Penn State Football: Is James Franklin’s aggressive approach backfiring?

The Penn State Football program lost three recruits in a matter of days. Could James Franklin’s aggressive approach begin to backfire on him?

Ever since his arrival to Happy Valley, Penn State Football’s head coach James Franklin has made his personality pretty clear. While he does want to have fun coaching, he surely doesn’t play any games. At the end of the day, the man in charge has one goal, and one goal only — that’s to win a championship. And if they don’t win a championship, then ultimately, the season’s a failure.

So what it does it take to win a championship in the eyes of Franklin? Well, for starters, he likes to keep the competitive spirit alive. Players might know their position or role on the team, but they don’t know where they fall on the depth chart when it comes to game day during the regular season. Did you start last season? Great! You have to earn that back once again. Were you next in line to start next season? Well, don’t expect any handouts pertaining to the starting spot.

This is nothing new in football, but not all coaches stick to their guns for every single player. But Penn State’s James Franklin does. And since he did a couple of months back, he ended up losing the next quarterback up in Tommy Stevens. While the loss of Stevens doesn’t sting as much today, Penn State does still have a bit of a problem on their hands regarding losses of players.

Verbal commitments are beginning to back out…

James Franklin may be aggressive when it comes to the depth chart, but he also doesn’t like playing games during the recruiting process. When you look at players that even have the slightest interest in Penn State, they load their recruit up with visits. It seems as though Franklin is the type of coach who doesn’t like to let players leave without a verbal commitment.

The aggressiveness that he uses towards his current players seems to be the same kind of intensity that he brings to his future commitments as well. The Centre Daily pulled up an interesting quote from Franklin back in 2018. “Once you shake my hand, we’re engaged, and there’s no more dating, no more flirting,” Franklin told the media back in December.

Nowadays, the Nittany Lions head coach is finding out first hand that that’s no longer the case during the recruiting process. As Penn State ended up losing three commits in a matter of a few days, it’s beginning to look like the pressure the staff puts on their commits to get a definitive answer out of them is backfiring later on down the line.

Players aren’t exploring their other options before committing; then they end up backing out months later. Prospects such as cornerback Josh Moten and offensive tackle Aaryn Parks are the most recent examples of this. While Penn State isn’t the only team dealing with the decommitment issue, no other team had more decommits in a matter of one week during this offseason so far. Is it all James Franklin’s fault? Not exactly.

However, it’s become apparent that the old method of recruiting isn’t working well at this point as it once has. As Franklin has mentioned before, social media and such can play a critical part in recruits backing out of their commitments — but trying to get a verbal commitment early on knowing a player has hardly visited other campuses is causing a massive case of decommitments around the nation. Unfortunatley, Penn State’s approach has been failing the most.