Five years ago, at the end of a game against Indiana, Penn State found itself in a scenario that was practically impossible for a coach to screw up.
With a 21-20 lead, the ball inside Indiana’s 20-yard line and an opponent that exhausted all its timeouts, Penn State only needed to kneel three times over the final 1:47 to escape with the win.
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It should have been a non-event.
Then, against all football logic, Penn State scored. Indiana tied the game, then won on a two-point conversion in overtime, delivering one of the most crushing defeats — and arguably the most egregious coaching sin — of Franklin’s tenure.
But that last part is up for debate. When it comes to Franklin’s management of game situations, tactics and the clock, choosing just one sideline debacle is like asking where you should start at a Las Vegas buffet.
After a long courtship this fall, Virginia Tech finally locked up Franklin on Monday to be the Hokies’ next head coach.
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It’s a hire that will be celebrated around the industry: For Virginia Tech, a chance to bring baseline competence back to a program that’s had a rough decade; for Franklin, an opportunity to resurrect his career after this Penn State season fell apart in stunning fashion, leading to his unceremonious dismissal in October.
Perhaps it will be a perfect marriage.
But it’s not nearly as sure of a thing as Franklin’s cheerleaders would have you believe.
James Franklin had a record of 104-45 as head coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions. (Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images)
(Isaiah Vazquez via Getty Images)
In a difficult coaching market, where Virginia Tech was at best the fifth-best available job, was this a no-brainer for the Hokies’ administration?
Based on résumé, it’s hard to argue against. There aren’t a lot of free agents who won 68% of their games over 15 seasons at Penn State and Vanderbilt and coached a team in the College Football Playoff semifinals just 10 1/2 months ago.
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There’s no denying that Franklin knows how to build a good program. He’s done it both a blue blood and one of the sport’s traditional sad sacks.
But the entire theme of this college football season more broadly has been how some of the stuff that mattered most in the past isn’t quite as relevant now. Some programs have adapted, others have struggled, and the end result is a compressed sport where even teams that seem bound for the CFP are engaged in a fourth-quarter struggle practically every week.
And when parity takes over college football the way it has this year, never has there been such a premium on what happens on the sidelines in close games.
When the margins are this small, every fourth-down decision, every situational play call, every squandered timeout can be the difference between winning or losing.
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And Virginia Tech just hired a head coach whose track record suggests he’s among the worst in the country at managing a game.
Year after year, it’s been a major issue for Franklin. And it reaches all the way back to his very first game at Penn State against UCF when his bizarre refusal to use his timeout during a two-minute drill nearly cost the Nittany Lions an opportunity to kick a winning field goal.
From that moment all the way until his final game against Northwestern, Franklin was on the defensive at one press conference after another about his playcalling, his decision-making and how he managed various situations.
The criticism and second-guessing wasn’t unfair, either.
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Franklin usually got the big stuff right. But on the margins, when a head coach is required to make consequential tactical decisions in the heat of battle, he was often quite bad and never got better.
A 4-21 record against top-10 opponents doesn’t happen by accident.
Ultimately, it cost him one of the best jobs in college football. Now he’ll have to do it at a program with fewer resources and natural advantages. Penn State was usually the second or third-most talented team in the Big Ten. It will take a monumental recruiting and NIL effort to put Virginia Tech on that talent tier in the ACC.
And even if Franklin does that, he will at some point be judged yet again by whether he can win the games that matter most.
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Unless moving 370 miles south has improved his ability to manage a clock or call a play under pressure, it won’t be long before Virginia Tech fans start to feel the frustration Penn State endured for the last dozen years.
