Somehow, some way, all roads lead back to this place for Penn State football.
We'll spare you all the prelude: the players who forewent a shot at the NFL to come back to Happy Valley for one last run at a Big Ten and national title, the insistences that this time would, finally, be different for James Franklin, the opportunity that presented itself at home, at night, against a top-10 Oregon team. Franklin's reputation needs no introduction, not now that he's fallen to 1-18 against top-10 conference opponents during his time at Penn State.
We're not here to re-litigate what happened on Saturday night. We're here to try and answer a far more difficult question: What, exactly, does Penn State do now?
Of course, there's plenty of football still in front of the Nittany Lions. There are also potential opportunities for revenge against top-10 teams, with Ohio State (in Columbus) and Indiana (at Beaver Stadium) still to come in November. Who knows: Maybe this is the nadir, the dark before the dawn that spurs Penn State to a title run that they're still very much capable of. Maybe, in a few months' time, this will all seem sort of quaint, the way last year's heated debate about Ryan Day's future at Ohio State does now.
You'll forgive Penn State fans for not wanting to try and kick that particular football one more time, though. It would be one thing if bad luck and vanishingly small margins kept befalling Franklin and his teams, a la Jim Harbaugh at Michigan. Instead, the script remains depressingly familiar: The Nittany Loins are talented enough to at least keep things respectable, but never good enough to stamp themselves as the better team.
So: Where does that leave us? What is Penn State to make of the Franklin conundrum after 11-plus years and a 104–43 overall record? The overwhelming majority of programs in the country would kill for a floor of 10-2. A ceiling of 10-2, however, is a very specific kind of hell, one that puts the Nittany Lions in a situation without an easy solution.
James Franklin's success at Penn State can't be disregarded entirely
Seriously, don't laugh. It wasn't that long ago that Penn State looked like a program on a long, slow slide toward the middle class, something like Nebraska east. And we're not just referring to the horrors of the Jerry Sandusky scandal: Even before the Joe Paterno era imploded, the Nittany Lions had averaged just under eight wins a year over his final decade-plus at the helm, and Bill O'Brien worked miracles just to keep the team above bowl eligibility.
All of which is to say that this was hardly a given when Franklin arrived from Vanderbilt. (It also bears repeating that Franklin managaed to build a competitive SEC program at Vanderbilt.) And yet, once he got his recruits into the program, Penn State took off, winning 11 games in back-to-back seasons and earning New Year's Six appearances in 2016 and 2017.
Franklin has managed to sustain that success over more than a decade at the helm, a near-eternity by the standards of modern college coaching. He recruits at or near the top of his conference, he's competitive in the transfer portal and he's made some darn impressive coordinator hires on both sides of the ball. These are real skills, even when they're easy to forget about amid the high-profile (and admittedly baffling) game-management goofs and the deflating losses on the biggest stages.
There's another world in which Penn State opts for a different hire to replace O'Brien, and things begin to fall apart. Recent history tells us that the Nittany Lions cannot afford to take double digit-win seasons for granted, no matter the institutional investment and overwhelming fan support. Those things don't guarantee success, after all; just ask Nebraska.
If Penn State does fire James Franklin, for who?
If you're a Penn State fan who wants Franklin gone after what happened on Saturday night, I'm not here to tell you that you're wrong. If I were in your position, I would probably feel the same way. But I would like to ask a question: Who are you realistically getting to replace him?
Again, this is a bit different from Day, who had an awfully thin track record of head-coaching success at the college level. Franklin built a nine-game winner at Vandy, then turned Penn State from a program in crisis to one of the most stable programs in the support (for better or worse). If you're kicking him out of bed, you need to be very sure that the person you're replacing him with has also demonstrated the ability to sustain winning at the highest levels. And as we look around the country right now, which coach who might feasibly be available checks that box?
Penn State isn't about to pry Lane Kiffin from Ole Miss, for cultural reasons if nothing else. Marcus Freeman isn't leaving Notre Dame. Kenny Dillingham has found his dream job. Mark Stoops? Matt Campbell? Lance Leipold? None of them have a resume superior to Franklin's in a job like Penn State's. A hot-shot coordinator like Oregon OC Will Stein or Oklahoma OC Ben Arbuckle? Are you really firing Franklin in order to roll the dice on a guy who's never served as a Power 4 head coach?
Are you taking a chance on a fast riser like New Mexico's Jason Eck? Are you trying to lure Urban Meyer back to college football? None of those options strike me as obviously preferable to sticking with the devil you know, even if the introductory press conference high would sure hit different.
Really, the answer here is that ... well, there's no good answer. Sure, you could look to Georgia for inspiration: The Dawgs were in a similar spot with Mark Richt and then managed to parlay that into two national championships and counting under Kirby Smart. But Smart is a black swan, a generational hire that cannot be easily replicated (and besides, it's not like the greatest coach in the history of the sport just happens to have a right-hand man who played at Penn State). The more likely outcome is that whatever the Nittany Lions get is something slightly worse than Franklin, and that the program gets left in a slightly worse place than it is now. From there, who knows; one bad hire can easily snowball into two, or three, or four.
None of which is to lecture Penn State fans into feeling differently than they do in the wake of another exasperating loss. But the only thing to do is to just keep moving forward, and hope that next time is somehow different.