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Giger Counters: This might be my favorite thing James Franklin has ever said

Alright, we talk a bunch of serious football stuff around here, and a lot of people take this stuff very, very seriously. But let’s remember, we are talking about human beings here, too, with the Penn State football team, and as the old saying goes, they put their pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else.

With that in mind, I got a big kick out of what James Franklin said Wednesday night when he was asked an awesome question by Ben Jones of StateCollege.com.

The question was: “Living without your family, what’s the biggest domestic thing you’ve had to pick up? I mean, are you cooking for yourself at night? What is the thing that you’ve got to learn how to do these days?”

Now, just the fact that we in the PSU media can ask that kind of question to the coach of a 1-5 football team is something. As I keep saying over and over, Franklin is someone who gets it with real-life stuff, so we can ask him real-world questions without him biting our heads off.

I cannot imagine asking Nick Saban that kind of question, by the way.

Anyway, Franklin’s response was particularly awesome.

“I was single for a long time, so I did those things, but it has been a long time,” he said.

Then came the best part.

“I think the biggest thing is, with campus shut down and nobody around, I pretty much wear the same sweatsuit every single day, so that helps. I can wear it for a good week or so before I have to do a whole lot. Then the good thing is I can put on the loop like the players and put it in the loop and have the equipment guys wash it. So I’m only wearing about a sweatsuit, so that helps.”

As I sit here at 10:40 p.m. wearing the same Nike hoodie that I’ve worn for 4 days in a row, and knowing that I’ll put on the same sweatpants for like, umm, I don’t know, the 8th day in a row tomorrow, I can certainly relate to what Franklin said.

I remember during the quarantine, I wore the same clothes literally every day for weeks on end. I think I washed them once or twice, but who can even remember.

“I have done laundries on some Thursday nights,” Franklin said before adding, “I wash some underwear and some socks, and that’s about it.”

Hey, maybe nobody else cares about any of that stuff, especially when the Nittany Lions are 1-5.

But I applaud Ben Jones for asking the question and appreciate Franklin for telling a good story about his overused sweatsuit that maybe a lot of us can relate to. I know I can.

On a more serious note, Franklin ended his comments to the question above with an update about his family situation. His wife and two daughters have been living down South for a while now during the coronavirus pandemic because his daughter, Addison, has sickle cell disease, an underlying condition that could be very dangerous for her if she gets the virus.

“The thing is just trying to figure out when my family is gonna be able to come back, I don’t know when that’s going to be,” Franklin said. “With obviously the virus and with sickle cell and there really not being anywhere in State College or Centre County that can treat for sickle cell. That’s what we’ve been discussing a lot as a family is just I don’t know when they’re gonna be able to come back. So I try to spend as much time with them FaceTiming and Zooming and things like that as I can.”

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