Misery Index: Is Penn State already regretting ditching James Franklin for Matt Campbell?

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If you could turn the clock back to Oct. 12, 2025, the day Penn State fired James Franklin, and tell Nittany Lions fans everything that would happen over the next 51 weeks, it would be interesting to know how many of them would want a do-over. 

Because as frustrating as Franklin could be, and as shocking as it was to be 3-3 last October with a team that was considered a national title contender, nobody really imagined this — least of all athletic director Pat Kraft. 

If you knew Penn State's coaching search would go on for more than 50 days, with a whole bunch of rejections before landing on Matt Campbell, would it have been the right decision? 

If you knew that the highly rated recruiting class Franklin assembled would go up in smoke and be replaced by a bunch of transfers Campbell brought with him from Iowa State, would it have been worth making a change?

And if you knew that Campbell's first five games would include losses to Wisconsin and Northwestern — teams that went a combined 11-14 last season — how tempting would it be to sneak into Kraft's office, steal his cell phone and laptop and make sure that he had no method of communication to the outside world for the rest of the season? 

This isn't to suggest that it was a definite mistake to fire Franklin. Kraft's reasons for wanting a change were valid, and it's too early to say that Campbell can't get the job done. 

But in the moment? Yeah, it looks bad. Really, really bad. So bad that Kraft is going to feel the full wrath of Penn State's fan base after Friday night's 34-13 loss to Northwestern and deserves every bit of scrutiny that will come his way the rest of this season.

Because when you defy convention to fire a coach just six games after he led your program to College Football Playoff semifinals in 2024, and when you think you can do better than someone who went 104-45 and consistently had Penn State in the top 15, you better be right. 

Even if you're a fan who lacked faith that Franklin was going to deliver a national title, and even if you're an administrator who grew weary of his excuses for not winning enough big ones, he did not have to be fired. Though last season blew up in Franklin's face with a team that seriously underperformed during the bizarre three-week stretch that sealed his fate, Kraft made a proactive choice to change coaches before it was obviously necessary. 

It was a gamble, a bet that Penn State was a big enough brand with attractive enough resources to make a coaching upgrade. 

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And though the search eventually landed on a logical choice with a great reputation — even NFL teams had poked around about Campbell's availability during his time at Iowa State — Penn State is a different kind of job than anywhere he'd coached before.

Tougher conference, greater scrutiny, more demanding fan base, much higher stakes. 

And while we must stress that it's still early to make definitive statements about how Campbell will work out in the end, getting pushed around by Northwestern is a massive red flag. Penn State got outgained 506-291. Even if this is a good version of Northwestern, that should never happen.

"I put a lot on me because there's somehow, some way I didn't get this team prepared to play the physical brand of football we need to play," Campbell said after the game.

Well, it's too late now for this season. A lot of prognosticators picked Penn State to be a playoff contender because of a friendly Big Ten schedule, and in some ways it's even easier now than it looked in the preseason with teams like Michigan and Washington among the biggest early-season disappointments. 

But no matter what Penn State does the rest of this year, the what-ifs and recriminations will hound Kraft unless Campbell can prove next season that he's the right guy for the job. 

That's a lot of pressure, but it's also what Kraft signed up for when he got rid of a successful coach under the premise that he could hire a better one. And it's why Penn State reigns as America's most miserable fan base in Week 5.

Conference Champions of Misery

ACC: It is an undeniably cool story that Andrew Luck returned to Stanford, where he was one of the great players in school history, to lead the program as general manager. It's really the only reason anyone has paid attention to Stanford football over the last couple seasons, and it's generated plenty of fawning media coverage. But there is no on-field evidence yet that Luck knows what he's doing in this role. Nobody is going to argue that life is easy for Stanford, which is stuck in an ACC that doesn't fit geographically and can't fix its roster quickly with transfers because of the school's academic requirements. Still, losing 57-3 to Wake Forest — one of the ACC's other academic powers — is a result that might truly represent rock bottom for a program that was contending for national titles just over a decade ago. Nobody expects that anymore from Stanford, but this is a program that hasn't won more than four games in a season since 2018. And Luck's selection of 39-year-old Tavita Pritchard as head coach has gotten off to a rocky start. Pritchard, the former Stanford quarterback, was on staff for some great years under David Shaw before going to the NFL as an assistant coach. But since Luck took over, Stanford has lost by three touchdowns or more eight times in 17 games. That's not sustainable. 

