Pete Thamel addresses James Franklin’s future at Penn State, hot seat talk

The 2025 season looked promising before toe met leather for Penn State. The Nittany Lions entered the year widely regarded as one of the national championship frontrunners. Then, Penn State dropped its first two Big Ten games, and quickly hot seat-talk has started for head coach James Franklin.

One person who thinks that hot-seat talk is a bit premature is ESPN insider Pete Thamel. He explained on the College GameDay Podcast that between his buyout and the success Franklin has had, the hot seat talk is just talk for the time being.

“Let’s talk for a minute about Franklin’s future,” Pete Thamel said. “Because I got a ton of like, ‘Are they gonna fire Franklin’ yesterday, and Dan just said they can’t keep doing the same thing over and over. So, my stance here in early October is that the body of work of James Franklin, combined with his $50, 5-0, million buyout, like, that is not a real conversation in my opinion, right now. Like, do you fire James Franklin?”

During his time at Penn State, James Franklin has found plenty of success. That includes a 104-44 record and five AP Top 10 finishes. The problem has been his record against those top-tier teams. He’s now just 4-21 in those games.

Penn State fell to 3-2 by losing a game Franklin doesn’t normally lose, to a struggling UCLA team. That is going to make it almost impossible to live up to the team’s preseason expectations. It also comes at a time when the school is pouring resources into the program. So, clearly, the expectation is that he finds a way over the hump.

“The guy was a nose hair away from playing for the national title last year. He won two Playoff games. He’s won 11, 10, and then 13 [games] last year. He has three other 11-win seasons there,” Thamel said.

“And he said this. He credits Neeli Bendapudi the president, Pat Kraft the AD, they’ve given him everything. The roster is flush with talent. The coordinators are the highest paid pair in the history of college football. They’re paying $5 million just for coordinators. That’s some Power Five teams’ whole staff salary pools. So, it’s all there. All the support, all the talent, and it hasn’t happened.”

Beyond the cost, the challenge is finding someone better than Franklin. There is a known level of quality to the program now. Making a change doesn’t guarantee improvement. It could even make things worse.

“But all that said, you can’t ignore — it’s really hard to make a hire. Say they’ve been the seventh-best team in college football the last three years. It’s really hard to make a hire to get from seven to two,” Thamel said. “And I wrote this about Drew Allar, that’s the hardest terrain in sports. They’ve been great, but they’re short of elite. They’re not championship, and that is some of the hardest ground to travel in sports. To me, I can understand frustration, I can understand the question. To me, that’s not a real conversation at this point.”

For the time being, James Franklin remains the Penn State head coach, and the goal in 2025 is still to make it to the College Football Playoff. It’s a long way to go, and the Nittany Lions will need to be perfect, but it’s not out of the question just yet.