The post-mortems on Penn State’s disastrous 2025 season have slowly trickled out, as dominoes that James Franklin’s unexpected firing knocked down have finally settled. One of those dominoes was offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki, who spoke to Pete Nakos of On3 about what went wrong in Happy Valley to turn a preseason national title favorite into an unmitigated disaster by Week 7.
“I’m not saying that we approached the offseason lightly because we didn’t. But when the guys came back, the expectations for our results grew every week, and the noise kind of slowly got louder and louder and louder. We probably didn’t combat the noise well enough. We didn’t say, ‘Hey, listen, guys, certainly people are saying these things about us, but it doesn’t mean s—.”
Penn State’s heavy expectations sank the ship last season
Expectations are a funny thing. Franklin spent much of his tenure at Penn State as an underdog, rescuing the program from the brink of collapse coming out of its darkest days, then punching up at Ohio State and Michigan. In 2025, the Nittany Lions were a favorite, heading into the year ranked No. 2 in the country after returning much of the core that led them to the College Football Playoff Semifinal the year prior.
Even Franklin has admitted he didn’t handle those expectations well, telling Adam Breneman, “I know that, that last year, we were very aggressive and bold, and took on some risk that I normally would not take on… Even our approach, we were a 1-0 team, and I allowed us to talk about things other than 1-0.”
Kotelnicki, who has since settled back as the offensive coordinator at Kansas, where Franklin plucked him from in 2023, took a lesson from the experience: “What I take away is that we probably should have done a better job of reminding our team how close we were to not winning some of those games in that [2024] season,” Kotelnicki told Nakos, referencing the overtime win against USC, and game-winning drives against Minnesota and Wisconsin.
However, maybe that shouldn’t be, and maybe it wasn’t the only lesson he learned, because I can think of another.
Expectations aren’t the only reason Penn State crumbled in 2025
Kotelnicki’s offense worked well at Kansas, where he leveraged mobile quarterbacks to create a diverse run game and kept defenses guessing with a bevy of pre-snap motion and unorthodox formations. At Penn State, much of that same window-dressing read as gimmicky, and without Tyler Warren and Beau Pribula to provide the QB run-game for Drew Allar in 2025, the whole thing fell flat.
Some of that is on Allar, who never lived up to his own expectations as a five-star recruit. But Kotelnicki was the play-caller Franklin tasked with tapping into his potential, and two years later, Terry Smith was giving interviews on Pittsburgh sports radio, saying the offense wasn’t built for his skillset.
Franklin and Allar share that blame, no doubt, but it’s also worth considering that Kotelnicki, who generated real buzz as a head coaching candidate after 2024, just isn’t cut out to be a play-caller in the Big Ten or the SEC.
Even before Penn State's fateful Week 5 loss to Oregon, and subsequent defeats at the hands of UCLA and Iowa, the Nittany Lions offense looked arduous against subpar competition. Then, against those Big Ten foes, it became painstaking. That's not simply because expectations weren't handled properly. It's clear that the offense wasn't either.
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