Blue White Illustrated

anderbilt fans weren't pleased when a Penn State moving truck parked outside James Franklin's Nashville home in late February. It was an 18-wheeler complete with Nit- tany Lion logos on the trailer sides and a large blue stripe bisecting the white cab, almost mimicking a PSU football hel- met. If the Commodore faithful ever needed a reminder that Penn State had swooped in and lured away the best coach in school history, this was a real- life illustration. Maybe you saw the picture floating around the Internet or on the nightly news. Well, that's when Franklin first saw it, too. He recently said it wasn't his idea to send the team's equipment truck to Tennessee to pack up his family's be- longings and bring them to State Col- lege. He was given a few moving options and chose the quickest one without knowing whether it would be a U-Haul or a spaceship. With everything he had on his plate, the farthest thing from Franklin's mind was the appearance of the moving truck. "There's only so much time in a day," he said. Since arriving in January, Franklin has capped off a top-25 recruiting class and scored seven verbal commitments for the next cycle. He has been gearing up for spring practice while trying to famil- iarize himself with the most important people in this whole process – the cur- rent players. He described it as a "sprint and a scramble." Franklin had been living out of a hotel a few miles from the Lasch Building un- til his wife, Fumi, and two daughters, Shola and Addison, made the perma- nent move north, and he still has made time for the public. He's made appear- ances at Penn State basketball games and wrestling matches (he wrestled for one year in high school, by the way), he eats lunch with students at the HUB, he's opened up winter workouts to the media and he's also squeezed in a series of radio appearances. He's everywhere and he's juggling a lot, yes, but going out of his way to send a blue and white moving truck to Tennessee, simply to rub salt in Vanderbilt's wound, was nev- er on his to-do list. In early March, he kindly joined Jerry Fisher (WBLF), Travis Johnson (Centre Daily Times) and me for our weekly "roundtable discussion," which we air live from Otto's Brewery on North Atherton Street. And we talked about the obstacles that come with settling into a new place. "There aren't enough hours in a day," he told us. "Sleep is overrated. Lunch is overrated, but we keep grinding through it." This lifestyle is routine for him and most of his assistants. In working his way up the coaching ladder to PSU – which he said is the ladder's top rung – he's lived in every time zone in the country during the past two decades. He and Fumi are used to moving. For instance, Franklin had a one-year stint as receivers coach for the Green Bay Packers in 2005, and after Mike Sherman's firing, Franklin hit the coaching market. For only two hours. One day he was working in the NFL, liv- ing in the frigid football tundra of Wis- consin. The next day, he was in Kansas. "[Sherman] was let go at 9 o'clock, and there was a plane from Kansas State that landed at 11 o'clock," Franklin re- called. "I got on that plane with two big bags, and I never went back. We had a house. My wife packed the house up and my wife sold the house. That's kind of how it is." After two years at Kansas State, the Franklins were off again. This time to Maryland. He's hoping now that lifestyle is behind him. He lauds the potential at Penn State. His goals are towering, and if he's going to reach them, he understands he has to stay for the long haul. So it seems unlikely that he'll be con- cerning himself with moving trucks again anytime soon. Because, as he knew when he accepted the job, he's not in Kansas anymore. ■ L A S T W O R D T I M O W E N | O W E N . T I M . B W I @ G M A I L . C O M In for the long haul V @AdamBergNBC6/Twitter KEEP ON TRUCKIN' PSU's equipment truck helped move the Franklins out of their Nashville home in February.

• Cover