Matt Campbell is trying to retain two Penn State alums on the staff — Dan Conner and Deion Barnes — and he appears to be working to bring in another alum to oversee the entire defense. Matt Zenitz of 247Sports reports that USC’s D’Anton Lynn is a “target” for Penn State’s current defensive coordinator job.
Lynn was a player at Penn State from 2008 to 2011 and an NFL assistant from 2014 to 2022, working his way up from a seasonal intern with the New York Jets to safeties coach with the Ravens. He transferred to the college game in 2023, spending one season as defensive coordinator at UCLA and the past two seasons at USC. In both cases, he took over a terrible unit and immediately drastically improved it. Here’s where the Bruins and Trojans defenses ranked in SP+ before Lynn arrived and during Lynn’s tenure.
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Before D’Anton Lynn: UCLA (2022) — No. 83
During D’Anton Lynn’s time: UCLA (2023—17th
Before D’Anton Lynn:University of Southern California (2023) — No. 105
During D’Anton Lynn’s time: University of Southern California (2024) — No. 48
During D’Anton Lynn’s time: University of Southern California (2025) — No. 35
He won’t inherit a terrible team at Penn State – the Nittany Lions, who even had a down season defensively, ranking 33rd in SP+. But with the departures from the NFL and potential transfer portal movements, there’s still a lot of transition stuff going on, and bringing in someone like Lynn who can immediately improve results would be a great option.
So this person is pretty good. Really good. Matt Campbell was hired just 12 months after the previous one was turned down, and it was definitely a huge hire.
We’ll see where this goes. It’s a good sign to receive a tweet like this from Zenitz, but the news is still up in the air before tweeting that “a deal is being finalized.”