On the surface, a coach with a 70% win rate who has led his team to a winning season in 10 out of 11 years ought to have no fear of losing his job. Yet, this coach should.
Every fall, I look forward to one thing above all else: college football. Specifically, watching the Penn State Nittany Lions. My dad is a Penn State alum and has watched every Penn State football game for decades. Growing up, as I started to enjoy football, we began watching all the games together. This has remained the same until now as we are in the middle of the 2024 college season.
Penn State over the past few years has been a solid team that is seemingly always ranked. From the outside looking in, you would think my father and I would be satisfied with a consistently good team. But what we have come to realize is that their coach is holding back Penn State football from returning to an elite team, à la Joe Paterno’s championship teams, the teams my dad grew up watching. Their current coach is consistently good but rarely great, and my dad and I think his time should be up.
This coach would be Pennsylvania native James Franklin, Penn State head football coach. Franklin is by no means a bad coach; in some regard, you have to be a pretty good coach to achieve what he has. His main strength is his ability to recruit talent. State College, Pennsylvania (where Penn State is located) is a pretty isolated town, located about two hours away from a big city as it is, so it is hard to persuade highly rated prospects from around the country to spend at least 3 years in the middle of Pennsylvania. Even with this obstacle, Franklin has extracted the best from PA. Studs like Saquon Barkley, Micah Parsons, Jahan Dotson, Joey Porter Jr., and Abdul Carter are all from Pennsylvania and have all been recruited by Franklin. So with all this talent he has assembled over the years, it makes sense why the team’s production under him has been impressive. Penn State is consistently a top 25-ranked team that looks to compete within the Big Ten conference.
But where Franklin has struggled is taking that next step to become an elite team. Every season they enter looking to be an elite squad with eyes on a national championship under Franklin, but every year they come up short. If Penn State wants to legitimately have a chance to win a national title, they will have to do so under another coach because James Franklin has proven he cannot win the big games.
A bold claim, yes, but there is clear evidence that this is the case. The large majority of wins that Franklin has had at Penn State have been against inferior opponents, but when he has faced quality competition, the Nittany Lions have struggled. Franklin has a record of 1-14 against top 5 ranked teams which is not what someone would expect from an “elite” coach. The opponent that Franklin has struggled against the most over the past decade would be their rivals the Ohio State Buckeyes. Ohio State for years has been a consistent top 10 ranked team, who most recently won a national championship in 2015. A great team, yes, but if James Franklin puts together elite teams every year he should be able to perform well against them. This has not been the case as Franklin has an abysmal 1-10 record against the Buckeyes. It would be a different story if Penn State was always inferior in talent to Ohio State, yet out of those 11 games, 6 have finished within one score, meaning that they were very winnable games. Take, for example, the most recent matchup between Penn State and Ohio State which finished 20-13 in favor of Ohio State. In this game, Penn State had two drives where they got within the five-yard line, yet somehow they managed to get zero points from each of them. The playcalling was miserable, as it always seems to be in good games, and if they scored both of those possessions they probably would have won the game.
This poor play-calling and game management offensively has been a common scene among these single-score, close games, and first, you could blame the Offensive coordinators for these miscues. Under Franklin though, there have been 6 different Offensive Coordinators in his tenure, yet the results stay the same. Franklin is the common denominator, and he has proven time and time again he cannot win the big games. Even the one win he does have against Ohio State came off a fluke-blocked field goal attempt that was returned for a Penn State touchdown in the final minutes of the game, and that was eight years ago. Firing Franklin is not 100% warranted though, as some things need to be taken into consideration before doing so.
First of which would be his salary and his buyout. In late 2021 James Franklin got a 10-year contract that would see him as coach until 2031. Every year, the contract would see him earn 7 million dollars. On top of that gargantuan contract, he gets security in his job because Penn State would have to pay his “current year’s base salary, supplemental pay, and loans multiplied by remaining contract years” if they fired him. If they were to fire him now that would be near $50 million. The chances of Penn State doing this are very slim, at least anytime soon because of this unholy number they would have to give him, for nothing in return.
Another thing that has to be regarded is the introduction of the 12-team college football playoff this year. Previously at the end of each season, 4 teams would be able to play in a semifinal and then final game to determine the national champion. Due to Penn State losing their big games every year, they have been on the outside looking in on these top four teams, so now with a 12-team format, they should be able to make the playoff. Do I expect them to be competitive in the playoff against college football’s premier teams?
No. At least not with Franklin at the helm.
