Or blue bloods.
It was telling that he jumped at the VA Tech job without a sniff from Florida, LSU, Auburn
James Franklin Throws Penn State Under the Bus for Not Caring About Players
- Thread starter NittanyLionRoar
- Start date
It was telling that he jumped at the VA Tech job without a sniff from Florida, LSU, Auburn
So I guess he doesn’t have to prove anything, you like him just because he isn’t Franklin. You should have just said that.
So if he comes here and goes 6-6 for five years in a row, then he’s an upgrade?
Unless he comes here and has some kind of scandal in the first or second year. Again, I think we need to let him prove something as our coach before we start saying how much better he is.
We'll just have to wait and see, but have a lot more confidence in MC leading the program to more top 10 wins just on their respective track history...
So glad Franklin's gone. Can't praise Kraft enough for taking care of that part of the business.
My guess is he’s referring to Kraft wanting to dump some of the current players and get some hired guns out of the portal and Franklin didn’t want to do that because he wanted his guys.I have a question.
Franklin repeatedly claims he is a “players coach” and suggests that is the reason he got fired.
Has BGJ ever explicitly explained his interpretation of the connection between being a “players coach” and “getting fired”?
Context is everything.
MC way elevated ISU's recruiting; can't say that BGJ elevated PSU's recruiting beyond where it has been historically.
And MC took lesser rated recruits and sent a good no to the NFL, including a QB (development is just as important as recruiting).
How many of the highly rated QB recruits BGJ landed are starting QBs in the NFL?
James had more walk throughs than a Broadway play . Made the team stale .
I worked with a guy that was a high school WR coach. He went to a coaches clinic that Franklin was at and signed up to go to his session. Said he got absolutely nothing useful from a technical aspect from Franklin. Instead, he said all he talked about having them play with the right attitude and swagger. I just shook my head and told him that sounded about right.
Fair questions. So far what we know of MC is he’s more X’s & O’s than CEO, which very much counters JF’s approach. Perhaps we’ll get better results, perhaps we won’t. Either way, our program had become the proverbial definition of insanity, so he’s very much the change we needed.
Not really.
Isu averaged about #57 the last 10 years. The 10 years before that they averaged #55. It was about the same per 247.
Our recruiting will probably take a step back.
Maybe the coaches needed the walk through instead of the players.
Can be…maybe the whole “1 step back, 2 steps forward” mantra? I’d rather take the chance of getting better than know I’m always gonna be just better than average.
Some people are really delusional. He was fired. He works somewhere else. That somewhere else is in competition with Penn State. He’s going to tell his truth. There is no right or wrong. There is simply competition and he is competing to win over his team.
How often does a coach openly bad-mouth his former employer, even when fired? It’s rare from what I’ve seen. It isn’t even about not burning bridges, as it’s highly unlikely that Franklin would ever coach at PSU again. It’s about taking the high road and focusing on the positives at your new school.
JF went through 11 coordinators in his time, Grant Haley saved his hide big time, otherwise he would have
been replaced.
I just want to see good, tough Penn State football , and Terry showed us it's possible with co-operation.
Look, I don’t like a lot of things James Franklin did after he was fired. However, I watched the video of the quoted text and I believe you are taking what he said differently than what he meant.
When he said “when things changed at PSU,” I think he meant when the team started playing bad and losing, not that PSU started to not care about players. When he said “the reason I struggled is because I care about the players,” I think he was saying that when the team started to lose, he struggled because he cared about the players, not because his job was at risk.
BGJ is a classic narcissist! It’s about him and never his fault. I recommend that he celebrate his 12 yr run and accept the fact that when it mattered most, he failed. Of course that won’t happen and I will enjoy watching him struggle in Blacksburg because he can’t let it go. Move on James. It’s healthier for you.
Sincere question. How long should we wait. I don’t think you can make any judgments on the 2026 seasons based on the fact half the team will be portal guys.
Do we judge the 2027 season?
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Franklin is still upset with what happened. He is a players coach and is loyal. We seen this when he came here from Vanderbilt. He does it his way and rewards those who he feels deserves rewarding. I think he wanted FSU and settled for VT as the others were not calling. He could do the funniest thing and leave VT for UM or another place as other jobs are going to come open.
