Changing of The Guard in Ames Nolan Leonard

With the 2025 College Football Regular Season coming to an end many coaches can come into the spotlight for either being fired or leaving for “greener pastures”. The Big 12 conference is no different than the rest of America when it comes to this. The biggest coaching carousel news in the conference so far is the departure of Coach Matt Campbell out of Iowa State. Just this past week ISU announced that Campbell would be moving on for a new opportunity. That new opportunity ended up being for the Penn State Nittany Lions; a team who has had a lot of coaching drama themselves this year. However, Cyclone athletic director Jamie Pollard had nothing but good things to say about Coach saying, “He had other times he could have left and didn’t. Matt Campbell owes Iowa State nothing because he did more than we could have ever dreamed he would do as our head coach.”

I mean this is the ultimate praise especially coming from an athletic director who is very much involved with the program. As many CFB fans know at the end of the day this is a business which makes it all the more impressive when a coach and his school go out on good terms like this because this type of interaction is in the minority. It is a testament to how great of a coach Campbell is. He was able to build up an Iowa State program that had frankly never seen this level of sustained success in the history of its program. In less than 10 seasons he broke the team’s coaching record for wins and helped them capture their first ever Big 12 title.

With Campbell overtaking James Franklin’s spot at Penn State, many people have started to compare the two and have found them eerily similar. I agree with this comparison, as with Campbell, Franklin built up a school who had been historically bad for quite a long time (Vanderbilt) and was able to elevate his resume to become the head coach at one of the premier programs in the nation at Happy Valley.

Unfortunately, no coach can be great all the time and these two certainly aren’t immune to that. For both coaches their biggest weakness was their inability to win big games with Campbell finishing his time in Ames 16-27 against top 25 competition including 4-7 against top 5 teams. On the other side of things, the man he is replacing struggled just as much if not more against the best of the best by going 12-25 against the top 25 and a paltry 3-18 against the top 5. To get back to more of a positive note, good news for Cyclone fans as the new head man has already been announced. Jimmy Rogers was welcomed as the next head coach at Iowa State on December 5th and brings with him multiple FCS National Championships as the head coach at South Dakota St. It will be interesting to monitor how he responds to coaching a Power Four program.