The college football world was rocked with shocking news Sunday as Penn State fired James Franklin amidst a stunning implosion by the Nittany Lions with losses to a top 10 Oregon being followed by shocking losses at UCLA and at home to Northwestern. This comes after PSU made massive investments to retain most of their elite talent after being just a late interception away from playing for a national title last season.
Franklin's inability to win the big one has been the one thing that held PSU back during his tenure but the last two weeks have been the first time that the Nittany Lions have lost games they shouldn't have under him. And with donors and the AD feeling egg on their face given the investment made, Franklin gets a stunningly quick axe despite the fact that he went 104-45 with a conference title, 5 top 10 finishes, and a PSU program that has been a top 3 program in the Big 10 after Franklin took over a program needing a lot of work following mass NCAA sanction and two decent caretaking years from Bill O'Brien.
Personally, I think PSU is acting rash in a player-paying era where we've seen talented rosters implode midseason even at schools with great cultures and coaches who have track records of success. Look at Clemson's messy start to the season that destroyed all their ambitions along with 2024 Florida State being a disaster. This is a quick trigger finger that Penn State could easily end up regretting unless they get the right guy.
On the other side of the coin, Franklin is probably a top 15 college football head coach at worst at the moment. The past couple weeks have obviously been ugly but this is a guy who turned Penn State back into an elite winner and made the Nittany Lions a consistent top 10 program in the sport, even if they could never make that jump into the elite tier.
As the cliche goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Or in other words, one program's fired coach is another program's treasured hire that turns things around.
And if I'm on that committee at Virginia Tech, I'm doing everything I can to get in contact with James Franklin and get an interview set up with Tech's coaching search committee ASAP and unless I hear something off-putting or out of touch with the current landscape, I'm making Franklin my top target and trying to land him before the end of the season.
Think about it, Franklin is a coach who has dominated the recruiting territory that you want to get talent from, putting up consistent top 5-10 recruiting classes and then turning that talent into a winning machine. While PSU has some advantages compared to VT regardless of the coach, Franklin and his organization has proven way more successful with VT's efforts to replicate it not succeeding. Add in the $229 million in new money for athletics that will primarily go to football and now you have a budding machine ready for a prove operator to maximize.
The resume of Franklin is also as good as it gets. He has six seasons of 10+ wins with five finishes in the top 10 of the postseason rankings, a CFP semifinal appearance in the first year of the expanded CFB Playoffs, 2 conference title game appearances including one Big 10 title, three victories in New Year's Six Bowls, and a winning percentage that is better than many current and future CFB Hall of Famers including Frank Beamer. Add in his three seasons at Vanderbilt where he went to a bowl game all three years and won nine games in his final two seasons and it shows how good Franklin really has been and how he's the dream case of hire that suddenly has a chance at falling into Virginia Tech's lap.
The crazier thing is VT has a chance to intentionally pursue him now with their own job open before other big fish that will want to consider him are open.
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The guy that taught Pry all he knows, ain’t the guy! Sorry, but his buyout probably has a clause where he will be paid yearly his 8 million unless he gets another job.