James Franklin reveals recent conversation with Nick Saban as Penn State seeks winning edge

As Penn State lines up to start the 2025 season, coach James Franklin knows he’s facing a new kind of pressure. Just about everyone believes the Nittany Lions are good enough to compete for a national title.

Actually winning one? That’s a different story.

College football analyst Josh Pate sat down with Franklin on Tuesday afternoon to discuss what he’s learned in the last few years and how he can apply it to this season. And Franklin revealed an interesting conversation he recently had.

“A couple things, right? You’re constantly studying the game,” Franklin said. “You’re constantly talking to people about things that you handled the previous year. You’re talking about how do we go into this season?

“I’m on a walk the other day, I pick up the phone and call coach (Nick) Saban, right? ‘You’ve been in this situation before.’ He had really good feedback, as you could imagine. I’ve watched all the stuff, you’ve had a number of conversations. We were in the league together. But that was good.”

James Franklin didn’t get too much into what he took away from the conversation from Saban. That he’ll keep to himself.

But if he was able to find a few good nuggets of wisdom from one of the most successful guys to ever do it, that could be just the push that Penn State needs. Franklin expounded.

“A lot of times it’s not that they’re going to tell you anything different, they’re reinforcing what you already know, and there’s value in that,” he said.

There’s another element to this offseason for James Franklin that he has tried to highlight. He has some really, really good assistant coaches.

“I think the other thing is leaning in,” Franklin said. “Stan Drayton has been a part of I think three national championships, right? Jim Knowles just had a national championship last year.

“So I’m trying to encourage Jim to say, ‘Look, I just was a part of it. This is what it looks like. What we just did at practice yesterday, that’s what it looks like. This doesn’t. This is not aligned with championship-level football.’ So I’m encouraging them to talk about it, because we want to grow from their experiences as well.”