Evaluating James Franklin's First 10 Years at Penn State
Ten years ago, Penn State introduced the "Pennsylvania boy with a Penn State heart" as its new head football coach. James Franklin was a 19-year coaching veteran who scaled from filling soda machines at Kutztown University to becoming the head coach at Vanderbilt at age 38 to taking over at Penn State three years later. Even after an interview process he called "the most challenging thing that I've ever been through personally and professionally," Franklin still couldn't conceive what awaited him at Penn State.
Ten years later, Franklin is the second-longest tenured head coach in the Big Ten, ranks fourth in Penn State coaching history with 88 victories and has finished four seasons with teams ranked in the final AP Top 10. He has a better winning percentage (.693) in his first 10 seasons than Joe Paterno had in his last 10 (.621).
Franklin presides over a $100 million football operation with a 10-year, $75 million contract guaranteed through 2031. The Lions have won 20 consecutive regular-season games against teams not named Ohio State or Michigan, to which they have lost a combined six straight. This year, the coach who has called himself "fiercely loyal" repeatedly since that Jan. 11, 2014, introductory press conference fired an assistant coach during the season for the first time.
In 2014, Penn State football faced an uncertain future with roster, economic, facility and administrative limitations. Today, Franklin has the assets of a top-10 program straining to get into the top 4. "My guy, he is so prepared for these moments," Penn State Athletic Director Patrick Kraft said of Franklin's approach to coordinator searches, a pitch applicable to everything Franklin does.
"We are a top-10 program," Kraft said. "We are fighting to win a national championship. We are going to. That is our focus."
How far has Penn State trekked the past 10 years, and how long until it reaches that goal? Franklin's decade at Penn State offers some insight.
Penn State coach James Franklin takes a pregame walk around Beaver Stadium.
Matthew O'Haren/USA Today Sports
Franklin begins building a program
When Franklin arrived at Penn State in 2014, nearly everything needed a rebuild. The Lions played the 2014 Pinstripe Bowl with 41 eligible scholarship players, not even half of a full roster. The Lasch Football Building barely had been expanded or updated in years. Penn State's football staff ran leaner than most other major programs.
Since 2014, Franklin has doubled the full-time football staff from 19 to 38. His first Penn State staff had two assistant recruiting coordinators. The recruiting staff now numbers 13. Franklin has 11 analysts, a seven-person sport performance staff and a director of football research and strategy.
According to its 2015 athletics financial filing, Penn State spent $33.5 million on football in Franklin's first season. That included $11.2 million in coaching salaries. In its most recent filing, which covers the 2021 football season, Penn State spent a record $57.6 million on football, including $15.7 million on coaching salaries. For that season, Penn State football generated a record $105.6 million in revenue.
Over the past decade, Franklin has pressed for a multi-year Lasch renovation that will cost about $98 million once completed. He secured funding to upgrade training facilities, the analytics department, nutrition programs, Holuba Hall and more. The proposed Lasch renovations once included a quarterback lab. Franklin also wants the university to consider building dorms for football players.
"We’ve made great strides, and I don’t want it to come off the wrong way," Franklin said in 2021 after signing his 10-year contract. "I’m very appreciative of the strides we’ve made, but there was a long period of time where we did nothing and it put us behind, and we’ve been playing catch-up."
Penn State's missed opportunities
Penn State won the 2016 Big Ten title and nearly made the College Football Playoff in Franklin's third season, about seven years ahead of conventional wisdom. That should have turbocharged Penn State's push into college football's elite. The Lions got close again in 2017, going 11-2 with losses by a combined four points, but stalled thereafter. Franklin thought the program squandered its momentum by not investing more heavily after 2016.
“The reality is," Franklin said on the Penn State Coaches Show in October 2022, "if you look at it when we won [the Big Ten title] in 2016, we had phenomenal momentum in that time, and we really should have capitalized on that momentum and been bold and aggressive."
Franklin has described Penn State's entry into NIL similarly, saying the program was not "bold and aggressive" when Pennsylvania passed Name, Image and Likeness legislation in 2021.
"We've still got a ton of work to do," Franklin said last year. "We started out that first couple years where we said we were going to teach student-athletes how to be entrepreneurs. That was our NIL model. So we were two years behind everybody else. I think over the last year we've made significant progress. But if you give somebody a two-year head start in a basically three-year model, I think it's [the result] pretty obvious."
Assessing recruiting and development
During his first Signing Day in February 2014, Franklin made one of the most important calls of his inaugural month on the job. He called running back Saquon Barkley, then a junior at Whitehall High who had committed to Rutgers, and made his pitch. Barkley listened, flipped his commitment soon after and changed the narrative around Penn State football recruiting.
