Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1540433
N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 5 2 1 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M P enn State had just allowed a 12-point lead to slip away in the final eight minutes of its White Out clash with Ohio State back in September 2018, and James Franklin was still fuming when he stepped into the media room at Beaver Stadium. It was the second year in a row in which the Buckeyes had rallied from a double- digit fourth-quarter deficit to deny Penn State a program-altering victory. In the wake of the 27-26 loss, the Nittany Lions' fifth-year head coach was too agitated to dive into the minutia. Dispensing with his customary breakdown of the game's specifics — turnovers, penalties, play- calling decisions, etc. — Franklin instead delivered a statement of purpose to the assembled media and dozens of recruits gathered around the railing above the stage. "The reality is, we've gone from an av- erage football team to a good football team to a great football team, and we've worked really hard to do those things," he said. "But we're not an elite football team yet. As hard as we've worked to go from aver- age to good, and from good to great, the work that it's going to take to become an elite program is going to be just as hard as the distance that we've already traveled. It's going to be just as hard to get there." The passion in Franklin's voice was un- mistakable as he railed against what he saw as the complacency in Penn State's program. "Right now, we're comfortable being great," he said. "I'm going to make sure that everybody in our program, includ- ing myself, is very uncomfortable. Be- cause you only grow in life when you're uncomfortable." Over the next seven years, it became all too clear that Franklin had perfectly diagnosed the challenge Penn State was facing — namely that the gap between the perennial elites of college football and the ambitious strivers was more vast than a lot of people might have suspected given how quickly he turned the Lions from sanction-ridden afterthoughts into a team to be taken seriously. But while Franklin had sized up the gap, he never entirely bridged it. The Nittany Lions kept losing to Ohio State, kept falling agonizingly short in the kind of games that could have changed the trajectory of their program, kept having to push their most ambitious goals off to next year. On Oct. 12, athletics director Patrick Kraft decided he couldn't wait any lon- ger for Franklin to engineer that break- through. The day after a 22-21 loss to Northwestern, Penn State's third con- secutive defeat, Kraft fired the veteran coach and put longtime assistant Terry Smith in charge on an interim basis. The move brought an end to the fourth-longest head coaching tenure in the program's history. Franklin had gone 104-45 overall, tying Rip Engle for the second-most wins ever at Penn State. And as Kraft acknowledged, the coach was also "a trusted ambassador for this university and a friend to the Penn State community." That wasn't enough. "At Penn State, we hold all our pro- grams to the highest standards in our shared pursuit of excellence," Kraft said. "My job is to evaluate everything and make hard decisions for what's in the best interest of our athletes, our pro- gram and our department. "Football is our backbone. We have invested at the highest level. With that come high expectations. Ultimately, I believe a new leader can help us win a national championship, and now is the right time for this change." Penn State's Trajectory To those not steeped in the history of the Nittany Lion football program, Franklin's dismissal was shockingly abrupt. Fifteen days earlier, the team was ranked third in the country and was locked in a double-overtime battle with No. 6 Oregon in front of 111,015 fans in a jam-packed Beaver Stadium. Penn State ended up losing that game on an interception by senior quarter- back Drew Allar, and then it lost to UCLA and Northwestern, games in which it had been a three-touchdown favorite. The three-game skid was the team's longest since falling to Iowa, Il- linois and Ohio State consecutively in 2021. Even the shocking setbacks against the Bruins and Wildcats struck a lot of outside observers as survivable given that Franklin had won 10 or more games in six of his 11 full seasons at Penn State and had led the team to the semifinals of the College Football Playoff just 10 months earlier. What those people missed was that PSU's fan base was restless even before the losses started piling up. The an- nual setbacks against Ohio State, which contributed mightily to Franklin's 4-21 record versus Associated Press top- 10 opponents, had created a feeling of skepticism that Penn State would ever break through without something dras- A Change At The Top James Franklin's dismissal sets in motion a high-stakes coaching search M AT T H E R B | M AT T. H E R B @ O N 3 . C O M