- Former Stark County star Matt Campbell deals with transfer portal as Iowa State football coach.
- "Year of the Quarterback" series continues with input from Notre Dame, Iowa State coaches and College Football Hall of Fame coaches.
Editor's note: Steve Doerschuk spent months researching quarterbacks. The result is three waves of a series, "Year of the Quarterback." The first wave revolves around tremendous high school QBs fighting to find the field in college. This is the fourth article in the first wave.
Matt Campbell isn't in the middle of nowhere, but being in the middle of Iowa might seem that way when trying to attract a five-star quarterback.
The former Perry High School and Mount Union University bruiser is in his ninth season as football head coach at Iowa State University, in Ames.
The Skunk River always has flowed through Ames, but the rampaging NCAA transfer portal probably never will.
While Ames is growing in population and vitality, it isn't Columbus, Norman or Tuscaloosa.
In the last 10 years, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Alabama have combined for 27 seasons with at least 10 wins.
Iowa State is still looking for its first 10-win football season, ever. The only nine-win seasons before the Campbell era were in 1906 and 2000. Campbell joined the club when his 2020 team went 9-3.
Former Massillon Washington High School coach Earle Bruce wound up at Iowa State for a while. His strange run started with three four-win seasons, followed by three eight-win years, followed by replacing Woody Hayes at Ohio State.
Campbell, 44, stands to be the winningest head coach in Iowa State history. He enters the 2024 season at 53-48, poised to pass Dan McCarney, who went 56-85 from 1995-2006.
Campbell also stands on the shaky ground of the portal era, which began after he made waves with a win over Baker Mayfield and the No. 3-ranked Oklahoma Sooners in 2017.
Coming off a 7-6 season in 2023, the coach from Stark County stared down the struggle.
"We’re not a rental program," he said. "We’ll never survive in that world. We build a program and try to get the right guys here to continue to be the best team we can be, year in and year out.
"As the rest of the world looks or feels crazy, I think we have homed in on who we are and not tried to waver too far off of it. Just keep finding the right humans to come into our program, and surround ourself with the right process.
"That is what I still love about what we get to do here."
Brock Purdy is Campbell's claim to signing fame. Campbell was the only coach able to tell him, 'Hey, I played for Perry, too." Purdy hails from Perry High School in Gilbert, Arizona.
An injury to former Massillon Tiger Kyle Kempt enabled Purdy to start early in his freshman season at Iowa State. Purdy was undersized, at 6-foot-1, but his game grew. He went to the NFL in 2022 and last season helped lead the 49ers to the Super Bowl.
The Cyclones' 2024 schedule reflects these portal-tossed times.
Projected quarterbacks of opponents include Iowa's Cade McNamara (transfer from Michigan), Houston's Donovan Smith (transfer from Texas Tech), Baylor's Dequan Finn (transfer from Toledo), and Cincinnati's Brenden Sorsby (transfer from Indiana).
Kempt, now one of Campbell's Iowa State assistants, feels the boss's pain of wrestling with the portal.
"The greatest thing Matt does here is getting the guys to play hard," Kempt said. "We may not have the most talent in the league, but we're going to line up and play the absolute hardest for 60 minutes of anybody in this conference."
One of Ohio's top quarterback prospects, Ashland High School junior Nathan Bernhard, received an offer from Iowa State. Actually signing Bernhard would be just a first step. The next would be developing him and keeping him out of the portal.
The portal perturbs Larry Kehres, who won three of his 11 NCAA Division III national championships at Mount Union when Campbell was on the team.
"Matt is a great teacher and program builder," Kehres said. "When I talk to coaches about team building they kind of roll their eyes. They seem to be heading away from that.
"The thought for a college quarterback used to be you're gonna take a redshirt year and every year get better, and when you're a sophomore Joe Blow is going to be ahead of you, but then you've got the next two years. That's becoming less and less the way they envision putting their team together."
Ohio State runs with the thoroughbreds in the portal derby, as needed.
Kyle McCord helped get the 2023 Buckeyes to 11-0. Nine days after a 30-24 loss at Michigan, he entered the portal. Will Howard soon transferred in.
Howard had Kansas State on a 5-1 hot streak in 2023 before losing 42-35 to Campbell's team, Iowa State. He then entered the portal before Kansas State's bowl game.
"These days, how does a freshman quarterback become the starter?" Kehres said. "It's a question I ask myself. How does a freshman enter Ohio State and become the starter? One did (C.J. Stroud), but he already left.
"What is Ohio State supposed to do? Get a proven starter, or go with one of the quarterbacks they recruited who hasn't started yet?
"It's a little bit mind-boggling now, the notion of developing a team and developing a player."
Portal awareness extends from the top of college football to the small high school ranks.
Six-foot-5 Jared Witherow will be in his third year as the starter at Malvern, which competed in the smallest enrollment division in last year's Ohio playoff system. Coach Matt Chiurco sees Witherow as a strong NCAA Division II prospect who must figure out where he stands in the portal era.
"I'm not a college coach, but I think the portal has screwed up college football altogether," Chiurco said. "Schools recruit you and say, 'I want you be our guy down the road in a couple years,' and then that doesn't become the case because they go in the transfer portal and find somebody else.
"To me, the portal is an absolute disaster. I spoke to a college coach last spring and he agreed. He said there were over 700 student-athletes in the transfer portal, just in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. He said, 'We have to do our due diligence, because our jobs and winning depend on it.'
"I think the portal is celebrated way too much, and social media has a big part of it. It really has changed the complete landscape of college sports. I don't even want to think about what it will look like in another five years."
One quarterback who set all-time Stark County records and another who broke those records live with portal ramifications.
