When Penn State lost to Wisconsin last week, people blamed the players, the coaches or the football gods. There were frustrations stumbling back to the cars in the tailgate lots and there were thumbs racing across phone screens — once service was found.
As Penn Staters have done at least 25 times since 2020, there was a familiar attitude spewing out of mouths, minds and accounts.
But something interesting happened. They also blamed the athletic director. That’s because, unlike all of the other losses in 2020 through most of the meaningful parts of 2025, there were always other places to put it.
Now in 2026, as Penn State’s football team stumbles yet again in conference play while Penn State fans are asked for more money in some fashion, there is nowhere else for Pat Kraft’s mess to hide.
The state of Penn State athletics is a mess. Now who is going to clean it up?
As the reality of that Wisconsin loss and another week helped folks literally and figuratively sober up, it became clear that the feelings around the fan experience, writ large, no longer had a scapegoat.
Instead, it was all put in the open to see. A price increase is fine when everyone leaves the stadium getting a $700 million renovation happy. But when another ho-hum hot dog is served with a defensive collapse like the way it was last weekend, there are fewer people to blame.
When a ticket increase notice of at least $90, but for some far more, is sent with a listless performance a week later to Northwestern, that frustration only continues to roar.
The fundamental difference between this season’s frustrating play — and believe me it was frustrating — and other seasons is that there is a general sense of understanding for a year-one head coach. There are far more bumps than there are years like the one that Kraft’s alma mater had in 2024 under Curt Cignett for new coaches. Grace, to some extent, was always going to be shown – even if particularly after Friday’s effort – that is quite hard to do.
But it is symptomatic of the situation and while Matt Campbell will likely have at least three years to assess whether he was or was not the right hire, the questions being asked of the hiring decision are fair ones.
Those questions however seem much louder because there is only one person who can answer them: Kraft.
In April 2024, Penn State hit fans with a surprise Nittany Lion Club increase of roughly $100 at minimum. The increase just appeared with no prior warning or very little logic to the sense other than “we need more money.” Around the same time, the athletic also launched a student ticket lottery for football games that doesn’t reward attendance to previous games. Those two decisions, along with the restriction of parking passes, created a volatile secondary market for tickets that has become borderline predatory.
But everyone’s love with Kraft – buoyed by a moderately successful football season and bravado of investment in the NIL space – was still strong. He went to battle for Penn State. He pressured the Big Ten for Penn State. And after all, at some point price increases are acceptable and these were Kraft’s first major batch of them.
Things seemed to be worth it as Penn State ripped open a College Football Playoff run in 2024. The women’s volleyball team returned to its winning ways by adding another NCAA title to its trophy case, and the wrestling team continued its dominance. Penn State men’s hockey finally came alive in a way that so many fans had only dreamt of just a decade ago with a Frozen Four run. Even when fans were asked for more, it appeared they were getting more from Kraft, who was a finalist for the Sports Business Journal’s athletic director of the year.
That year’s success – and likely a column from StateCollege.com’s Mike Poorman – created sky-high expectations for Penn State athletics both internally and externally in 2025-26. The football team would keep key pieces of its offense, including Nicholas Singleton and Kaytron Allen, through roster retention boosts in the NCAA. There was an expectation that the women’s volleyball team – the most well-followed women’s team on campus – was back to its dynastic ways. Kraft gave Penn State men’s hockey money to attract future first-overall NHL Draft pick Gavin McKenna to its roster, another watershed moment for the team. And meanwhile Kraft was still heavily supporting the wrestling program, standing mat-side as animated as ever during every opportunity.
All of that expectation would come at a cost increase of a different kind again. Penn State rolled out its Legacy Fund, effectively a sales tax on anything that Penn State sells, with the aim to offset revenue sharing costs. Then there was the visual cost as Penn State for the first time sold “field-naming rights” to Beaver Stadium.
That deal however transformed into a dilapidated sign hanging outside of Gate A. And then a more permanent one on the Gate D. Then one another one that lights up on top of the roof of the suites. By now, as the primary benefactor of the deal has labeled it, the deal has turned into a stadium-naming rights deal where Penn State likely left money on the table. Then Penn State added another ad, this one for Amica, just off to the back of the end zone to the turf. Elsewhere, Penn State unveiled new ribbon boards that – you guessed it – only show more ads and little information of value.
But those pain points, along with a few others, were nothing compared to the painful end of the Franklin era. Penn State laid a dud against UCLA after losing the White Out in yet-again heartbreaking fashion. Then in what was an uncomfortable, water-bottle-cap-free environment on homecoming, Franklin’s team lost to Northwestern, 22-21.
Kraft had no other choice but to fire Franklin the next morning – even with a potential buyout – and half of a season left to play. It was the correct decision as both the school and the coach seemed to be done with one another.
But that frustration that spewed toward Franklin removed the angst around ads, price increases and more. That decision and the fallout from it dominated the conversation and the frustration of Penn State fans – while the looming coaching search also offered a light of potential.
