James Franklin’s rise and $45M fall, plus midseason CFB check-in

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Welcome to Week 8. Tonight, New Mexico State-Liberty is the season’s first Tuesday nighter, and Delaware-Jacksonville State is the highlight tomorrow night. More like Until Tuesday.

To Live and Die in L.A.: What led to $45M, and what’s next?

Four short stories, all set in the same city far from Pennsylvania:

Jan. 2, 2017, in Los Angeles: USC’s former interim coach, Clay Helton, meets James Franklin’s miraculously rebuilt Penn State in the Rose Bowl. Big Ten champion Franklin beat Ohio State two months prior, and everything is perfect and will remain so indefinitely.

The Trojans’ 52-49 comeback win goes down as one of the greatest bowls in history, easily the best game I’ve ever covered. Packing up tailgates, Penn State fans feel bittersweet about losing a game they’ll remember forever, but still can’t believe they just got to watch Saquon Barkley scamper throughout their dream stadium just five years after Joe Paterno’s downfall.

“May have been the most exciting Rose Bowl game ever,” says Franklin.

“It’s what fairy tales are made of,” says Helton.

Nov. 23, 2021: In Los Angeles, USC is about to hire its replacement for the fired Helton, and his former Pasadena adversary is the favorite to replace him.

For a while, Penn State’s Franklin has been connected to just about every open job in the country (this is a passive way of putting it, as if famous agent Jimmy Sexton’s newest client has played no role in those rumors), creating uncertainty in State College. So on Nov. 23, Penn State AD Sandy Barbour announces Franklin’s new 10-year deal. Ten years!

In the logic of college football contracts, a logic that has long been carefully cultivated by the agents charged with extracting money from schools, Franklin’s decade-long deal is meant to convey monumental stability to recruits and potential assistant coach hires. The instability had of course been summoned by Franklin’s supposed USC interest, but that’s just capitalism.

Awkwardly, Franklin’s team is 7-4 at the time of the contract, having cratered after a 5-0 start. The year prior, 2020, had been a quicker cratering, with Penn State going from a No. 8 preseason ranking to an 0-5 start. So upon learning the 2019 Cotton Bowl and 2017 Fiesta Bowl winner Franklin is set to stick around through 2031, Penn State fans again feel … bittersweet.

Five days after Franklin’s big Penn State extension, the Trojans shockingly hire Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma. A few months later, Patrick Kraft (remember this name) would replace Barbour as PSU AD.

Jan 2., 2023, in Los Angeles: Franklin’s Nittany Lions beat Utah in the Rose Bowl, Penn State’s second Rose win ever and first since Paterno’s in 1994.

Imagine this scenario: Accepting the school and the coach have tired of each other, he then leaves on top, or at least really, really, really close to it. For where? I dunno. Regardless, it feels like the culmination of one of the more perilous rebuilds in football history. Everyone realizes: Huh, that coach who sucks so badly that he can’t beat Columbus Thanos … has actually accomplished something amazing. Bittersweetness forgotten.

Nah! Who the hell would just walk away in L.A., one year into the nearly nine-figure contract he’d obtained partly by acting like he’d wanted to walk away to L.A.?

Oct. 4, 2025, in Los Angeles: Franklin could’ve weathered the previous weekend’s overtime loss at home to Oregon. But the Rose Bowl Stadium, the site of arguably his two best moments, is where it first begins to seem possible that Penn State might spend $45 million to end a decade-long contract not even halfway over yet. Previously winless UCLA 42, previous No. 2 Penn State 37.

