Randy Peterson
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April 23, 2025
Through these years of chaos, all of which are the result of the almighty dollar, Matt Campbell has not compromised his values. Iowa State’s best-ever football coach, still is guided today by the same principles he talked about during his first meeting with the Cyclones media way back in November 2015.
“We’re not going to go and buy a team,” he told reporters Wednesday. “We’re going to go and develop a team.”
Thank goodness. We’ve had it up to our eyebrows with coaches who live by the belief that a higher roster payroll always beats a roster of players trying to improve themselves in more grass roots ways. As super star Breece Hall so famously said, “five-star culture beats five-star players.”
Please, don’t change. Don’t join the jaded. Iowa State fans like you just as they are, Coach Campbell.
The 10th-season Cyclones coach has lived through major college athletics changes we never thought imaginable. Stuff like:
** A no-rules transfer portal.
** The unregulated wild, wild west of paying players outrageous amounts of cash for use of their names.
** Making conferences so big that people can’t even follow them anymore, and . . .
** Athletes listening to money-grabbing grubs, when proclaiming they’re worth more NIL cash than they really are.
Thankfully, positives in our college sports world are still strong enough to successfully push back against hard-charging negatives.
Thankfully, we’ve still got veteran coaches who hold onto beliefs with which they grew up – coaches right here in our own state, for example, like Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz and the Cyclones’ Campbell.
I thought about this when listening to Campbell’s press conference Wednesday. I thought about it, when someone asked him about the talks he’s had with players this week regarding pinching rosters to 105 players – which is basically eliminating walk-ons.
“None of us get into coaching for those kinds of conversations,” he said. “It’s honestly, showing you where college football is today.
“It’s criminal. It’s sad. It’s disappointing. It’s one of those things that, when your real responsibility is the development of the student-athlete, no matter where that student-athlete falls in your football program.
“That’s what’s really hard. It’s one of those things you don’t believe in – that you don’t stand for.”
He stood for it when athletics director Jamie Pollard hired him in 2015 – and thankfully he stands for that today.
“It’s been a week where you really sit and evaluate what are we really doing in our profession?” he said.
Campbell and his staff are, and have been, all about giving people a chance, no matter how many recruiting stars sits beside their names. There’s plenty of stories out there – like former Des Moines East High School star Rory Walling joining Campbell’s program without a scholarship – then made himself (with the assistance of his coaches) into one of the school’s best-ever special teams players. He’s now a member of Campbell’s staff, by the way.
“This is education, right?” Campbell said.
“This is higher learning. This isn’t professional sport, where we are going to mandate or dictate how many guys can be on a team. That’s hard for me to understand that value.”
Campbell brought that value with him from a successful coaching career at Toledo. As much as his college football surroundings have tried to change that -- he’s stayed refreshingly firm.
“We’re trimming down for what?” he wondered. “That’s the one thing that’s really hard for me to understand. To be quite honest, we still don’t know if we’re trimming down. You have to look out for the best interest of all your kids in your program and their families.
“You have to prepare every young person for what can be the most extreme of the rules. Come on. It’s April, and we don’t know what the rules are for next fall. That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of.”
Campbell doesn’t always publicly express thoughts like these. So when he does, it’s impactful.
“My greatest joy that I still gain is developing the 18-to-22 year-old young person that comes here and leaves home for the first time in life,” Campbell said. “I don’t care how you slice it, there’s two great transitions that happen in life -- the transition we all have gone through of leaving home and being off on your own, and then on top of it, this truly is a competitive arena you’re going into. That’s another transition.”
Once a players’ coach . . .
Always a players’ coach.
(Award-winning columnist Randy Peterson can be, and has been, reached at randypete4846@gmail.com or at any Okoboji-area beverage/food establishment between the hours of open and close.)