Penn State entered the 2025 college football season as the No. 2 team in the country. It finished with an ongoing head coach search and a mass exodus of players from the program. In the meantime, former Nittany Lion head coach James Franklin found a new home at Virginia Tech, taking coaches and players with him from Happy Valley.
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Despite having familiar faces now wearing the Hokies' uniform, Franklin admitted that he won't repeat his approach to the 2025 season.
"I got a huge chip on my shoulder, kind of an unusual situation. Again, six games earlier, we're playing for [a] national championship. Now, obviously some things happened that were in my control and I take total responsibility for that," Franklin said on Ari Wasserman's show on Thursday. ". . . [I'm] extremely motivated, really enjoy coming to work every single day [and] working with a group of people that are passionate about making Virginia Tech proud . . . Most importantly, our players are driven and excited and motivated."
With Franklin putting his all into his new team, he understands what yields success — and what doesn't.
On the show, Franklin said that the excitement, anticipation, and expectations for the 2025 season were boiling over the pot. The pressure to take the next step, whether self-inflicted or influenced by external factors, pushed Franklin to make "philosophical tweaks."
"Be more aggressive and maybe more aware of these types of things and allowed the players to have conversations and allowed the staff to have conversations that we typically hadn't in the past," Franklin said. ". . . We allowed more of that last year, and obviously looking back at it, I don't think that was the right thing to do. [We] had a model that worked for 14 years [at Vanderbilt and Penn State], and that's one example of a number of things that we would have done differently."
It was evident things changed from the 2024 season, even from the Nittany Lions' non-conference slate at the start of the season. One of the biggest things Franklin hinted at was getting over the "big game" hump. In Week 5, Oregon made a statement that derailed the remainder of Penn State's season and title-winning hopes.
Whether on-field tweaks or overarching philosophical tweaks, like focusing more on the big picture, Franklin messed with a system that previously worked for him and his squad. While that system struggled to overcome that stark barrier, it at least got the Nittany Lions to the standard they expect. Franklin learned "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" the hard way.