James Franklin can’t win the big ones. His 4-21 record against Top 10 opponents across his tenure at Penn State proves that. But on Saturday in Week 6, he couldn’t win the small one, falling to 0-4 UCLA as a three-touchdown road favorite in the Rose Bowl.
Penn State was the first AP Top 10 team to lose to an 0-4 opponent since 1985, and it was one that hadn’t led a game at any point yet this season, had already fired its head coach, and had a first-time offensive play-caller. It was a catastrophe of epic proportions and has the Penn State fanbase that was already tired of coming up short against Ohio State, Michigan, and now Oregon, ready to move on.
Franklin's $50+ million buyout is a significant obstacle, though. He’s signed through 2031 as one of the highest-paid head coaches in the country. There’s also the shared fear amongst the fanbase that maybe Penn State couldn’t do any better.
The list of realistic candidates to replace Franklin could be even scarier than the eight-figure dollar amount it would cost to fire him.
The Nittany Lions could consider turning to the offensive play-caller who has beaten them two years straight. Stein cooked Tom Allen’s defense for 45 points in the Big Ten Championship last year, and had answers for his quarterback, Dante Moore, against Jim Knowles’ revamped unit in Week 5.
Kenny Dillingham, another former Oregon OC, is thriving as a head coach, and in recent years, we’ve seen coordinators, like Kirby Smart and Dan Lanning, hit the ground running as first-time head coaches at major conference jobs, but there’s a whole lot of uncertainty that comes with hiring them.
Manny Diaz retreated to Happy Valley after a failed tenure as the head coach at Miami, then, after two years running elite defenses for James Franklin, got the head job at Duke. He won nine games in his first year leading the Blue Devils and has them off to a 3-0 start in ACC play this season.
He’s a good coach who is familiar with Penn State, but does hiring a retread who couldn’t hack it the first time he had a job at a college football powerhouse instill faith that the program will unlock a new ceiling?
Matt Campbell is the king of doing more with less, and at Penn State, he’d have more. The only problem is that that was Franklin’s biggest calling card when Penn State hired him away from Vanderbilt. Not that Franklin’s failure has been a tenure, but Campbell could be more of the same and would require a complete defensive overhaul of the defense to run his patented 3-3-5.
Penn State has long been a 4-down front defensive line, and has recruited that way for years, so it may not be the best fit on that side of the ball.
Curt Cignetti may actually be a home run hire. He immediately led Indiana, of all programs, to the College Football Playoff and has the Hoosiers back in the AP Top 10 this year. He and his staff evaluate transfer talent as well as any team in the country, and have fully embraced the new realities of the sport with NIL, revenue-sharing, and the portal.
The only issue with hiring Cignetti is that he’s already 64 years old, that is 11 years Franklin’s senior, and through a year plus in Bloomington, he has just one win against an AP Top 25 team. The two times Indiana has faced elite programs, Ohio State and Notre Dame, last season, it has looked entirely outclassed. Maybe with Penn State’s resources, that would be different, or the Nittany Lions would have the same big game issues, and a $56 million buyout preventing Cignetti from spending big in the offseason.
The most likely name that would be tied to Happy Valley if Franklin takes another job or is flat-out fired is Matt Rhule. Rhule played linebacker for Penn State from 1994-97, and the New York City native has already had success in the state, turning Temple into a 10-game winner as a first-time head coach.
Rhule was once a rising star, and last season he led Nebraska to its first bowl game since 2016, but he’s far from the big splash that Nittany Lions fans would be expecting if the program does make the bold move to ditch Franklin.