James Franklin hot seat: Why Penn State's coach still holds all the cards despite loss to UCLA

Penn State lost one of its worst games in years this weekend by dropping a 42-37 outcome at UCLA. Now, after losing a game that they never do, being their first unranked defeat in almost four years, James Franklin faces as much criticism as ever as head coach of the Nittany Lions.

Josh Pate discussed Franklin during ‘Josh Pate’s College Football Show‘ on Sunday. He was as surprised as anyone to see Penn State take a loss like this, with him knowing there’s only so much they can do now at this point with over half of their season still to play despite being 3-2.

“I expected there to still be guardrails. I expected that there was a worst-case scenario…and thats 8-4, but then James gets to the end of the season and makes a lot of changes he knows he needs to make, and he course corrects, and he defines a little different way they’re going to do this, this, and that. But you can’t do that in the season. Well, the problem with making decisions as a head coach, which you get paid a lot of money to do, is, once you make them, you’ve made them,” said Pate. “You don’t get to make new choices on your staff. You don’t get to change your recruiting philosophy. You don’t get to portal in new players in week seven. You’re stuck with what you’re stuck with…James Franklin can’t fix a lot of this because he’s got an entire season left to go, and that’s even if he plans on fixing anything was my point. I don’t know because I can’t get in his head. I don’t known if he even sees fit to fix anything. I just know they missed the exit on this season. They totally missed it.”

Failing to come back from down as much as 20 to the Bruins in the five-point loss in Pasadena, Penn State is almost certain to now fall far short of their title expectations, both in the Big Ten and the College Football Playoff. That’s as a loss like this was never in the equation considering the issues that the Nittany Lions had against ranked opponents only, being 4-16 against the Top-25 just since 2021.

So, following up another one of those kinds of losses to Oregon in the Whiteout with this to UCLA, Happy Valley is anything but when it comes to Franklin. Still, barring something unforeseen, Pate isn’t expecting a new coach for the Nittany Lions, nor is he certain that their current one will be making any real changes in how he goes about things for 2026.

“Now, the question a lot of people are asking is should they fire him? I have no clue how you even do that,” said Pate. “It’s $56 million to pay if you want to fire him, first off. I don’t even wade into those waters. That’s not my money, so I’m not sitting here telling anyone else how to spend it. And I know, even if we were to look at James Franklin through the harshest of lenses, if you apply the logic lens on there, you do still have to bake in the opportunity for him to just have a down year. I’m not holding him to a different standard than I’m holding a lot of other coaches at high-level programs to.”

“But, okay. Let’s just say that’s unacceptable to you, because it’s your program, not my program. So, if it’s unacceptable to you, what’s going to happen to him is up to him. I mean, be real now. You’re not going to pay $56 million to buy him out. Now, if we get to the end of the season and something happens where a mutually agreed-upon reduced buyout is negotiated? I don’t know why he would do that, but maybe he does – okay, well, that could change the calculus. If he were to take another job, of course that changes the calculus – follow-up question is which job would it be?…So, I don’t even know what would be on the radar there,” Pate continued. “I just know that there’s still, in the back corner of my mind? Actually, in the front of my mind, there’s a whole part of me that loves James Franklin. But, he knows all this is true. Can’t fight it. The one thing I wonder is – and you’re not going to get this out of him probably ever and you especially wouldn’t get it out of him in the middle of the season. I wonder if he looks at anything and unequivocally says, ‘That I will change once I get to the end of the year’, ‘This person will not be here anymore once I get to the end of the year’. That we cannot know.”

Again, Pate took no pleasure in saying some of this considering his past defenses of Franklin. It’s just that this was the kind of loss that he hadn’t had in some time, and that he couldn’t afford either as it suggests they could now fall well short of those preseason plans – especially with two top-ten teams currently still on their schedule come the start of November.

“People would yell, ‘Oh, James Franklin is overrated!’ and I would say no he’s not. No one rates him top-five but they rate him in the five to ten range, which is exactly where a guy should be who beats everyone in the ten to twenty range but falls against the teams and coaches that tend to be in the one to five range, and I was okay with that because that’s a really easy team to figure out. That’s a really easy coach to figure out, and I’ll defend him if people say he’s overrated. I’ll defend him because he’s winning the games that, you know, oddsmakers indicates he’s supposed to win and he’s losing the one they say he’s supposed to lose,” said Pate. “Those were the guardrails and the guardrails are gone now…That’s been Penn State Football for a long time. I have felt such at ease that, even at the worst, we’re not really getting that far off the road. There are no guardrails anymore. Guardrails are gone.”

“There’s no going back to the way it was. So, now, when you look at the fact that they’ve still got to play Indiana, and they still got to play Nebraska, and they got to go to Iowa, and they go to Ohio State, and they go to Michigan State? They will lose one or more of those games, and there’s no limit to how bad it could be,” Pate said. “You thought the floor on this team may be 9-3. I heard many people say in the preseason that this is the most slam-dunk playoff team there is. They’re not going to go to the playoff. They will not go to the playoff. In fact, they may be closer to flirting with seven or eight wins than they are nine or ten wins. And so, for the first time in a decade, just about how long he’s been there? Total unfamiliar territory, and I don’t really know how to process it.”

Penn State, with this loss and their playoff hopes likely gone already, is in an unprecedented place based on what their program and coach have been the past few years. That could make for a long, unfamiliar few weeks ahead for Franklin and his team up in University Park.

“Look, I don’t know how they get it back,” said Pate. “There are no guardrails here. They’re sort of off the cliff now. We’ve never been here before.”

“I will tell you one thing – there’s still a long way to go in that season, and those are a lot of players and a lot of coaches who returned, in many cases, with one goal in mind, and that goal is probably out the window. Mathematically, they’re not eliminated. But, just looking at the quality of play, and knowing there’s not a whole lot of mystery with this team? It’s not like this team is going to improve in this compartment or this category. You kind of got what you got. They’re probably going to lose more games,” Pate said. “There’s just a lot of things I’m worried about with Penn State Football – a product on the field that I’ve never been worried about before.”