Many expected the 2025 Penn State football season to be history-making, and through six games, it already is, which is why James Franklin is no longer the head football coach.
The goal coming in was to win a national championship.
Although that wouldn’t have been an unprecedented thing at Penn State— 1982 and 1986– that was an entirely different era of college football.
Back then, sportswriters like me determined the rankings, and whoever they thought was the best team won it. Now, there’s still subjectively involved via the College Football Playoff committee, but for the most part, the best teams get a fair shot to compete for the national title.
For Penn Stats to get a national title by winning three or four postseason games instead of just one would have been something nobody had ever seen.
It almost happened last season, when Penn State came within one drive of going to the national title game.
Most of the key players from that team came back for this season, and that’s why Penn State started the year ranked No. 2.
Franklin said at Big Ten Media Days in July that this team was the “best combined personnel that I think we’ve had at Penn State.”
“When I talk about personnel, I’m talking players and staff,” he said. “From a depth, from a talent standpoint and from an experience standpoint, so we’re very excited about that.”
At the time, nobody argued with Franklin, because it was hard to argue against anything in that quote.
Along with the players Penn State brought back— QB Drew Allar, RBs Nick Singleton and Kaytron Allen, DE Dani Dennis-Sutton among them— Penn State added a defensive coordinator who just made the national championship in Jim Knowles and a running backs coach who had won two of them in Stan Drayton.
Getting Knowles, in particular, was a history-making move.
Never before had Penn State landed a coordinator from the reigning national champs, and never before had any program paid an assistant what Penn State paid Knowles.
Nor did it ever cost so much to put a roster on the field, so history was made on that front, too, in this age of NIL.
Then, the season started. Through three games, nothing really happened: Penn State beat Nevada, FIU and Villanova by an average of more than 38 points, didn’t look great doing it, and fans just kind of shrugged through it all.
The Oregon game changed everything.
What started as a typical big-game failure— Penn State plays a top 10 team, loses a close game, everybody is mad at Franklin— turned into the beginning of Penn State making the wrong kind of history.
No winless opponent had beaten a top 10 team since 1985.
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.UCLA did that to Penn State Oct. 4.
No team had lost back to back games as 20+-point favorites in 30 years.
PSU made that kind of history that past Saturday.
It ended up being the final nail in the coffin for Penn State’s playoff hopes, for Allar’s season and likely career and, ultimately, the end of Franklin at PSU.
There is no explanation as to why this all blew up.
When teams underachieve, there usually is one.
Maybe multiple star players went down. Maybe the schedule was too tough. In the case of Florida State last year, which started the season ranked No. 10 and then lost 10 games, it was a case of transfer portal acquisitions not delivering.
In Franklin’s time at PSU, a few teams flopped.
In 2020, Penn State started the year ranked No. 8, then dropped its first five games and finished with a losing record.
Nothing about the 2020 season was normal, so Franklin deserved some grace.
The next season, PSU started 5-0 and rose to No. 4, then ended up finishing 7-6.
But Franklin had a legitimate excuse in that QB Sean Clifford played the second half of the season hurt, and all of those losses— with the exception of the nine-overtime debacle against Illinois— were close games against ranked opponents.
This year, Penn State was mostly healthy, with the exception of LB Tony Rojas, and played a weak schedule, with the exception of Oregon.
There might be another case of a team underperforming this poorly with so little reason to, but it’d be hard to think of one.
Franklin was in charge of all of it, and is deserves the Lion’s share of the blame.
The firing of James Franklin was a sad occasion for PSU. Regardless of if you agree with AD Pat Kraft or not, a man losing his job is not something to celebrate, let alone the other lives that will be affected.
It all happened because Penn State made the wrong kind of history.