Two truths about Franklin’s firing:

People who have at least $45 million at their disposal just used it to fire the second-most-accomplished coach in school history, who was a 10-2 machine (usually, at least) in a sport where winning double digits is way harder and rarer than Nick Saban made it look. Don’t ever tell me rich people are more emotionally stable than regular people.
The $45 million left on Franklin’s contract might not have been the fault of anyone who paid it make it go away, and this 12-year marriage had already entered “you’d better pull off a Ryan Day championship” grounds. Franklin had bristled and prickled almost the entire time, and Central Pennsylvania had long been sick of his every result being exactly what Vegas had predicted it’d be, either a heart-strangling loss to Michigan or a boring win over Northwestern. (Three days ago, that monkey’s paw curled.)

From here, there is zero guarantee that Penn State’s next coach will have as many strengths as Franklin, nor that the next coach’s weaknesses will be less exhausting than Franklin’s turtled-up game planning, inventive clock management and general nervousness. As fans, we always want our coach to be The Current Guy Minus The Specific Things We Hate About The Current Guy. Unfortunately, such a guy does not exist. Do you know how many things Georgia fans hate about Kirby Smart? A million things about the next guy will annoy you, but they’ll be new and different things, and that’s what hope is all about.

As for who that guy might be, someone at Penn State surely wants to offer Pittsburgh native Curt Cignetti his own planet. But here’s a very 2020s CFB question: Why leave this Indiana program for Penn State?

On the early candidates list, Bruce Feldman also counts Nebraska’s Matt Rhule as a front-runner. Rhule has already acknowledged his ties to both Penn State and its AD, Kraft, with whom he remains close from their days at Temple.

Within the coming weeks, I’m guessing Cignetti gets another billion-year extension of his own at Indiana and/or former Paterno linebacker Rhule goes home to State College. (Nebraska fans would then inform Penn State fans of all the things about Rhule that have annoyed them, and then Nebraska could look into hiring … a coach with a .681 career winning percentage, James Franklin.)

More:

Stewart Mandel goes in on college sports admins who cry broke, then pay a quarter-billion in stupid buyouts.
BUYOUT RANKINGS: Franklin’s windfall ranks behind Jimbo Fisher’s legendary $77 million, but ahead of all the other big numbers. (Charlie Weis’ inflation-adjusted Notre Dame number would be a heaping $29 million, but it doesn’t even need that adjustment in order to rank fourth.)
Former Penn State WR Terry Smith is the interim. More background.
Chris Vannini grades Penn State as a job, also listing several other potential names to consider. Since the Franklin news broke, I’ve been excited about the possibility of Penn State head coach Fran Brown, currently at Syracuse and probably fighting wolves or something. Only potential problem: Just like Franklin, he is bald.

Quick Snaps

Midterms: Who’s ahead of (or behind) pace?

The regular season is about halfway over. Yep, already. The passage of time continues to surprise.

It’s time to take a quick look at teams that have played exactly six of their 12 games. Let’s compare current records to BetMGM’s win totals from two months ago. Three happy notes:

First, congratulations to 4-2 Mississippi State and Northwestern for already surpassing their 3.5-win totals. House money!
After them, 6-0 BYU, 4-2 Maryland, 5-1 Vanderbilt and 5-1 Virginia are each one win away from hitting their overs.
Arizona, Cal, Cincinnati, Georgia Tech, Houston, Purdue, Stanford and Texas A&M are within two each. (Purdue doesn’t get to play Southern Illinois again, though.)

Among teams that have played exactly six games, the one furthest from its total is … well, this won’t surprise you: Penn State, whose doubters had already cashed their under-10.5 wagers even before the Nittany Lions lost to Northwestern.

At 4-2, Notre Dame will also fall short of its 10.5, and the same goes for 3-3 Clemson’s 9.5. And among the teams that have played seven games, 3-4 Kansas State will finish under its 8.5.

In happier news about the halfway point, Manny Navarro assembled a list of midseason awards, including the year’s wildest game, for those who missed UNLV’s frantic win over Air Force.

Thanks for reading. Tell me at untilsaturday@theathletic.com what your school would do with $45 million.

Sunday’s most-clicked: The section of Oklahoma State fans coping by way of shirtless camaraderie.

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