Matt Campbell's Getting UNWARRANTED Heat For "Taking Shots" At Ohio State And Texas, And It Makes Me Absolutely Sick
Fuck On3 Sports, man. This tweet is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with social media, and they fucking knew exactly what they were doing when they posted this.
The quote they ran with about Austin and Columbus was from a speech that Matt Campbell gave to recruits before the White Out last weekend. A recruit's father took a video of the speech and posted it to Twitter, which is where those On3 dweebs saw it. The speech was fucking five minutes long, and they took the one line from it that could serve as ragebait out of context. Absolutely pathetic.
That's another thing I'll preach to you guys while I'm already on my soapbox a little bit. If you see one of these tweets that quotes a video of someone talking, just watch the damn video. You can do it in 2x speed if you don't wanna waste too much time. Because so often, the standalone quote registers MUCH differently when you read it vs. when you actually hear the person saying it in their overall delivery.
There's no better display of that concept than this video right here. If you only read Campbell's quote -- and those fuckers at On3 knew that most people would just do that and then move on -- you'd think a struggling head coach with zero self-awareness is taking shots at two of the biggest programs in college football. But when you listen to his full message, he's just telling the recruits that Penn State football is EVERYTHING to the local community of State College. Which is 100% true. It's not just that the entire town loves the football program. It's that the entire town depends on the football program.
Austin, Texas has a population of over a million people. Columbus, Ohio is a little under a million, with 900,000+ currently living in the city. Both cities are also the capitals of their respective states, so you can see why Campbell would pick those two as examples. He's not saying that the Longhorns and the Buckeyes aren't juggernauts in those places. He's just saying that there's more to those cities than football.
State College, on the other hand, is in the middle of nowhere. It has less than 50,000 people living there full-time. On a fall Saturday, though, the town's population QUINTUPLES in size, simply because people flock to Happy Valley to see Penn State play football. That's what Campbell means by College Football Town, USA. And that's why there comes a certain responsibility with playing for Penn State, which is something that Campbell is trying to ingrain in these recruits early on.
Which, by the way, I know Penn State's obviously going through a big time rough patch right now and things are looking bleak, but I fucking loved the recruiting pitch that Campbell gave. It was so reassuring to see that, yes, while the play on the field hasn't come to form yet, the principles they're building this program on are strong. And clearly, the recruits and their families respected the hell out of that.
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The video actually came at the perfect time to remind people that we're still very early on this process. I know it sucks to see a guy like Bob Chesney walk into UCLA and turn things around immediately, but we gotta stay the course. Campbell's saying and doing all the right things. He can still be the guy. Let's just hope he's able to get that first signature win against Michigan on Saturday. We need it. I also need to beat Portnoy more than anything.
Fuck the Wolverines, and once again, fuck On3.