It’s Wednesday, December 3, and Penn State still does not have a head coach. Since Penn State fired James Franklin in October, many big-time jobs have come up and been filled while athletic director Pat Kraft has continually failed the fill the vacancy that he hastily created.
A series of many missteps has led Penn State to a place where it has the lowest-ranked recruiting class in the Big Ten by a mile, with just two commits left in the class. There’s a chance the Nittany Lions end the first day of the Early Signing Period with zero signees.
For all of Kraft’s inaction, he’s gotten plenty of potential candidates paid this season. Nearly every head coach rumored to be an option in Happy Valley has decided to stay put for a major payday, an undeniable sign that the Penn State job is not as good as sought-after as Kraft or anyone expected a few months ago.
Is Penn State not a good job anymore?
In this new era of college football, the transfer portal spreads talent across the country, and through revenue-sharing and NIL, nearly any program that is willing to win can spend enough money to attract it. So, Curt Cignetti doesn’t have to leave Indiana to compete for a national championship at Penn State because Indiana is just as good a job. So is Vanderbilt, Nebraska, and BYU.
Penn State is still a good job, but there are more good jobs than ever in college football, so there’s little incentive for a head coach to leave a place where they’re having success to start over somewhere else. That’s led seven head coaches who were, at least ostensibly, candidates for Penn State’s head coaching job, to sign extensions.
The latest to join that list is Georgia Tech head coach Brent Key, who signed an extension to stay at his alma mater through 2030. Key was rumored to be in the mix for both the Penn State job and other jobs in the SEC before they were all filled.
Key’s extension comes just a day after BYU head coach Kalani Sitake, whom Penn State had zeroed in on as its target to replace Franklin, reupped with his alma mater. Now that those two are off the board, Penn State is mostly out of options, and Kraft is on the hot seat himself. So, here is the complete list of every head coaching candidate that he missed out on for one reason or another.
This does not include coaches that Penn State was rumored to have interest in, who immediately shut down the idea of leaving without an extension: Kalen DeBoer, Marcus Freeman, and Josh Heupel. Though if you’d prefer to add them to list, you can.