Iowa State associate AD for football personnel Derek Hoodjer will follow Matt Campbell to Penn State

New Penn State football head coach Matt Campbell is making one of the first big hires of his tenure in State College. The new leader of the Lions will be bringing his de-facto general manager at Iowa State, associate AD for football personnel Derek Hoodjer, with him to fill the same role. CBS Sports’ Matt Zenitz first reported the news. On3’s Pete Nakos has confirmed it.

Hoodjer is a Nebraska native and Cyclones alum who started coaching at the Big 12 school as a student assistant in 2011. He would later move into a graduate assistant role in 2014 before becoming the program’s Assistant Director of Recruiting & High School Relations for two seasons. Campbell would later promote him to Director of Player Personnel before giving him the title of Assistant AD/Player Personnel, which is another way of saying program general manager, in 2023.

“I think Coach Campbell had a really good idea of exactly what he wanted our program to be when he first arrived, what he wanted it to look like and how we wanted to get to that point,” Hoodjer told The Athletic in 2023. We haven’t really steered away from that. Maybe we’ve made some slight tweaks here and there in how we recruit or where we recruit or who we recruit, but the type of person always has been of the utmost importance. We’ve tried not to steer away from that ever along the way.

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“We’re all really fortunate that Coach Campbell really does live by the philosophy of, “We’ll be judged on the ones we do get and the ones we do take.” Recruiting can become really competitive. Ultimately, we want to be judged on the guys that we do get in our program and making sure they fit who we are and making sure they’re capable of helping us win. We know that can come in a lot of different ways.”

Hoodjer joins current Penn State interim head coach Terry Smith on Campbell’s first staff. He is now on a four-year deal, per On3’s Pete Nakos, although the role he will have is currently unclear.