Terry Smith makes his case to be Penn State’s next head coach at Monday press conference

Terry Smith’s players have done most of the campaigning for their interim head coach to have that tag removed, but on Monday, Smith took up his own cause. On his Zoom media availability, the prospect of him retaining the job full-time in Happy Valley came up multiple times, and Smith’s mindset is clear. 

“If I don’t speak for myself, who will?” Smith said.

Coming off an emphatic senior night win at Beaver Stadium, 37-10 over Nebraska and Matt Rhule, once the top candidate to replace James Franklin, Smith laid out the reasons that he believes he should hold onto the job. 

Smith is wrong; he’s not a good leader, he’s a great one. The team is playing hard for him, and playing hard to make a bowl game. After entering the season with such monumental expectations, fighting to the end for six wins wasn’t a guarantee, but Smith has galvanized the locker room. 

Smith was also smart to direct the attention to Rutgers, because a loss to close out the season, as meaningless as that game ultimately is, and as poor process as this would be from Penn State administration, would certainly doom his candidacy. Though the reality is, he shouldn’t be a real candidate anyway. 

Penn State cannot hire Terry Smith despite the growing momentum

Penn State fired James Franklin because he couldn’t win big games. In two tries as the program’s interim head coach, granted with a redshirt freshman quarterback, Terry Smith has lost three big games: on the road at Iowa, at Ohio State, and at home against Indiana. To make matters worse, his team held a fourth-quarter lead in two of those three games, and both times his game management was questionable. 

Now, after beating Michigan State and Nebraska, again with a roster that was built to compete for the national title, Smith is being lauded as the program’s savior. Those are games James Franklin always won, and the latter two were games he always lost. Smith fared no differently. 

Former Penn State quarterback Michael Robinson made an impassioned case for Smith to take the job full-time on NBC’s halftime show from Beaver Stadium. While it’s impossible not to appreciate his love for a fellow Nittany Lion, his logic is entirely misguided. 

The best case Robinson made for keeping Smith is that players and coaches who were contemplating leaving to join James Franklin or head elsewhere would stay. If keeping those players and coaches was the goal, Penn State would have never fired Franklin in the first place. 

You can argue about whether the program needed a wholesale change, but that’s what Pat Kraft brought about when he fired Franklin. To stop short of that would be a massive misstep. 

Terry Smith is a great leader. He’s the perfect interim coach, and he’d be an asset if he stays in Happy Valley as an assistant. He’s also unproven as a head coach and largely looked out of his depth through three games before beating up on lesser-talented teams, both already on their backup quarterback.