How a broken transfer system put Penn State quarterback Beau Pribula in a no-win situation
James Franklin’s frustration with college football has been apparent all through the 2024 season. There are snide remarks about the current system, its lack of structure and the negative impact it’s having on the people who should theoretically benefit most — the student-athletes.
In some ways, that came to a head on Monday afternoon. Just over an hour before Franklin was to speak with the media ahead of his team’s first College Football Playoff matchup with SMU, it was reported that starting quarterback Drew Allar intended to return for the 2025 season, and he said as much Monday.
“I came to the conclusion myself that (returning) was the best for my future,” Allar said.
That is good news for the program, and should have been cause for celebration. But even that came with its own bad news — the night before, backup quarterback Beau Pribula announced he would be entering the transfer portal and leaving the team before the playoff began.
And so Franklin sat at the front of the Beaver Stadium media room and went on a soliloquy, deriding the system that has forced Pribula into this situation before closing briefly with the positive.
“Obviously Drew announcing he’s coming back is an awesome thing, and we couldn’t be more excited about that,” Franklin said.
For all of the good in Allar’s return — and there is plenty — it was overshadowed by a broken system forcing a contributor to a team in the College Football Playoff to leave it before the postseason can even begin.
Pribula’s decision was not an easy one to make, according to his own social media statement and what Franklin and others said Monday afternoon. The head coach even said the quarterback was on the field Sunday practicing, but he noticed he was not all the way there.
“I think it’s one of these things, like a lot of things, in theory, that sounds good,” Franklin said about Pribula staying with the team. “But when you actually talk through how it’s actually going to work, it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to say you’re preparing to be the starter — when I say the starter, you guys understand our approach at every position, starters and backups approaching it that way — and I feel like at the end of the day I don’t feel like Beau felt like he could do those things to the level he needed to. He was out at practice yesterday and I could tell he was distracted by all of this.”
Franklin had already outlined why Pribula was in the situation he is. He’s a potential starting quarterback who would be sitting behind Allar for a third year in a row in 2025, and had put enough on film as a contributor to this season’s team to be a desirable player for teams in need of a signal caller. And the window for him to leave to do that is brief.
The NCAA’s transfer portal window opened on Dec. 9 and closes on Dec. 28, with an extra five days to enter for those who are on playoff teams after their season ends.
So yes, technically Pribula could have stayed, but as Franklin said, it’s far easier said than done. And the potential consequences are harmful enough for the quarterback that if he had pushed all of this back and entered when the season ended, he may have been left without an opportunity at all.
“I can give you my word — Beau Pribula did not want to leave our program and he did not want to leave our program until the end of the season,” Franklin said. “But the way the portal is and the timing of it and the way our team is playing — and when you play the position of quarterback and there’s only one spot and those spots are filling up, he felt like he was put in a no-win situation, and I agree with him. ... To have a transfer portal/free agency going on right in the middle of the playoffs, there’s just a lot of things that don’t really make sense.”
Instead, Pribula will leave his dream school — one he envisioned playing for since he was a child — in order to give himself a chance to succeed. It is surely not an easy decision to make and one that reached a conclusion that nobody wanted to see, even if all parties acknowledged it was a necessary one.
He will go to a new program soon enough and potentially start for a team for the rest of his career — and he will do it with the backing of many of his Nittany Lion teammates like Drew Allar and Tyler Warren, who praised him Monday.
“It’s difficult, but I understand it,” Warren said. “It’s the first time stuff like this has happened, so there’s really not a right answer for how to do things. ... We love him, he’s our guy, and he’s my roommate, so that’s one of my better friends.”
And next year he may even face off with Allar and Penn State now that the starter will return for his third year of leading the program.
But all of it will have happened earlier than Pribula ever wanted it to.