Throughout the rest of the school year, the teams that so many had expectations of, including winning that mythical fourth national title in a school year, fell flat too. Penn State men’s hockey was bitten by an injury bug that put too much on the back of McKenna to accomplish more than what had happened a season ago. A key transfer loss in the women’s volleyball program and several injuries soured the opportunity to build a new dynasty. The two other key revenue-driving sports, men’s and women’s basketball, continued to be mostly forgotten about because as Kraft put it in his introductory press conference, everything moves through football.
Instead of winning four national titles, Kraft effectively fired – or did not renew the contracts of – four coaches in 2025-26. It had to replace six in total.
But by far the messiest was the football situation. Kraft did not ask a search firm to handle the job, instead relying on just himself, right-hand man Vinnie James and left-hand man Nick Colella to handle it. That decision is where the court of public opinion began to sour on Kraft in a few ways.
Terry Smith – who was the interim – was never truly considered for the position, despite Kraft saying so. (Though a particular bit of the lobbying for Smith came from the pro-Paterno faction, which could be another set of thoughts.) Kraft’s firing of Franklin so early into the season got prime targets like Cignetti, close personal friend to Kraft Matt Rhule and Pennsylvania native Mike Elko massive raises. (Again firing Franklin was the right move.) The obvious targets fell off the hot board and one target known to no one in State College emerged.
Kraft heavily pursued BYU’s Kelani Sitake, which was a curious choice. Sitake, a former player at BYU and devout Mormon, would have to leave a school where beyond alumni status, other spiritual ties were a part of the allure of staying. Yet Kraft managed to get Sitake to agree to a deal effectively verbally in person after flying to Provo to meet him. However, Kraft left without a signature, leaving the door open for BYU’s deep pockets to make one final pitch, mostly thanks to the CEO of Crumbl Cookie.
The attempts to keep Sitake worked and Kraft wore egg on his face as the quest for a new head coach moved deeper into December and closer to signing day. Meanwhile, because of the Sitake situation, Kraft let other candidates go as well, leaving Penn State somewhat scrambling. By the end, Kraft was considering Brian Daboll, the recently fired New York Giants head coach, and Matt Patricia, the former New England Patriots and current Ohio State offensive coordinator, for the role. They were another set of puzzling choices that Kraft moved off of because he was able to find Matt Campbell.
Campbell was reportedly one of the first overall choices that Kraft considered. However, because the “search firm” relied on limited, internal resources and no real search firm at all, Penn State essentially had the wrong phone number for Campbell at the beginning. After Sitake said no, Penn State eventually got into contact with him.
It was the first real moment in the Kraft era where the mess had been exposed for all, including national media, to see or rather hear after audio from a meeting between Kraft and Penn State players was leaked.
All of this was on the back of a $700 million renovation to Beaver Stadium happening before all of Penn State’s eyes that has an emphasis on premium seating, areas that most fans will never see or use.
That was only made worse as Penn State announced its ticket price increases yet again in the summer. While most fans not on the west sideline saw roughly a $90 increase, other fans who have sat on the west sideline for generations became priced out because those areas are now becoming premium seating. The average Penn State fan, not of the corporate crowd, was only being pushed away in a baffling manner that is void of the heartbeat of what makes Penn State Penn State.
Then when Penn State fans rolled into Beaver Stadium for the Marshall game, fans were greeted with more construction dust that effectively removed bathrooms from the west side of the stadium and increased food prices. While most items increased by 4 percent, soda increased by 19 percent while also reducing the size of the cup.
This was on top of the fact that Penn State switched to digital parking passes for non-premium parking sections, which has created problems in the premium areas with people effectively stealing their spots because there is no way to manage whether or not someone parked in the correct location. It also doesn’t include the fact that Penn State charges the most for gameday parking in the Big Ten by a wide margin.
Elsewhere, Penn State’s NIL media site failed, yet another collapse of the NIL infrastructure at Penn State. And prior to the start of the season, men’s basketball coach Mike Rhoades bluntly admitted his team wasn’t getting enough financial support to be competitive.
All of those problems, which some are more trivial than others, compounded when Penn State’s football team – the program with the most support and thus the barometer – then began to collapse against Wisconsin and laid an egg against Northwestern. Those issues too are void of macro factors like increased inflation nationally, rising gas prices and hotel costs that add pile on to the cost of attending a game.
Penn State fans, who can’t necessarily complain about the football coach in a manner that will cause change right now, had to put that frustration somewhere and it is rightly going toward Kraft yet again after Friday’s loss.
Costs increase, gameday experiences get worse for most and yet the visible marker of success can’t be found. It is not Kraft’s job to win Penn State football games from an executional standpoint. Though, with how intensely and close he stands to the coaching box during games, he may think so. After all, it’s that bravado that endeared him to most Penn State fans – much like his public lobbying for a home Big Ten opener to start a season.
But if Penn State doesn’t start winning games soon, it will only create more questions about the choices that Penn State and, more particularly, Kraft are making right now. Right now those choices only seem to be making a bigger mess. Those questions are far from the declarative statements that Penn State fans were making about their love of Kraft more than a year ago.
It’s a mess that is out in the open and with ticket renewals due soon, there is no escaping it for Kraft.
Ultimately, only the fans will be the ones who will be asked for more money and only the fans will be the ones asked to clean it up.
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