around the performance of  at times, but through it all sticking to the process has worked and started to turn into actual results.
“I think this group’s got a chance to put a powerful statement together,” Campbell said. “With man, I think college football. There’s so much ebbs and flows, and the ability to just stay with it. They, I still believe, since the Northwestern game, this group’s consistently gotten better every week, and it took another huge step forward tonight.”
Those ebbs and flows in college football include first-year head coaches in Jon Sumrall (Florida), Billy Napier (JMU), Lane Kiffin (LSU), Will Stein (Kentucky) and former Penn State head coach James Franklin (Virginia Tech) who have all had roller coaster rides in their current seasons as their new jobs. Campbell is no different and while Bob Chesney at UCLA is the ultimate outlier this cycle, it should come as no surprise there are growing pains at those institutions and rightfully so.
“Our society right now, in the world that we live in today, says that you should complain, point your finger, and blame everybody else. But this group chose to stay together and find solutions and work through it,” Campbell said. “And again, we’ll see where this group ends. We still got eight guaranteed quarters to us left, and where do we end this season? Who do we become? Can we continue to grow and get better? I think there’s still great challenges for us, and so we’ve made great steps forward, which is awesome. But I think there’s still a lot for this football team to decide who it wants to be and how it wants to finish.”
To get to this point the Nittany Lions breezed through the non-conference slate with relative easy and while none of the three teams they played lit the world on fire, it was a good start. Campbell’s crew lost to Wisconsin in heartbreaking fashion, Northwestern in embarrassing fashion, then USC and Michigan each by a possession.
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.“We had to become a team. We were a group of players and a group of coaches that were kind of trying to find our identity,” Campbell said. “I know there were some guys that came with us, or some guys who we inherited, some guys that had been at Penn State. But the reality of it is we had to create a real team, and we had to create the culture and the identity that we we wanted to play with, I think we know what that wants, what that needs to look like, and to be honest with you, and I know I said it a million times in the preseason, is we needed real adversity, and we had to go through hard, and then we had to decide if we wanted to work through it, or we wanted to fracture away from each other.”
The team has done just the opposite: It’s continued to come together much like it did under Terry Smith last season and for guys like tight end Ben Brahmer, who came with Campbell to Penn State, it’s no shock this team has come together like it has.
“The momentum we created off of four losses in a row. It was just awesome to see us stay together,” Brahmer said. “Just kind of that saving of just not giving up as a whole team together, not pointing fingers at anybody, and just continue to work during the weekend and on Saturdays. Just keeping our heads on it.”
Brahmer and his teammates have kept their heads on straight and on the task at hand by taking more of a holistic approach that will serve them well on and off the field.
“Just never giving up, sticking together through hard, hard stuff, and it’s just like life,” Brahmer said. “You might lose four games in a row in life, and you just got to stay together with with your family or with whatever it is in your job, and just continue to do that.”
It might seem simple and that’s okay, but that seems to be exactly part of the identity Campbell is building in his program. One that works hard daily, one that handles adversity and rises above it on and off the field.
“The identity of how we want to play football here is really important, and again, those are things from our end in terms of the style we want to play, the resiliency we want to have, the character that we want to embody on the football field,” Campbell said. “I think all those things matter, and again, we’ve worked really hard to try to lay those foundations, and we’re going to continue to work really hard to lay those foundations. I think that’s more important than even a win and a loss. It’s the how we do it, and you know, you earn the right to win football games, and this group is certainly doing those things right now.”
Sometimes the process is longer than intended, but the destination is worth it in the end. Campbell and company might have got off on a rocky road, but it seems as though things are starting to smooth out as the end of the season comes near.
