Penn State's Matt Campbell Outlines What Must Happen After Loss to Wisconsin

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Penn State had a golden opportunity to make the College Football Playoff this season because of how easy its schedule was from top to bottom. 

As we look at who Penn State has taken on this year and who it will play moving forward, there really wasn't any excuse to not at least be one of the top 15 teams in America. Even if we went into the season suggesting that Penn State could have lost to USC or Michigan, I think that would have been fair. 

Outside of that, there really wasn't a game on Penn State's schedule that I was worried about. However, in what feels like typical Penn State fashion over the past few years, it lost the game it had no business losing on Saturday against a Wisconsin squad that just shouldn't have been on the same field as them.

Wisconsin isn't a bad team by any means, and I said before the game that Penn State had to be careful here. It felt like a game that Penn State was going to win, but if it didn't come out and do what it had to do on both sides of the football, it wasn't going to do enough to win the game. 

That's exactly what happened Saturday, and now Penn State finds itself in a situation that it didn't want to be in. 

Speaking to reporters, it sounds like head coach Matt Campbell was fine with it, at least in the sense that he knows his team has to battle some adversity. He believes that it is going to either make or break his team this year. I don't necessarily agree with that.

“I've said this multiple times. Adversity is what college football is about. The ability to overcome adversity and the ability to unify and rally forward. This will be a great test for us. We'll find out a lot more about ourselves here in the next six days from our coaching staff and our players. 

“The reality of it is, these are all correctable things if we're willing and humble enough to be able to make the great corrections. It will be a great challenge for us. Not going to be easy, but you know we look forward to the challenge to grow ourselves forward. I appreciate it,” Campbell said, per 247.

While I agree with the fact that adversity is what makes college football, Penn State was not going to go undefeated in Campbell's first season, and there was bound to be a letdown game or two, even if those games were simply against teams like Michigan or USC and Penn State just wasn't as good as either of them. 

But the Nittany Lions haven't played well in any of these games so far.

Beating Marshall, Temple, and Buffalo does not impress anybody at the end of the day.

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