Matt Rhule immediately emerged as a top candidate to replace James Franklin at Penn State. The Nebraska head coach is a former Nittany Lion with ties to athletic director Pat Kraft, and might be the obvious choice after Indiana handed Curt Cignetti a mega-deal to keep him in Bloomington.
However, Rhule, like Franklin, has had his struggles against ranked opponents. His last win over a Top 25 team came in 2016 as the head coach of Temple, and on Friday night against a Minnesota team well outside the top 25, his Cornhuskers fell 24-6. Meanwhile, one name that hasn’t been mentioned in the early stages of Penn State’s coaching search was pulling off an upset of No. 2 Miami.
Jeff Brohm is a Louisville alum, so there’s a chance that the former Cardinal quarterback isn’t ever going to leave his alma mater. However, Kraft should consider making a push to pry him away because the win was Brohm’s fourth as a head coach over a top-five-ranked team.
For contrast, across his entire 11.5-year tenure in Happy Valley, James Franklin managed a 4-21 record against top 10 opponents. Brohm is now 4-2 against top-five teams.
Jeff Brohm could be Penn State’s big-game solution
Brohm’s team was overmatched by the talent of Miami. Yet, he pulled out all the stops to build an early lead over the Hurricanes, including direct snaps to three different players on his team's opening drive, a fake field goal for a first down, and a direct snap to a wide receiver with three quarterbacks on the field, all split out wide.
Brohm is one of the country’s most creative play-callers, consistently maximizing veteran quarterbacks that he plucks out of the transfer portal. Brohm won 19 games over his first two seasons after leaving Purdue for Louisville, both with different portal quarterbacks, and now he’s managed to revive USC transfer Miller Moss, who spent most of his career with Lincoln Riley, another of college football’s preeminent QB whisperers.
Against Miami’s elite pass-rush, Brohm fed Moss a steady diet of quick-developing pass plays to get the ball out of his hands and allow his receivers to rack up yards after the catch. It was the perfect game plan to slay one of college football’s most talented rosters, something he’s become accustomed to.
While he doesn’t recruit on the level of Franklin, Brohm does more with less, and that might be more important in college football’s revenue-sharing era. Talent is as widely dispersed as ever in college football. So, with rosters closer to a level playing field, gameday coaching is becoming even more important, and Brohm is one of the best.