I think what many are missing, is the new reality of D1A Professional College Football - PSU completely destabilized the program when they fired Franklin. They are going to lose virtually all of their NIL-worthy players regardless of who they hire. It is not likely enough to just hire a "good coach" - DeBoer at Bama is an excellent example. Bama went 9-4 last year and is facing another year where they are "okay", but certainly not elite and likely not a playoff team (ND was the highest ranked 2-loss team in the last CFP Rankings - they were #9. ND will likely move to #8, but OU is probably moving to #9 or #10. At least 1 ACC team is making it and G5 Team.).
The reality is that PSU has put themselves in a position where they almost have to hire a both "a good coach" and a coach who can bring a core group of players (i.e., a coach of an existing team) if they want any shot at relevancy over the next several years. If PSU can't do this, they're going to be in serious danger of long-term irrelevancy a la UNL. NIL recruiting is way, way, way more important element of current D1A CFB, than HS recruiting, especially when you've completely de-stabilized and blown-up your rooster as PSU has - Cignetti has proven this quite dramatically (and DeBoer has proven that just bringing in a great coach - with no players - into a destabilized rooster, results in a severe dropoff of producut - 4 losses last year no playoff.... blowout loss this year to a bad FSU team and now a loss to an Oklahoma team was not a great team and had been blownout by a not great Texas team.).
Nope, it's pretty clear that given the position PSU has put themselves in, they are not only going to have to "buy" a great coach, but "buy" his team as well. If a coach can't bring a large group of players with him, their value is greatly diminished as nobody is going to pay a coach $12 million a year for a re-building project that could take 3 or 4 years and potentially never at all given the realities of the modern "pay-to-play" era. (IOW, all these people talking about available resources and where PSU stacks up, are utterly full of dung - PSU has plenty of resources as they proved on what they spent on Knowles.... but it really comes down to who is willing to spend what on who now as Cignetti and Indiana have proven. Indiana was a crap football program historically - that mattered ZERO in today's "pay-to-play" Professionalization of CFB environment. ZERO! Bama proves the opposite, you can become an "also-ran" very quickly in today's environment. Anybody can become competitive if they are willing, and able, to spend the money, but just spending the money guarantees nothing - it comes down to the quality, and "value", of what you spent.).