To be fair, that’s not just Franklin at those clinics. I’ve coached football, basketball and baseball and been to coaching clinics for all of them. I’d venture to say to say that roughly a quarter to even a third of the coaches who speak at these things either don’t go in depth with anything or talk about vague topics like program development. It was after I had stopped coaching football, but a bunch of my friends that still were went to a clinic here in the Baltimore/DC area where James was one of the speakers. They said something similar that he was just speaking about being a cheerleader and attitude and rallying the troops essentially.
The best two high-level coaches that I’ve seen at conferences were both basketball guys, Bob Huggins and Billy Donovan. Huggins is bar none the best, not only does he stay after an answer every single question after the session is over, but he’s the opposite of what you see on TV. He’s funny, he’s friendly and will even have one of his staffers email you his playbook if you want. Maybe it’s because he’s half lit when he does the speaking, but he’ll also invite you to the bar after the clinic and pay the entire bar tab for everyone as well. Donovan was the same minus the drinking part.
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He might under a different AD. That’s the crux of his bitterness. Things with him and Kraft really soured leading up to this season. We just didn’t know about it until the firing. He was fired for his disagreements with Kraft as he was for the teams performance.
If you are not performing in a job, (any job) you better at least have a great attitude and extraordinary relationship with your boss or things will end badly.
I mistakenly replied to you and correctly re-posted my reply, but now I can’t delete this post. So…have a great day?
And a “walk through” is?
I feel like I’m in that episode of the Office where Jim is asked to provide his new boss with a “Rundown” but waits too long to ask what a “Rundown” is.
I was originally going to say I felt like George when he needs to go “Downtown” to do an assignment he didn’t hear Mr. Wilhelm give him.
This is just a bunch of catty nonsense. You're trying way too hard to bash one while elevating the other.
Campbell had periods at ISU that would have made PSU fans call for his head a million times over, if he was our coach. Multiple times (3) his teams had preseason top 25 hype and ended up unranked. They had a 3 year period where they were .500 overall, with 2 7-5 regular season records sandwiching a 4-8 campaign.
People keep focusing on things like "top 10 wins" because it's a convenient way to attack Franklin. If Franklin had top 10 wins, but also then followed up those wins with disappointing losses, when we were favored, critics would have latched onto that data point and said we need someone who can win those games we're supposed to win. Post hoc rationalizations stink. In 2017, Campbell's squad beat a then 3rd-ranked squad, and a then 4th-ranked squad in the same season. Woohoo! Yeah, except they lost 4 games to unranked squads, and another game to a ranked squad, and ended up 7-5 and unranked. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? But, hey ... 2 top 10 wins!
Campbell did what he did in a lesser conference, against lesser teams that had lesser resources ... so that negates part of that criticism. Also, part of a coach's job is to convince the powers that be to procure more resources. That's something at which Franklin excelled.
Franklin won at Vandy, a program that, historically, was much worse than ISU, and facing much tougher competition. It's not like he walked in here unproven and just took advantage of all we had to offer ... he, in fact, led in rebuilding the program, so that it had a lot to offer.
And this nonsense about being a "superficial salesman" ... so childish. The guy won. A lot. Salesman talk, but they don't have the substance to back up what they're saying. His program was highly successful. Not to the level of the "we deserve Nattys" entitlted children crowd, but very successful. This would be the only year where he ran his mouth a bit and didn't have success.
And, after all that, I still think Campbell could be a good hire ... there are positives. We just don't need to be irrational and catty in attacking a guy who did very, very good things for this program.
One really cannot compare the current reality in CFB with NIL and the portal with CFB then. Completely different game--as we're seeing. That doesn't mean I didn't think it was time for a change. It was.
He's a narcissist by saying he's about the players. Got it. He failed when it mattered most because he was successful in getting us to moments that mattered. I'd recommend you stop bashing the guy, and hoping for his failure when he brought a ton of success to this program, and helped re-establish it as nationally relevant, even though, as we saw through this replacement-hiring process, it isn't the dream destination that some hoped/thought it was.
Franklin was hired way back in a time when he made promises to parents about their kids future, in their living room. That's not the case anymore. They hire ballplayers and they have to make it on their own or GTFO. He is a little slow to the new game.