Blue White Illustrated

acteristic of the team, but I did see that. It's probably both. I see a lot of young, hungry guys who are ready to prove themselves, guys who maybe haven't had significant roles at this point in their careers, redshirt freshmen and things like that. But also, probably on the other end of the spectrum, I worry a little bit about this team, and I talked about it with them. Those juniors and seniors had seen a lot of adversity at Penn State and had to fight through that adversity, which allowed us all to grow. I think we're in a situation now where we've got freshmen, redshirt freshmen and sopho- mores who think it's just a birthright. I'll just show up at Penn State and we'll win 11 or more games. That's what we do – play in New Year's Six bowls. They don't really understand all the hard work and sacrifice that went to get to that point. So I see both. I see a hun- gry team that wants to prove itself and individuals who want to grow in their roles, but I also feel like as a team, we've got to do a good job as coaches to make sure this team is able to fight through adversity so that they can grow, be- cause we haven't been through it. So we may have to really build some of that ad- versity into our training camp and make it one of the more challenging training camps that we've had because the ad- versity hasn't just naturally happened. BWI Does that extend to the staff? You've got some new assistants this year. Do you have to convey to the rest of the staff those same things, or is that not necessary? FRANKLIN We've got a veteran staff, and even the guys who we hired – I mean, Phil Galiano, he's not an older guy but he's a veteran guy. He coached in the NFL for a long time. He coached at Rut- gers when they were building that pro- gram and had a bunch of success. He was here last year, so this is his second year here. He's a veteran guy. He under- stands that, he gets it. Tyler Bowen was with us and with me for a long period of time. He played for me, was a GA for us, so he gets it. And then you've got David Corley, who we interviewed seven years ago when we hired Josh Gattis. He was at places like UConn and Army and tough places and battled through. And then we have Ja'Juan Seider, who obviously, being at the University of Florida and West Virginia, has been around big-time football. We went out and hired veteran coaches, so I think the combination of the veteran staff that we've got return- ing and then the veteran coaches we brought in, I feel good about it. BWI As the manager of an organization, have you been in a situation like this be- fore where you've had back-to-back years of this level of success, and does it require a recalibration of what you do? Or do you just keep doing what got you here? FRANKLIN We're big be- lievers that we have a model that works. This is a model that worked at a very chal- lenging place like Vander- bilt, and we came here under very challenging cir- cumstances. When we won seven games two years in a row, people were ques- tioning some of that. And I've told you before, I never really did [have doubts] because I think I understood what our challenges were within the program and I still had a lot of confidence in the model. So, no. I think the biggest thing for me is, internally I'm saying to the team, "We have to grow up, and we have to grow up fast." We have to feed that hunger that we have. But we also have to realize that we need to get some young guys who haven't been through the adversity we've talked about, we have to figure out how to get them to speed up their matu- ration process. And then externally, I think you've seen and you've heard some of my inter- views. I've done some pretty deep dives into where we are as a program when it comes to other top-10 programs in the country and where we are in our own conference. I worry a little bit that the programs that we're competing with, most of them had their foot on the gas for the last 20 years, and we didn't. We didn't for a long period of time. And then we come in here and we're battling and fighting and we get the program the last two years to have a significant amount of success, and I don't want our people to take a deep breath and think, "Whew! We're back." If you're not pushing and being smart and being cal- culated and being aggressive in all these areas – infrastructure, staff develop- ment, player development, recruiting, all these types of things – it's a very fragile thing. I don't want people to misinterpret what we're doing right now and what I'm doing. I just live this. I live this every single day and I understand how fragile it all is and how competitive it all is, year-round. So that's all I'm doing right now. I'm recognizing the challenges within our own program on our own roster, and then I'm also identifying challenges and issues that we have to solve to continue building. And also, the most important thing is, we've got mo- mentum right now, and we've got to take advantage of that momentum. Because I've seen a lot of programs, a lot of coaches and a lot of organizations that have momentum that don't make the right decisions, that don't make the right moves, and they lose it and never get it back. BWI Do you look at Penn State as maybe a model of that in its recent his- tory? FRANKLIN I don't know if that's fair, because for really a long time, this place was rolling. I just think it was more of a situation the last 10, 15 years before probably Billy arrived. I don't know, and I don't want anybody to misinterpret this, because obviously the program was so strong for so long, but I don't know if I know what the expectation is here. Well, we can't say that this is the expectation but then not be willing to do the things that [comparable] programs are doing. " "

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