The common criticism of Penn State football’s present circumstance has become so pervasive even Google AI manages to pile on. Simply pose the question of what James Franklin’s record is against top 10 teams, and not only is the response an injurious “4-20”, but the phrase “resulting in a 20 percent win rate” is added as an insult.
As we await the unofficial launch of Franklin’s 12th season as head coach of No. 3 Penn State with a Saturday night White Out visit from No. 6 Oregon – the official start saw veteran QB Drew Allar lead victories against lightweights Nevada, FIU and Villanova by a combined 121 points – this is how so many in the professional media and many, many more on social media evaluate his performance to date.
It is not defined by what he has achieved: assuring the Nittany Lions would remain firmly in the sport’s upper echelon following the Jerry Sandusky scandal, the end of Joe Paterno’s career and the oppressive NCAA sanctions that resulted; double-digit victories six times in the past nine seasons; the program’s first Big Ten championship of the title-game era.
It’s about what he has not accomplished: reinventing Penn State football to a position of equality with Big Ten superpowers Ohio State and Michigan.
And, to be fair, even Franklin had a substantial role in establishing this as the Nittany Lions’ persistent narrative.
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It began on the last day of September 2018, another White Out occasion at Beaver Stadium, when the Lions blew a 12-point fourth-quarter lead at home against No. 4 Ohio State and lost by a single point. Franklin addressed the media afterward and made a compelling statement about where the Penn State program was, and where it needed to be.
“The reality is, we’ve gone from an average football team to a good football team to a great football team, and we worked really hard to do those things,” Franklin said that night. “But we’re not an elite football team yet. And as hard as we have worked to go from average to good, from good to great, the work that it’s going to take to get to an elite program – it’s going to be just as hard.”
Honestly, harder. Much.
Because the Lions traveled those first two steps by their third season under Franklin, when the extraordinary Saquon Barkley and underrated QB Trace McSorley led them to a Big Ten championship victory against Wisconsin. But seven years after Franklin issued that declaration, they still have yet to climb that final step in the sport’s hierarchy.
“I think he kind of -- whether he meant to or not – defined his relationship with these big games,” Tyler Donohue, in his ninth season covering Penn State for Lions247, told The Sporting News. “He put it out there exactly where he thinks the program needs to be. He hasn’t won that game that says they’ve gone from great to elite.”
In the aftermath of Sandusky’s crimes, the removal of the Paterno statue and the postseason and scholarship restrictions initially imposed on the football program, it never was a given the Lions would return so soon to performing at a level accurately described as average or good, let alone great. Hiring the very capable Bill O’Brien rescued the program from looming disaster, but his preference for NFL employment put Penn State back in the same conundrum just two years later. If they’d gotten his replacement wrong instead of choosing Franklin, they might be chasing Ohio U. rather than Ohio State at this stage.
“He rebranded the whole place in his own image, and did it fairly quickly,” Dave Jones, who retired after covering the Lions for 35 seasons at the Patriot-News and PennLive.com, told TSN. “I didn’t think that was possible. And they needed to.
“Back-to-back, they made the two best hires they could possibly make.”
The corollary to Franklin’s struggles against the very best teams is how rarely the Nittany Lions have been upset. Since the 2016 conference championship season, they have won more than 90 percent of games against unranked opponents, and more than 85 percent against teams ranked outside the top 10 or unranked. Four of those defeats to non-Top 25 opponents occurred in the truncated (and failed) COVID season of 2020. It’s interesting, as well, that in those 24 games against top-10 teams, Penn State was favored in just four, was the underdog in 20.
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Franklin has been exceptional at getting Penn State to do what it’s supposed to do, and that is an underappreciated skill.
“I’ve heard the opinion that James Franklin is the most fairly rated coach, because he doesn’t lose games where he’s the favorite, but he really never wins those big games,” Big Ten Network analyst Jake Butt told TSN. “In fairness, rarely is he actually favored over Ohio State or Michigan or Oregon. But they’ve played competitive games.
“I think history does tell a story. It’s fair. Penn State wants to win these games. Penn State is a blueblood program. They put players in the NFL. They spend on their roster. But for me, it’s less about the past. It’s more about this year.”
The challenge has been to elevate what reasonably can be expected from the Nittany Lions, and there have been some obstacles on the way to this 2025 opportunity. There were unavoidable losses of essential staff members Joe Moorhead (OC, hired as Mississippi State head coach in 2018), Ricky Rahne (OC, hired as Old Dominion head coach in 2020) and Brent Pry (DC, hired as Virginia Tech head coach in 2022).
There also, though, was the failure to retain Josh Gattis, the recruiting coordinator and wideout coach who built a receiving corps featuring DaeSean Hamilton, Chris Godwin, KJ Hamler and Mike Gesicki. Gattis aspired to become an offensive coordinator, but Franklin chose to replace Moorhead with Rahne, instead, and Gattis left to fill or share that position at Alabama, Michigan, Miami and Syracuse.
