12 years is a long time for a college football coach to stay in one job, and that’s something James Franklin pointed out soon after being dismissed by Penn State.
In hindsight, it seems Franklin wishes he’d left Penn State sooner.
For Franklin, his firing was “unheard of”
“Well, it’s unheard of because people have had challenges and had a chance to fix it,” Franklin told Ralph Russo of The Athletic. “What makes it what you described is we didn’t get a chance to fix it.”
In the same interview, Franklin was asked if he regrets not leaving Penn State “on his own terms.”
“Yes,” Franklin said.
“I say that because of how it ended. I didn’t feel like that at the time because when all these opportunities came I turned them down because we were so close.”
Penn State was, indeed, close.
In 2024, PSU was a scoring drive away from making it to the national title game.
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.Returning most of the key players from that year’s team, Penn State was expected to compete for a national title again in 2025. Many picked it to win the whole thing.
Instead, three straight losses led to Franklin being fired six games into the season.
Franklin didn’t mention the specific opportunities that he turned down. But from the time Penn State won the Big Ten in 2016 to Franklin’s contract extension in November 2021, he was a regular on head coaching hot boards.
The most frequent school Franklin was linked to was USC, which came up repeatedly in discussions in both 2018 and 2021. Franklin was also linked to LSU in 2021. As it turned out, Franklin stayed at State, USC hired Lincoln Riley and LSU Brian Kelly.
Kelly would end up being fired two weeks after Franklin. Riley is still at USC, where he’ll be facing Penn State and Franklin’s replacement, Matt Campbell, in Beaver Stadium Oct. 10.
Franklin is now at Virginia Tech.
VT hired him a little more than a month after his dismissal from Penn State.
