Maybe Penn State made paying $50 million buyouts cool because now everybody is doing it. Weeks after the program agreed to pay James Franklin $50 million+ (which could be drastically cut by the offset language in his contract), the second-largest buyout in college football history behind Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M, LSU decided it could round up $50 million to move on from Brian Kelly.
Kelly was fired on Sunday with the Tigers at 5-3 in his fourth season since leaving Notre Dame, and now the LSU job is easily the best one available. 10 coaches have been fired before the calendar turns to November, which means it’s a bad time to need a head coach, and Penn State suddenly doesn’t look like the most appealing job on the market.
Dreams of somehow luring Lane Kiffin out of the SEC, plucking Marcus Freeman away from Notre Dame, or even pulling Eli Drinkwitz away from Missouri now feel even more unlikely for the Nittany Lions.
Penn State is now far from the best job on the market this offseason
LSU is the best job on the market. Before Brian Kelly, each of the last three head coaches in the program’s history won a national championship in their first four years. Florida, which moved on from Billy Napier a week ago, has titles in its more recent past than Penn State, and is situated in one of the most talent-rich states in the country. Penn State hasn’t won a national championship since 1986, and is clearly a tier below Ohio State in its own conference.
The best coach on the market, whoever that may be, isn’t heading to Happy Valley.
Now, the best coach on the market for the LSU job may have never been on the market for Penn State. Therefore, the pool of candidates for Pat Kraft to hire from may remain largely unchanged. Still, with every big-time program that moves on from its head coach in one of the most chaotic coaching carousels in the sport’s history, it begins to look more and more like a Matt Rhule Happy Valley homecoming is inevitable.
That alone isn’t necessarily a disaster. Maybe Rhule is the right coach to lead Penn State. He’s a successful program builder with an impressive track record of winning at places that have been historically unsuccessful. He has proven himself as a recruiter at Nebraska and could level up that operation at Penn State.
The disastrous part is that Penn State’s hand might be forced in that direction. It’s that Kraft won’t have his pick of the litter in this coaching cycle, one that he and everyone at Penn State thought they would be the main character of.