When Matt Campbell was introduced on Monday afternoon at Beaver Stadium as the 17th head coach of Penn State football, one of the first people he mentioned was somebody who had nothing to do with the sport.

Campbell, in his opening statement, specifically stated that he was going to “demand a similar standard of excellence that the last great Iowa State coach that came here.” The man he was talking about? The longtime head coach of Penn State wrestling, Cael Sanderson, left Iowa State to come to Happy Valley back in 2009.

Campbell remarked that he talked to Sanderson on the phone for 45 minutes over the weekend about their similar paths to Penn State. Both were accomplished coaches who brought success to Iowa State, but left for a new challenge at Penn State.

During a news conference Monday, Matt Campbell said he spent 45 minutes on the phone with Cael Sanderson, another former Iowa State coach now at Penn State.

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When he was asked on Monday about Campbell’s comments, Sanderson confirmed the conversation and shared more details about what the two talked about. The veteran coach, one of the longest tenured ones in the entire athletic department, had nothing but good things to say about Campbell, noting that everyone he knows who’s still at Iowa State hasn’t said a bad thing about him.

If Campbell can replicate even a fraction of Sanderson’s success with the wrestling program, he’ll go down as a Penn State legend. In 16 full seasons at the helm, Sanderson has won 12 national championships and nine Big Ten titles, with his Nittany Lions being strong favorites to win their fifth consecutive championship in 2026.

Both Campbell and Sanderson experienced a lot of success during their college years, but in different ways. Campbell was a star defensive lineman for Division III Mount Union, winning three national championships and becoming an All-American under legendary head coach Larry Kehres, whose 332 total wins are the seventh-most in NCAA history.

Sanderson never got the team accomplishments that Campbell did when he wrestled at Iowa State, but he has the distinction of being maybe the greatest college athlete of all time. After redshirting his true freshman season, Sanderson went an unbelievable 159-0, en route to four individual national championships and winning the Hodge Trophy three times.

While winning four national championships is more common nowadays (and Carter Starocci one-upped it with five titles), Sanderson was just the second wrestler ever to do it when he completed the quartet in 2002. He would go on to win a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics before transitioning into coaching, becoming Iowa State’s head coach in 2007.

Unlike Sanderson, Campbell started his coaching career away from his alma mater as a graduate assistant at Bowling Green in 2003. While he did return to Mount Union as an offensive coordinator later, he used it as a springboard to get him more permanent jobs at the FCS level, with his big break coming when he was hired as Toledo’s head coach in 2012. After four successful seasons, he got the job at Iowa State in 2016.

At Iowa State, both had success in progressing the programs and establishing them as serious threats. Sanderson took over for his former head coach, Bobby Douglas, and elevated the Cyclones back to national contention. After failing to make the podium in three of Douglas’s last four seasons, Iowa State placed second at the 2007 NCAA Championships, tied for its best finish since the last national title in 1987.

In his three years at Iowa State, Sanderson’s team won the Big 12 in all three years and placed second, fifth, and third at the national championships. It was the first time the Cyclones had ever won three consecutive conference titles and the first time they finished top five in three consecutive seasons since the 1980s.

While the wrestling program had a storied history at Iowa State, the same cannot be said for the football program, which had never won a national championship and whose last conference title came in 1912. The Cyclones had only won eight games one time since 1979 and had only one nine-win season in over 100 years of existence (2000). Campbell inherited a team that had gone 8-28 over the previous three seasons and delivered unprecedented sustained success.

Campbell went 70-50 in his ten seasons, and while that might not sound elite, he elevated Iowa State to being consistently relevant. In 2020, they won nine games in a shortened season and won the Fiesta Bowl. In 2024, he had the Cyclones one win from their first-ever Big 12 title, but still finished with a program-record 11 wins.

Neither Sanderson nor Campbell delivered a national championship to Ames, but both did what they could with the resources they were provided. While Campbell’s resources were more material in the sense of Iowa State’s lagging NIL spending, Sanderson was just slightly out of range from the Northeast recruiting hotbed.

That’s what made Penn State an intriguing fit for him after the 2008-09 season, as they offered proximity to multiple high school wrestling powerhouses that churned out championship-caliber wrestlers yearly. Pennsylvania’s sheer level of wrestling talent made Penn State a hidden gem, and Sanderson made the jump in 2009. In an article by The Athletic in 2023, it was revealed that the consensus in the college wrestling world was that Sanderson wouldn’t leave his alma mater, but his interest in the Penn State job was extremely serious, and the two sides came together on a deal.

The biggest immediate domino? Future national champion David Taylor, now head coach of Oklahoma State’s wrestling program, was an Iowa State commit when Sanderson jumped ship. Taylor followed him and would go on to win four individual Big Ten titles, two individual national championships, and would be Sanderson’s first real star as he took just two years to make Penn State a national champion for the first time in 58 years, and he’s since won 12 of the last 14 titles.

The athletic director at Iowa State when Sanderson jumped ship? Jamie Pollard, the same athletic director who hired and couldn’t retain Campbell. In the new age of college athletics, programs like Iowa State, with nine-figure deficits, can’t compete with another school offering $70 million guaranteed and some of the richest NIL and assistant coaching pools possible.

And so, 16 years after the wrestling program got the man who would push the program over the hump, Penn State hopes they’ve found the man who will do the same for the football team.