James Franklin being undone at Penn State Football by his own doing

The grass isn’t always greener on the other side 

If you gaze out over the landscape of college football, you will see the ramifications of programs that made the correct hires, and you will see the programs that were quick to cast aside coaches before they were truly about to turn things around.

Texas, USC, Florida State come to mind as schools that have been seemingly just spinning the roulette wheel of college coaches every few years, hoping to get lucky and hit their number, however they have yet to do so.

Nobody has more money or more resources than Texas, hell, they have their own tv network; the Longhorn Network. Texas has very rich boosters willing to do anything and everything to get the right man for the job on campus and start winning again.

But, Texas is now on its third head coach since 2013, when Mack Brown left, cycling through Charlie Strong, Tom Herman, and now have Steve Sarkisian at the helm. Those three are a collective 43-46 to this point, as Texas boasts a 4-3 record in 2021.

Then, you can look no further than a team in the Big Ten, Nebraska, who looked to have made the slam dunk hire bringing home prodigal son in Scott Frost. Frost left for Lincoln after an undefeated season at UCF and was seen as a rising star in the industry, except nobody told their opponents that.

Frost has yet to even qualify for a bowl game at Nebraska, with a 15-25 overall record, finishing fifth in the Big Ten West in his first three seasons. He has recruited fairly well, but a lack of player development, losing talent to the transfer portal, and an overall lack of continuity have plagued his tenure in Lincoln to this point.

The overarching point to these examples of traditional blue blood programs swinging and missing time and time again is that once you start this process if you do not get it right you start an endless chase of your own tail.

Spending bad money after good, searching for that right guy becomes the rabbit hole too many successful programs find themselves tumbling down.

The endless seesaw battle of giving that next guy enough time to build a program vs pulling the plug and not missing out on the next hotshot hire.

The fallout of letting Franklin walk can mean more than just a few lost games.

It could start a downward trend that will take a monumental climb just to get back to where Penn State Football even finds itself today.