Coming out of Sandy Valley, Cameron Blair was an Ashland University freshman in 2021. He was a strong candidate to start in 2023 but was leapfrogged by Trevor Bycznski, who spent two years at Buffalo before transferring to Ashland.
Jack "Poochie" Snyder broke Blair's county records during his senior year at Canton South. The Mid-American Conference, something of a portal snake pit for quarterbacks, perhaps will sniff around if Snyder lights it up at Sacred Heart, but the MAC didn't want him as an incoming freshman.
Canton South coach Matt Dennison said Snyder's scarcity of offers owed to the portal.
"College coaches are forced into not building a program but trying to create something right now," said Dennison, whose dad, Jim, made long college head coaching runs at Akron and Walsh. "It's sad to see.
"Some great things football is supposed to teach you about camaraderie and the power of team are getting a little pushed to the side."
Jim Tressel's first coaching job en route to a national championship at Ohio State was as an assistant under Jim Dennison at Akron.
"As things are now, there are less scholarships for high school kids coming out, especially quarterbacks," Tressel said.
Marcus Freeman, now the head coach at Notre Dame, played linebacker for Tressel at Ohio State.
In Freeman's three years as a starter, the Buckeyes' primary quarterbacks were Troy Smith, Todd Boeckman and Terrelle Pryor, all recruited by Tressel.
Tressel didn't have to deal with the portal. Freeman does.
"We've been spotty in using it," he said. "We have a difficult time getting guys from other institutions. We've got to be very strategic in how we approach the portal and how we find ways to utilize it."
Notre Dame operated spring practice with four quarterbacks seeming to have starter-candidate credentials: Riley Leonard, who came through the portal from Duke; 2023 backup Steve Angeli; redshirt freshman Kenny Minchey; and true freshman CJ Carr, grandson of former Wolverines coach Lloyd Carr.
"Right now in college football you see a lot of guys who say, 'I'm not playing as much as I want,' or, I'm not the starter,' and they go and transfer," Freeman said. "Our guys are staying here. It's a great problem."
Former Massillon quarterback Justin Zwick was ending his career at Ohio State when Freeman's was beginning.
Zwick, 41, works for a company co-owned by Craig Krenzel, the quarterback of Tressel's 2002 national title team.
"I think college football has become the wild, wild west," Zwick said. "It's kind of a professional sport with free agency every year.
"It's odd to see a quarterback (McCord) who had success at a big-time program up and leave a few days after their final game. The college football we loved is gone."
Jim Ballard, star of Mount Union's first national championship team in 1993, trains quarterbacks at an academy he opened in 2007.
"If you're not a pure five-star kid, your recruiting process is going to be tough, because with the portal things can change in five minutes," Ballard said. "The big programs are looking for Division I quarterbacks who may not have played. Then it becomes, what junior college players are available? And then it's, what high school kids might I get?"
Former Canton South, Bowling Green and Cleveland Browns QB Mark Miller sees a complicated beast.
"To say transferring is selfish, yeah, it is to a certain degree," he said. "But it's also self-preservation. Why would I sit behind a kid in my class?
"Even going to NCAA Division II out of high school now is scary, because so many good players who can't find a home in Division I are going to Division II."
Under previous portal rules, players were allowed to transfer from one Division I college to another without having to sit out a year. Last year, an era of unlimited transfers without penalty emerged as a possibility.
"I hope to God it doesn't happen," said Mark Nofri, the head coach who recruited Poochie Snyder to Sacred Heart. "If a kid can transfer a second time without having to sit, it's going to get even more out of control."
Nofri spoke before the NCAA and the United States Department of Justice struck a deal in June allowing unlimited transfers without penalty of sitting out a year.
Ron Blackledge was a player at Canton Timken High School and Bowling Green, an assistant at several colleges, a Kent State head coach, and a Pittsburgh Steelers assistant. He is the father of former national championship QB Todd Blackledge (Penn State) and the grandfather of college athletes.
"I understand the reasons behind the transfer portal," he said. "It's kind of mushroomed. It kind of sickens me, to tell you the truth."
Freeman is in his third year as Notre Dame's head coach.
Early last season against Ohio State, his team took a 14-10 lead into the final seconds. McCord, the QB who wound up transferring out, led a drive capped by a touchdown with one second left.
Notre Dame's projected 2024 quarterback is Leonard, who came through the portal from Duke. The 2023 starter was Sam Hartman, a transfer from Wake Forest. The primary 2022 QB, Drew Pyne, bolted to Arizona State and after that to Missouri. The main Fighting Irish QB in 2021 was Jack Coan, a transfer from Wisconsin.
Round and round it goes in a world where coaches dance a portal/NIL two-step.
The biggest programs have the advantage in building name-image-likeness budgets and attracting transfers. Fundraising is part of job security.
Facing a dinner crowd at Massillon Eagles Post 190, Freeman said, "There's a lot of people, a lot in this room, a lot across the United States, that want to see Notre Dame have success. They know for us to have success in football, NIL is a part of it."
Campbell strains to make it work the old-fashioned way at Iowa State.
He recruited Purdy and played him for four years. He recruited Hunter Dekkers, who replaced Purdy in 2022 but was suspended for 2023 amid an NCAA investigation into alleged student-athlete gambling.
He recruited Rocco Becht, who replaced Dekkers in 2023 and was the No. 1 QB heading into 2024.
He has been able to work around the portal to an extent.
Tressel sympathizes. His conclusion:
"I think the magic of the good programs will be, the rules of engagement being what they are, who does the best job maintaining and building their culture in this new set of rules, with different expectations by the student athletes."
Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com
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