Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1503568
2 6 A U G U S T 2 0 2 3 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M / / / / / / / 2 0 2 3 F O O T B A L L P R E V I E W / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / take college football out of it. You would change the carpet in your house one time in 30 years, and we hadn't done that. We're at a similar crossroads now with NIL. When the industry changes, what- ever industry you're in, you want to be as competitive or as successful as you pos- sibly can be within that industry. You have to change and be bold and ag- gressive in how you change. We have been resistant from a historical perspective and internally. In the beginning, we didn't embrace it as an athletic department. And then externally, it's been difficult to get people bought into it. If it's just the coaches out pounding the drum, it's going to be difficult to get it done. But when the AD is pounding the same drum as the coaches, whether it's for facilities or NIL, I think more people are open to listening. They're hearing it from multiple sources. That's just the re- ality. We're still behind in that area. When I have my end-of-the-year meetings, I meet with every single player. One of the things I have them do is rank their posi- tion coach, rank the academic depart- ment, the training staff, the equipment staff. I have them rank every department so that I have this data, not only yearly but over 10 years, to identify what areas we're weak in. In a lot of the areas over the past couple of years where I knew we needed to im- prove, the feedback from the players in- dicates that we've improved. That's really valuable feedback for me. But across the board, the feedback from the players is that we're behind in NIL. They have friends and sometimes family members [playing at other schools]. We have players on our team who have broth- ers playing college football. It's a family member living it. That is really valuable information for me to take back to the administration, to give to the collectives, to educate our own staff. It's one thing for my coaches to hear stories on the road or talk to buddies in other programs. But coming from the players, that's valuable. The other valuable thing is that when I hire coaches from other staffs, they come in and can tell me exactly what they were doing at another program. BWI: What's the market? Has it settled or developed any semblance of consis- tency? FRANKLIN: No. The market is not settled at all. If we're saying, "We'll just wait until it settles, this is not sustain- able," then we're saying that mediocrity is OK until it happens. You can't do that. When one of the top players in the state of Pennsylvania leaves and goes to a school where you can't find a metric where that school is better than us — not one — and he goes there and you know what he was paid to go there, that's prob- lematic. We can't lose the best players in Penn- sylvania to other programs, especially programs that aren't on our level, because Franklin has urged Penn State to be proactive in its approach to facilities projects and NIL initiatives, bearing in mind the resources that its rivals have poured into those areas. PHOTO BY FRANK HYATT