Big 12: Watching West Virginia's 45-42 loss to Iowa State was reminiscent of those Big 12 games from a decade ago when it felt like nobody in the conference had even a slight interest in playing defense. Until the final possession, when West Virginia's DJ Epps fumbled along the sideline after crossing into Iowa State territory, the teams combined to score on six straight possessions. That included a 63-yard touchdown run and a 75-yard touchdown drive for Iowa State in the fourth quarter with no resistance at all from the Mountaineers. After allowing a ridiculous 577 yards, coach Rich Rodriguez told reporters his team had "some key problems to a level that I haven't seen in awhile," adding it's "stuff that I haven't seen in years" and calling it "hard to watch." Other than that, things seem fine in West Virginia, which will face high-powered offenses in Arizona and Cincinnati in the next two weeks. After a 3-0 start to the season, including an upset over Virginia, it looked like the Mountaineers might be a sneaky CFP contender. Instead, the 63-year-old Rodriguez is 2-9 in Big 12 games during this second stint in Morgantown.

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SEC: With a little more than six minutes left, and trailing Tennessee by three points, Auburn coach Alex Golesh decided to go for a fourth-and-1 from his own 24-yard line. Even though there was plenty of time left and he was risking the game right then and there, going for it was a defensible choice. The ensuing play call, however, was not. The Vols were not fooled at all by Auburn's choice to pitch the ball backward to Omar Mabson and tackled him behind the line of scrimmage, giving them a short field to land the knockout-blow touchdown in a 24-14 victory. It was also emblematic of the concerns Auburn fans have about the Golesh regime during this 3-2 start. Golesh, who made his reputation as an offensive coordinator under Josh Heupel at Tennessee and then as head coach at South Florida, is not scoring enough points or playing the kind of physical football that wins in the SEC through his first five games. The personnel and play-calling are just not up to par for what Auburn needs to win in this league. Golesh chose to bring a bunch of players with him from USF, including quarterback Byrum Brown, but that's a stop-gap measure at best. Auburn needs a lot more SEC-quality talent to compete at this level. 

Group of Six: Few programs outside the power conferences generate as much "sleeping giant" buzz as Colorado State. With its prime location, a great stadium, a history of success under Sonny Lubick in the 1990s and enough resources to win big in the new Pac-12, Colorado State's potential was enough to lure Jim Mora, Jr. away from UConn this year. But so far, it looks like the same old story after an embarrassing 56-26 loss at home to Oregon State. The Rams have given up a boatload of points this season, including 59 in a loss to UTSA, 41 to BYU and even 24 to Southern Utah. That will put a spotlight on Mora's decision to retain defensive coordinator Tyson Summers, who took over as interim head coach last season after Jay Norvell was fired and went 0-5. ESPN reported shortly after the game ended that Summers had been dismissed and was stripped of his play-calling duties during the game. For all its potential, Colorado State looks like it might be headed for its eighth losing season in the last nine years. The school invests too much in football to keep taking this many losses. 

Headset Misery 

Shane Beamer: For a coach who knew this season was going to determine his future, losing 35-34 in overtime to Kentucky is a gut punch that might be impossible to recover from. South Carolina led this game 17-0 early in the second quarter, held a 27-24 lead through most of the fourth quarter until Kentucky tied it with about four minutes left and scored first in overtime to take a 34-27 lead. It still wasn't enough, as the Wildcats won on a gutsy 2-point conversion call by first-year Kentucky coach Will Stein. At 2-3, it's hard to figure out how South Carolina turns this around with a trip to Florida next Saturday before a bye week. Beamer was so close to getting South Carolina into the CFP in 2024, but winning just one out of 10 SEC games since then isn't good enough. Gamecock fans love Beamer's feistiness and don't demand perfection, but we all know what happens when the bottom falls out like this. 

