The landscape of college football is ever evolving. In recent years, the main topics of discussion have been NIL and athletes entering the transfer portal and changing schools multiple times throughout their careers.

This football season has been a little different. Fans are still talking about those topics earlier, but we have also seen an eye-opening number of quality coaches fired or agree to “mutually part ways.” 

One coach who got the Pink Slip, who everyone is talking about, is Penn State Head Coach James Franklin. 

Franklin does not get the respect he deserves. Yes, he has not proven he can win the big game consistently. In 12 years at the helm of the Nittany Lions, he was 4-21 vs AP-Top 10 teams. He also lost to Oregon, which was ranked 6th at the time. This loss put him on the hot seat. The losses to UCLA on Oct. 4th and Northwestern on Oct. 11th really did him in. Penn State quickly fell to unranked by week 7 after starting the year ranked 2nd in the country. 

Fans who only look at their collapse in the AP rankings may think the firing makes a lot of sense, but there’s more to Franklin’s story at Penn State. 

In 2012, Penn State was in the middle of the horrible child sex abuse scandal that involved disgraced former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky and other former Penn State coaches. It also included Penn State’s school president, vice president, and athletic director, as they were charged with obstruction of justice. Even legendary head coach Joe Paterno had been discovered to know about the abuses through the investigation. Sandusky was ultimately convicted on 45 counts of child sexual abuse. The program was rightfully hit with heavy sanctions, and in July of 2012, it was given a $60 million fine, a four-year postseason ban, scholarship reductions, and a vacation of all victories from 1998-2011.

 For such a prestigious program, this was a major hit, but a young up-and-coming coach at Vanderbilt would soon come and bring this program back up. That man was Franklin. In 2014, he took over as Penn State head coach and performed “open-heart surgery” on the program. Before he joined Penn State, he was the head coach at Vanderbilt. He was the head coach there from 2011 to 2014. In the 2012 and 2013 seasons, he brought the SEC bottom-feeder Vanderbilt Commodores to 9-win seasons. Franklin also had them ranked in the end-of-season coaches and AP poll in 2012 for the first time since 1948, along with many other milestones in his brief stint at Vanderbilt. So when Penn State needed a hero, Franklin was the obvious choice. 

From 2014-2025, Franklin went 104-45 overall and 64-36 in conference play. Franklin had six 10 or more win seasons and only had a losing record during the 2020 shortened Covid season when Penn State went 4-5. To say Franklin revived this program would be the understatement of the century. 

In 2024, Penn State went 13-3 and went to the college football playoff and lost in the semi-finals to Notre Dame 27-24. Franklin was at the peak of his time at Penn State. No one in January of 2025 could even fathom Franklin being canned in just 9 months. 

However, after he had one bad stretch where the Nittany Lions went 3-3, and the plug was pulled. It is cutthroat.

 Yes, at the end of the day, college football is a business, but to fire the man who saved your program from heavy NCAA sanctions after one 3-3 stretch is disrespectful and sends a hurtful message. College sports are more of a business than ever in 2025, and it makes the head coach’s job even less safe and unpredictable.

Penn State fired Franklin because they think they can find a better coach, but that will be hard to do with a lot of other major Power 4 programs firing their head coaches. 

Mizzou fans are not going to like what I have to say next. Mizzou head coach Eli Drinkwitz has been linked, along with other names, to the Penn State job. Even with his contract being through the 2029 season, Mizzou donors will most likely need to help up his contract salary in order to compete with Penn State. Eli Drinkwitz also has a history of leaving after success, as in 2019, he was the head coach at Appalachian State and left after winning the Sunbelt championship  

On Nov. 17, Franklin was hired to be the Virginia Tech Head Coach. Virginia Tech has not won more than 7 games in 5 years, so just like Penn State over more than a decade ago, I believe Franklin is the guy for the job. Hokie fans should be and are very excited to have such a high-tier coach at the helm of their program. He is a great recruiter and will bring higher expectations to this program. 

I will be rooting for Franklin’s success at Virginia Tech, and so should college football fans.