“Rahne was ready to be an offensive coordinator before Josh Gattis was,” Jones said. “What’s James going to do? But that’s the way college football has been going: The jump up from position coach to coordinator and coordinator to head coach is so massive you just can’t keep a staff together. Unless you isolate who really matters on your staff and do everything you can to placate them … I don’t know if James could have done something to keep Josh, but Josh’s recruiting mattered.
“And all of a sudden, they couldn’t keep wideouts, and then were was a revolving door at wideout coach after that. There were four in four years. Meanwhile, at Ohio State, Brian Hartline is staying there. And he’s running an assembly line out of there.”
Ohio State, in no small part due to the superiority of NFL-bound receivers Emeka Egbuka, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Marvin Harrison Jr., Garrett Wilson and Terry McLaurin, has represented the most significant impediment to Penn State’s ascent. Of those 20 losses to top-10 teams, half were against the Buckeyes. It would be somewhat of an overstatement to say they’ve dominated, which only multiplies the frustration.
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Only three of those Penn State defeats were by double-digit margins, four were by a field goal or less and the Nittany Lions covered the spread in seven of the losses. Ohio State’s just been better, nearly every time.
“He’s not a great in-game decision-maker, not a great time/score analyst,” Jones said. “I can’t say that he has a bad read on his players and who will play well and who won’t at a certain time. I think he leaves that up to the coordinators and position coaches, which is what a CEO should do.
“But he cannot do math. He’s bad with timeouts. He’s bad with 2-point conversions. He makes harebrained decisions for time, score situations. And he’s a really smart guy.
“In the Ohio State game 2018, they’d already blown a double-digit fourth-quarter lead. McSorley was balling out and it’s fourth-and-5, and they go back-and-forth with timeouts, and the play they run was a handoff. On fourth-and-5. And it was stuffed. What are you doing? That’s the most infamous example for Penn State fans, as far as a gameday blunder.”
Franklin numerically has surpassed the work done by Paterno in this century, with a superior winning percentage (.712 to .634), more double-digit win seasons (six to four), fewer losing seasons (one to four). Perhaps not since the magnificent 1994 team led by Bobby Engram, Ki-Jana Carter and Kerry Collins have the Lions met the standard they are attempting to reach now.
“Penn State has followed the exact same model that Ohio State followed, that Michigan followed, which is to say: Hey, we have the opportunity to have a veteran roster,” Butt told TSN. “They convinced Drew Allar and Nick Singleton and Kaytron Allen, a bunch of O-linemen, Dani Dennis-Sutton, Zane Durant, Tony Rojas – it’s the same story on both sides of the football, guys that could be in the NFL but decided to come back because they felt like they had unfinished business, and they felt if they all came back and were aligned, they could win a national title.
“And then on top of that, they spent even more money by going out upgrading the wide receiver room. And they definitely upgraded the wide receiver room. They went out and got (Ohio State defensive coordinator) Jim Knowles to run the defense … So I think all their chips are pushed onto the table this year. That’s the way I’m looking at it. This year, there’s no excuses.”
We can’t judge from anything the Lions have done through three games what they are capable of achieving in 2025. We should know plenty by Saturday at midnight. This game against Oregon is a rare instance of Penn State being favored in a top-10 matchup; the Ducks are 3½-point dogs.
Allar is a three-year starter with 6,928 passing yards and 57 touchdowns on his resume, and he has thrown just 11 interceptions in 931 career attempts. That’s as many picks as Peyton Manning threw in his senior season at Tennessee.
Allar had the best tight end in the nation as a target last season, Tyler Warren, but little beyond that. Bringing in transfer wideouts Kyron Ware-Hudson (USC), Trebor Pena (Syracuse) and Devonte Ross (Troy) is expected to provide more options.
“I talked to two-time team captain Nick Dawkins, one of the best leaders I’ve ever been around, right before the season opener,” Donohue told TSN. “And he said, ‘It’s no longer about living up to other peoples’ expectations. Now, it’s about living up to our own expectations.’ And I think this year, leading up to the season, we heard guys more ready to talk about a national championship, not just starting 1-0. And James Franklin told us in Las Vegas at Big Ten media days, and again at his first preseason press conference, that he feels this is the best personnel – player-wise, coach-wise – that he’s ever assembled at Penn State.
“He’s already defined what these games mean to him.”
Had he not, others would have been plenty eager to do it for him.
“People are ready for, if and when James Franklin were to lose this game, they’re ready to bring up all those stats,” Donohue said. “I think psychologically, there’s a big opportunity where this program can maybe get that cloud lifted a bit. Seeing the way this team has played in some crunch-time moments, is there a psychological barrier this team needs to punch through? We’ve seen other programs do it. Georgia comes to mind, in the SEC several years ago, and now they’ve been on the top of that ladder a lot lately.
“Sometimes it only takes one win.”