Kyle Whittingham: Since the NIL era began, there may be no greater example of big money being lit on fire than Michigan's recruitment of Bryce Underwood. Funded by a group including Jolin Zhu (wife of Larry Ellison) and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, the deal that got Underwood to de-commit from LSU and pick Michigan instead was worth a reported $3 million a year for four years. That wasn't Whittingham's decision, but it's now his problem because Underwood just has not progressed in two years at Michigan and it's killing any chance of putting a functional offense on the field. After a 20-14 loss at Minnesota, a game in which Underwood completed just 10-of-21 passes for 101 yards and two interceptions, Whittingham called the current state of Michigan football "the biggest challenge I've had" in more than 40 years of coaching. Though the Wolverines are only seven total points from being unbeaten rather than 3-2, remember that they were a Hail Mary touchdown (and a clock controversy) away from losing to Western Michigan as well and haven't reached 20 points against anyone except UTEP. It's certainly fair to question whether the 66-year-old Whittingham was the right guy for Michigan at such a late stage in his career after two decades at a lower-profile job in Utah. But inheriting a quarterback who isn't going to live up to the massive contract he got out of high school has put Whittingham in a pretty rough position out of the gate — and he may need to pull the plug on Underwood if there's any hope of saving this season. 

Jeff Brohm: The knock on Brohm is that the moment you start to buy in, his teams will lose one that boggles the mind. It happened last season when Louisville was up to No. 15 and got beat at home by Cal, which ended up firing its coach. It happened in 2024 against a bad Stanford team after the Cardinals climbed into the top 25. And it's happened this year in back-to-back weeks with losses to Wake Forest and NC State that will knock Louisville completely out of the playoff picture. You might scoff at invoking the P-word, but the combination of a favorable schedule and Louisville looking good early, with a close loss to Ole Miss and a win over SMU, made it seem possible. Instead, Louisville is now 2-3 after a 31-28 loss to NC State in which its offensive committed three turnovers and its defense allowed 493 yards. The Brohm cycle of high highs and unimaginably low lows continues. 

Moment of Misery 

Virginia Tech's optical disillusion: Even on Saturday morning, after they'd watched dozens of replays from all kinds of angles, it wasn't hard to find Hokies fans on social media who were absolutely convinced that John Love's 36-yard field goal attempt as time expired should have been called good instead of wide left, leaving Virginia Tech on the wrong side Friday night of a 35-33 loss to Pitt. To be fair, there are some angles where it looks like the ball might have snuck inside the upright. But there are other angles you can find where the arc of the kick pretty clearly shows it hooked wide as it crossed over the top of the left upright. The lesson here is two-fold. First, short of some type of technology that would tell us definitively, nobody is going to have a better view than the referee standing under the goal, and he was emphatic that the kick missed. The second lesson is also simple: A 36-yard field goal is short enough, and Love is a good enough kicker, that it should never have been that close in the first place. And for Virginia Tech, it's hard to blame the kick or a referee's call when you commit four turnovers at home and lose a game in which you had a 499-295 advantage in yards. 

UCF's loss of space: Going back to their days in the American Conference, the UCF-Houston rivalry is about space as much as football. Outer space, that is. With its proximity to Cape Canaveral and the school's original mission to educate future employees of the Kennedy Space Center, UCF has claimed the title of Space U. But Houston, of course, is known as "Space City" because it also has a strong NASA connection. As former Houston coach Dana Holgorsen said a few years back, "They don't say, 'Orlando, we've got a problem.'" So who won the space race this time? The Cougars, wearing special "Gridiron Galaxy" helmets and blue uniforms, came back from a 17-0 deficit and scored 27 straight points in the final 19 minutes of the game to win. UCF is now 3-8 in Big 12 games since Scott Frost returned and hasn't been able to claim college football's space crown since 2023. 

UConn's rough(ing) rivalry: After erasing a 34-14 deficit against Syracuse, UConn only needed to stop one more play in overtime from the 17-yard line to celebrate its first win over the Orange since 2011. Though the rivalry between schools was based mostly on their Big East basketball battles, it's still a matchup with huge emotional stakes for both sides because the fan bases don't like each other very much. And when UConn not only gave up a 17-yard touchdown pass on fourth down but committed a roughing-the-passer penalty as well, it was about as bad a sequence of events as UConn has ever had in the football rivalry. With the ball moved to the 1 1/2 yard line, Syracuse coach Fran Brown had no choice but to go for two and the victory. When quarterback Amari Odom stretched the ball over the goal line, it somehow felt like UConn had given away a game it probably never should have been in position to win in the first place. 

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