The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: Reviewing James Franklin’s tenure at Penn State

On Sunday afternoon, Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft made the bold decision to fire head football coach James Franklin, ending a tenure that lasted for 11+ years.

Let’s take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of Franklin’s time at Penn State.

Good

Rebuilding from nothing: There is no doubt that Franklin is leaving the program in a significantly better place than he found it. He arrived in 2014 as the head coach of a team that had no offensive line depth, very little in the way of talent and a roster shrunk by scholarship restrictions, beginning that year by going .500 in the first eight games. Now, 11 years later, the Nittany Lions are firing him for going .500 through six games. That’s not to say the decision is incorrect. Rather, he created an environment and a program so successful that so much as sniffing the record he had when he first started is cause for termination. Franklin took the Nittany Lions from a team that was destined to be a cellar dweller for years to come and turned them into one that entered the year with national championship aspirations.

2016: In Franklin’s third year, he was hearing much of what he heard just before he was fired — the “Fire Franklin” chants rang out during the team’s 2016 matchup with Minnesota. But what happened after that became the most successful portion of his tenure. The Nittany Lions won out in the regular season, going 10-2 with Franklin’s only victory over Ohio State coming in that run. They went on to win the Big Ten title for the only time under the Penn State head coach and narrowly missed out on a bid into the then-four team College Football Playoff. The 2016 season is without a doubt the best of Franklin’s career to this point — and possibly the beginning of the end when it comes to setting expectations for what the program should be.

Catching up financially: For years Penn State was behind other college programs in facilities and amenities for student-athletes and coaching staff size and when the name, image and likeness era dawned, it was behind there too. Those are all relatively easy fixes — as long as you’re willing to pay to do it. For an extended period of time, Penn State wasn’t. But for years Franklin kept poking and prodding and pushing the narrative out publicly — if the Nittany Lions wanted to keep up on the field, it needed to do so off the field. And now the Nittany Lions are teeming with analysts on the practice field. They employ two of the highest-paid coordinators in the country on offense and defense. Their weight room is new and their training table is state of the art. Largely because Franklin pushed the program into the modern era of college football.

Bad

The big games: This only doesn’t go in the ugly because more often than not the Nittany Lions were underdogs in their biggest games. But that doesn’t remove the stain of just how bad Franklin was against top-10 teams in his time at Penn State. His 4-21 record was abysmal. Yes, they were mostly underdogs — but this is about more than that. This is about every time the Nittany Lions were on the precipice and blew it. This is about Ohio State in 2017, Ohio State in 2018, Minnesota in 2019, Ohio State in 2024 and now Oregon in 2025. In each of those games the Nittany Lions had a chance. In any of those first four, Penn State completely changes its season with a win. Win the matchup with Oregon, and this story isn’t getting written and Franklin is still likely the head coach.

The snowball losses: The even bigger issue might be what happened after most of those big losses. In 2017, PSU lost a heartbreaker to the Buckeyes, and then followed it with a heartbreaking loss to Michigan State that eliminated it from the playoff for good. In 2018, the Nittany Lions lost another close game to the Buckeyes and then again followed it with a loss after a bye week to Michigan State. In 2019, Penn State followed its loss to Minnesota with a near-loss to a bad Indiana team and then a loss a week later to Ohio State. And then there’s this year, where the loss to Oregon crumbled the entire program in just 15 days. Franklin’s tenure may be more known for his failures in the biggest moments, but it’s what followed those losses that caused each season to collapse.

Quarterback development: Penn State’s biggest flaw from a developmental came to fruition this season. There have been signs that quarterback development was an issue before, with previous signal callers never making the massive strides necessary to be elite at the position in college — with the exception of Trace McSorley. But Drew Allar was supposed to change that. He was the first five-star quarterback Franklin landed and he was already showing promise as a starter in his sophomore and junior years. His senior year was supposed to be the big one — the year he ascended into being the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft. But his play sputtered and his season and college career ended with an injury against Northwestern. And it’s possible that those strides were yet to come, and the injury will rob him and everyone else of the chance to see that. But there’s no denying that quarterback development was never a strong point under Franklin and may have held the program back.

Ugly

How it ended: The end couldn’t have gone much worse. Franklin accomplished so much in his 11+ years as Penn State’s head coach. He was incredibly close to a national championship game appearance just nine months ago after the program’s first College Football Playoff appearance. This was the year everything was going to come together. But then it all cratered. The Nittany Lions lost that game to Oregon and could not recover. Franklin, his staff, his players and everyone else in the Lasch Building put so much into beating the Ducks that it was left without direction — losing to a rudderless UCLA team that hadn’t led in a game all season and then to a Northwestern team that is just plain bad. Franklin had to walk off the field to boos and chants for him to be fired and many other insults. An unfitting end for someone who accomplished so much for Penn State football, and dragged it kicking and screaming to the new age of the sport.

This story was originally published October 13, 2025 at 9:06 AM.

Jon Sauber

Centre Daily Times

(814) 231-6461

Jon Sauber covers Penn State football and men’s basketball for the Centre Daily Times. He earned his B.A. in digital and print journalism from Penn State and his M.A. in sports journalism from IUPUI. His previous stops include jobs at The Indianapolis Star, the NCAA, and Rivals.