The end of James Franklin's tenure at Penn State is one the college football coaching industry will remember for quite some time. Seven games before he was fired, Penn State had the ball in the fourth quarter of a tied national semifinal game. Two games before he was fired, Penn State was ranked No. 3 in the country and had the ball in overtime against No. 6 Oregon, a touchdown and a 2-point conversion away from winning the game.
One ill-timed 3-game losing streak later, and it was all over.
Asked by The Athletic's Ralph Russo if, with the knowledge of hindsight, he regretted not leaving Penn State before he had the opportunity, Franklin said simply, "Yes."
“I say that because of how it ended,” Franklin explained. “I didn’t feel like that at the time because when all these opportunities came I turned them down because we were so close.”
Franklin's continued success -- without the payoff of a national championship -- became a strait jacket in its own way. For example, winning allowed his coordinators to get head coaching opportunities, and those vacancies were increasingly filled by candidates who wouldn't have taken the job the previous time it came open. These guys had resumes, and those resumes came hand-in-hand with higher salaries and more autonomy over their side of the ball. After enough time passed, Franklin had less and less ownership over his own offense. Put simply: you don't hire Andy Kotelnicki to tell him what to do.
That won't happen at Virginia Tech. Thirty-four year old Ty Howle is Virginia Tech's offensive coordinator, which in practice means James Franklin is Virginia Tech's offensive coordinator. “ can have a very different conversation with Ty Howle in what I want because he’s been a coordinator before, but not at this level,” Franklin said. “So I can say, Ty, this is what I want, very specific, A, B, C, D, and E, and are you comfortable doing these things, and us working together? This allows me to put my head on the pillow at night because it’s going to be how I want it to be.”
The other way Franklin's success became his own undoing is that, in retrospect, it created a false sense of security within the building. “Some people probably thought, hey, we’ve been here 12 years, we’ve been really successful, and I don’t know if everybody was working with the same edge," Franklin recalls.
And, to be fair, after 12 years, the force of Franklin's personality undoubtedly wore some folks down at Penn State. That won't be the case at Virginia Tech. He's a perfect fit for them in that regard, in fact.
Zooming out, though, the circumstances of Franklin's exit from Penn State were unprecedented for the industry, but the situation is not. It is quite precedented. There will always be coaches that win a whole lot of small and medium-sized games without breaking through and winning the big one. Ryan Day at Ohio State qualified, until 2024. Dan Lanning at Oregon and Steve Sarkisian at Texas qualify right now. Others are trying to get to that level. When a Lanning, a Sarkisian, or a future coach reaches the point Franklin reached before 2025 at Penn State leaves, I wonder if he'll use Franklin's hard-won answer as justification why.