Penn State Can't Win The Big One: Pressure Mounts on James Franklin

Nowhere in the United States this first weekend of November is more anxiety-ridden or more divided on the direction for the future than Pennsylvania. And it has nothing to do with the presidential election.

A season that looked like Penn State’s best hope to overtake Ohio State in the Big Ten Conference pecking order ended in familiar disappointment. With a 20-13 loss in Happy Valley on Saturday, the Nittany Lions dropped to 1-10 all-time against the Buckeyes during James Franklin’s tenure as head coach.

When it comes to Ohio State, Franklin’s teams have played the role of Adlai Stevenson to the Buckeyes’ Dwight Eisenhower, suffering repeated gut-wrenching defeats. The Buckeyes came into Beaver Stadium having shown vulnerability in a loss to Oregon and a narrow defeat of Nebraska.

Arguably, no coach in the Big Ten—perhaps no coach in college football—entered Week 10 under more pressure than Ohio State’s Ryan Day. The pressure seemingly transferred to Franklin with Saturday’s result, culminating in the head coach exchanging words with a fan while exiting the field.

Certainly, too much shouldn’t be extrapolated from a single incident involving a vocal spectator wearing an outfit that looked like it was purchased from Paulie Walnuts’ estate sale. However, Franklin’s on-field blow-up comes less than two weeks after he drew scrutiny for his handling of a reporter’s question about former Nittany Lions Jameial Lyons and Kaveion Keys facing felony rape charges.

Borrowing from the placard Harry S. Truman displayed on his Oval Office desk, when it comes to the head coach, the buck stops here. Franklin’s non-answer, which led to a subsequent apology, was a misstep that a leader with his experience should have avoided.

Both of these recent incidents, beyond the scope of on-field competition, reflect a growing frustration from and around one of college football’s longest-tenured head coaches. Another loss to Ohio State encapsulates the source of that frustration: the prospect of Penn State having plateaued.

It doesn’t help that in Penn State’s one win over Ohio State during the Franklin era—in 2016—the Nittany Lions missed out on the College Football Playoff all the same.

Penn State’s 10th setback against the Buckeyes since 2014 hardly disqualifies the Nittany Lions from this year’s playoff race. Even before any gerrymandering of the Big Ten’s map to extend to the Pacific, the league was already poised to be a primary beneficiary of playoff expansion.

And no program is better positioned to benefit from an expanded playoff based on precedent from the four-team playoff era, which began coinciding with Franklin’s first year at Penn State, than Penn State. Franklin’s 2016 Nittany Lions were the only conference champions passed over for a bid in favor of a team from their own conference.

From 2014 through 2023, however, Penn State would have likely appeared in five playoffs under the current format. The Nittany Lions won 11 games in four seasons during that run, achieving their first conference championship since 2005 and their first Fiesta, Rose, and Cotton Bowl titles since 1996, 1994, and 1974, respectively.

Franklin’s tenure has been undeniably successful on the field in all but one aspect: competing for a national championship.

That’s an especially lofty metric by which to measure the success of any head coach. Even Joe Paterno’s tenure, which produced the only two claimed national titles in Penn State history, hit roadblocks before breaking through in 1982.

One of those roadblocks even came from the White House, courtesy of Richard Nixon in 1969, whose presence at that year’s Texas-Arkansas game swayed the national championship in the Longhorns’ favor.

But perhaps the pressure on Franklin’s era of Penn State football would be lessened if it took an executive order to deny the Nittany Lions championships, instead of the familiar nemesis in scarlet and gray.