Since his first full class in 2015, Franklin has signed classes with an average national rank of 13.7, according to the 247Sports Composite. The team's results largely have followed those rankings. In 2023, Penn State ranked 13th nationally in the 247Sports team talent composite. The Lions went 10-3, finishing 13th in the final AP Top 25 and Coaches Poll. Penn State overachieved most in 2016, when its 20th-ranked roster won the Big Ten championship and finished seventh in the final AP poll.
Development has followed recruiting as well. Penn State has produced at least six picks in each of the last three NFL Drafts, its best run since 1991-93. Penn State led the Big Ten with eight picks in 2022 and tied for fifth (with Clemson, Florida, LSU, Ohio State, Oregon and Pitt) for the most 2023 draftees. Further, Penn State is one of four schools with at least five picks in each of the last six drafts. The others are Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State.
Tracing what matters: The results
In November, after being booed off the field following his team's third straight loss to Michigan, Franklin told fans that he understood their frustration at losing to Ohio State and Michigan for a third consecutive year.
'At the end of the day it's about actions and it's about production," Franklin said. "It's about playing well. We have lost to two of the best teams in college football who also happen to be in the same side of our conference. We understand that. We recognize that. So I get it."
Here's Franklin's Penn State tenure in those terms:
- Overall record: 88-39
- Big Ten record: 56-32
- Record vs. Ohio State and Michigan: 4-16
- Record vs. rest of Big Ten: 52-16
- Record vs. ranked teams: 12-26
- Record vs. top-10 teams: 3-17
- Last win vs. a top-10 team: 35-21 over No. 10 Utah in 2023 Rose Bowl
- 10-win seasons: 5
- 11-win seasons: 4
- Losing seasons: 1 (4-5 in 2020)
- Average wins per year: 8.8
Franklin builds a village
At his Penn State introduction in 2014, Franklin said, "This is my dream job." In 2018, Franklin spoke to a conference of Pennsylvania realtors, telling them that Penn State in fact wasn't his "dream job." He clarified for the large crowd.
"I would say in theory it was, but in reality it wasn’t," Franklin said. "What I mean by that is, I never thought a kid from East Stroudsburg [University] would ever be the head coach of Penn State. I thought it was going to stay in the family."
The family occasionally continues to cause tension. In 2023, Penn State Trustee Brandon Short said in an interview that a small group of alumni-elected trustees were part of a "counteroffensive to undermine athletics" that included voting against projects and discouraging donors from giving money to athletics and the university. Short said that tension extended to Penn State's NIL collectives, which ultimately merged into one unit in 2023. Both Franklin and Kraft have said that Penn State trailed other programs regarding NIL initiatives, though Kraft said he's seeing improvement.
"Thankfully I'm only spending 30 percent of my time dealing with this NIL space, which was vastly different when I first got here," Kraft said, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, in December.
That leads to Franklin's favorite term as Penn State football coach: alignment. Ten years into his tenure, Franklin said the university has an athletic director, a president (Neeli Bendapudi) and a trustees chair (Matt Schuyler) aligned behind, and in front of, the program. That, Franklin said, will determine the next decade of Penn State football.
"This is no knock on anybody, but I do think for the first time from the Board [of Trustees] to the President, to the AD, to the head football coach, we have a chance to have an alignment for really the first time," Franklin said on that October 2022 radio show. "This is extremely competitive and it is extremely competitive year-round. And the more wins that we can get in the offseason, the better chance we’re going to be able to do it on Saturdays. Because the margin of error is so small.
"... I could not be more excited about Dr. Bendapudi and Dr. Kraft, and not just for our football program, but really for our entire athletic department. I think it’s going to be exciting and I think you’re going to be happy with the results you see moving forward.”
More Penn State Football
The Penn State Football Year in Review
Is it too early to declare Penn State a playoff contender in 2024?
Penn State's Paul Posluszny elected to College Football Hall of Fame
What went wrong for Penn State in the Peach Bowl
Sheetz vs. Wawa: Penn State coach James Franklin pitches both for NIL opportunities
AllPennState is the place for Penn State news, opinion and perspective on the SI.com network. Publisher Mark Wogenrich has covered Penn State for more than 20 years, tracking three coaching staffs, three Big Ten titles and a catalog of great stories. Follow him on Twitter @MarkWogenrich. And consider subscribing (button's on the home page) for more great content across the SI.com network.
