Penn State might have been better off keeping James Franklin after all. Sure his on the field production was mediocre, and he already reached his ceiling in Happy Valley. Two miserable losses that followed an overtime home loss to Oregon will be how he’s remembered at Penn State.
Now two months later, Franklin is rebuilding Virginia Tech, and Penn State is still left without a coach. To make matters worse, Franklin has a top 25 recruiting class while Penn State has dropped outside the top 100.
Penn State fired James Franklin without a real plan
Penn State let the top Group of 5 coaches (Jon Sumrall, Ryan Silverfield, Eric Morris) land with Power 4 conference foes; the big names preferred to stay put rather than jump ship; and its Hail Mary choice (BYU’s Kalani Sitake) spurned the Nittany Lions to return to Provo.
Why does no one want to coach at Penn State? The Nittany Lions are spiraling into one of the worst hiring cycles in what should have been one of the most plentiful candidates to choose from.
The Penn State job isn’t what AD Pat Kraft thought it was
Penn State seemingly fired Franklin six games into the season to allow themselves as much time as possible to land the best replacement. Instead, athletic director Pat Kraft made it his sole responsibility to be in charge of the next hire, and that face planted. Maybe the Penn State job isn’t as desirable as Kraft thought it would be, certainly with more high-profile jobs popping up before the season ended.
The Penn State job was always going to be difficult, not just because you have to recruit against Ohio State, Michigan (and now even Indiana), but the expectations are surmountable. Franklin was fired not just because of three-straight losses, but because during his tenure, Penn State won just one Big Ten title and had just one College Football Playoff appearance.
Franklin couldn’t win the big games, and the idea is the next hire needs to be a big splash, someone who could come in and immediately inject new life into a team that was becoming lame. Now, Penn State could be forced to hire their interim coach Terry Smith full time, to avoid wasting another recruiting cycle.
Will Penn State recover from this abysmal hiring cycle?
It’s hard to think Penn State will recover from this abysmal cycle after they botched nearly every possible candidate. They’ve had one of the longest windows to hire a coach of any big-name job open, yet they whiffed badly and are still without a full time coach. To fire Franklin without a plan — or a search firm to help vet the process — will ultimately come back to haunt Kraft.
Even Kentucky and Ole Miss were able to hire coaches immediately after firing their respective ones, so why is Penn State so far behind? At this point, they’ve put themselves so much further behind everyone else that hiring Brian Kelly sounds like a good idea. At least Kelly can prove he can recruit in the Midwest. (That said, Kelly is probably too similar to Franklin in that he can’t win the big games.)
Penn State botched this hiring cycle, and now they are in a worse position than if they kept Franklin around anyway. They had more time and just about every team this year to find their perfect candidate, and everyone they wanted either signed extensions or landed elsewhere.
Penn State just isn’t the program they thought they were, and that’s worse than admitting they might have been better off not firing Franklin.