What to know about potential Penn State head coaching candidate Matt Rhule
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Penn State begins coaching search; Rhule emerges as early prominent candidate.
- Rhule rebuilt Temple and Baylor; pattern shows slow start then third-year jump.
- Main concern: Rhule lacks elite résumé and has weak record versus ranked teams.
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Penn State is just under two weeks into its head coaching search, and potential candidates have begun to trickle out. There will inevitably be twists and turns throughout the process that could wrap up sometime in December, if not sooner.
The Nittany Lions and athletic director Pat Kraft will be looking for a candidate that can lead the football program to a national title for the first time in nearly 40 years. James Franklin, who was fired on Oct. 12, failed to do that and only led the team to the College Football Playoff once. This season’s team, which is now 3-4 with no wins against Power Four opponents, was supposed to contend for a title and entered the year as the No. 2 team in the country in the AP top 25, but instead will be the last of the Franklin era.
So who will replace him? We’ll be taking a look at the potential candidates throughout the process, beginning with one of the most prevalent names since the second Franklin was fired — Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule.
History of building programs
Rhule has taken two downtrodden programs and within three years led them to 10 wins, and could be in the process of doing that with a third. His first head coaching job at Temple began with a 2-10 record, but quickly turned around from there. He led the Owls to a 6-6 record in year two and then a 10-4 record in year three, only the second time in program history that the Owls won double-digit games. He followed that with a 10-3 record, giving him two of Temple’s three 10-win seasons, and earning him the job at Baylor — a program under turmoil do to a sexual assault scandal that led to Art Briles getting fired. Rhule again struggled in year one, going 1-11, but rebounded with a 7-6 record in year two. He closed out his time with the Bears by going 11-3.
An unsuccessful two-plus year tenure in the NFL with the Carolina Panthers followed, before Rhule returned to college football with Nebraska. His 5-7 record in his first year and 7-6 in his second follow the same path he’s been on most of his career, with year three usually being the year he takes off with a program. That was happening with the Cornhuskers, until a difficult loss to Minnesota dropped the team to 5-2. For Rhule to continue the trend of getting his programs to 10 wins in his third year, he’ll need to win out with the Huskers during the regular season.
Connections to Pat Kraft and Penn State
This will be what most focus on if Rhule ends up being hired at Penn State. The Nebraska head coach has connections to athletic director Pat Kraft, Penn State itself and State College, making this the kind of storybook hire that they make movies about if it happens. Rhule moved to State College as a teenager, where he played football at State High before walking on at Penn State in 1994. He played four seasons as a walk-on linebacker for the Nittany Lion under then-head coach Joe Paterno, and spent a brief period as a volunteer assistant with Penn State.
And while all of that will help rally different portions of the fan base, it’s Rhule’s connection to Kraft that could help him land the job. The athletic director did not hire Rhule at Temple, but they overlapped from 2013-2016 and worked together until the head coach left for Baylor. More importantly, the two have remained close friends since, and have a strong relationship and proven track record of working well together.
Lack of high-end success
The biggest drawback to hiring Rhule is his lack of doing it at the highest level in college football. He’s built programs up, but has never stayed long enough to take a team to the highest level. This season with Nebraska could be his first in the College Football Playoff if his team wins out, but even that is unlikely. And this is a program that just fired James Franklin because the goal is to win national championships, not win 10 games and lose in the playoff.
Rhule’s track record is strong, but not elite, and that will be pointed out by his detractors throughout this process.
In fact, he’s only 2-23 against ranked opponents in his coaching career, a far worse number than Franklin’s 4-21 record against top-10 opponents. There are reasons to dismiss that number (Rhule has coached at Temple, Baylor and Nebraska, not exactly college football juggernauts) but it’s still cause for concern for a program that is desperate to get over the hump and win its first national championship since 1986. If he’s hired as the head coach, the bet is that he will have much more success against the best teams in the country when his resources match more closely to them than they have at his other stops. And if that proves incorrect, Penn State will, in all likelihood, have hired a different version of the same head coach it just fired.
