theathleticuk
BLACKSBURG, Va.
James Franklin gets the curiosity about how his time at Penn State ended.
How it all went so wrong, so fast, and how that experience might have changed him as he embarks on the next phase of his career at Virginia Tech.
But make no mistake: Franklin does not believe he needs to overhaul his approach after Penn State abruptly fired him when its most-anticipated football season in decades came crashing down.
Advertisement You can learn things over the years, you get around really good people, so youre constantly learning and growing and evolving, Franklin told The Athletic during a visit to Blacksburg this spring.
But its hard to say that you need to totally reinvent yourself when six games earlier youre playing to be in the national championship, right? For a Virginia Tech program that has been in decline for more than a decade since its heyday under Frank Beamer, landing Franklin is validating and hopeful.
For Franklin, the Hokies offered a chance to flip the script after Penn State fans had grown weary of his program banging up against the ceiling that separates top teams from the elite.
At this time last year, Penn State was being compared to the previous two national champions, Big Ten rivals Michigan and Ohio State.
After fits and starts and pleading from Franklin, Penn State had gotten its NIL program in order and had the financial wherewithal to bring back about a half-dozen key players from a CFP semifinalist, including quarterback Drew Allar, to be the foundation of what many thought would be a 2025 title contender.
Could Franklin meet the high expectations? A reasonable question.
The idea that Franklin would be fired in October? Unheard of.
Well, its unheard of because people have had challenges and had a chance to fix it, Franklin said.
What makes it what you described is we didnt get a chance to fix it.
Virginia Tech needs a fix and believes it is getting the best version of Franklin, the coach who won at Vanderbilt when that seemed almost impossible and returned Penn State to national prominence after a crippling scandal.
Franklin says he wants to get back to being more like that version of himself, too.
He believes he drifted away from some of the principles and decision-making that made him successful, contributing to last years disappointment.
Advertisement He wants to be more involved with the offense and better attuned to how his staff fits together.
He believes complacency crept into the organization, making last years preseason No.
2 Penn State team vulnerable to collapse.
And he wants everybody at Virginia Tech to understand just how fleeting success can be if its taken for granted.
You want to be at a place where youre celebrated, not tolerated, outgoing Virginia Tech athletic Whit Babcock said.
And he is celebrated here.
Franklin did what most coaches do after he was fired.
He tried to come to grips with the end of his 12-year tenure at Penn State and ponder what might be next.
He was still owed almost $50 million by the school.
He didnt need to rush back.
At first, its the shock of it, Franklin said.
And then youre trying to take some time, but the problem is the process wont allow you to take time.
Less than a week after he was fired, Franklin went on ESPNs College GameDay and made clear he wanted to get back into coaching ASAP.
Were just going to go win the national championship somewhere else now, he said then.
Some of Franklins confidants in the coaching world suggested taking a year off.
Recharge.
Refresh the way you do things.
His wife, Fumi, and agent, Jimmy Sexton, thought differently.
Youre gonna drive yourself crazy, and youre gonna drive us crazy if you sit out, Franklin said was their message.
The 2025 silly season was revving hot by the time he was let go.
Virginia Tech was among four power conference schools that had fired head coaches by then, and Florida was just one week away from cutting loose another.
If Franklin wanted to coach again, he would have options.
Virginia Tech officials wasted no time letting Franklin know they were interested.
I cant believe Penn State let em go, said former Virginia Tech defensive coordinator Bud Foster, who was the tip of the spear in a coaching search that basically turned into a recruitment of Franklin.
The excitement thats in our place right now to be able to hire a guy like James, I mean, youre talking about a game-changing hire.
In wooing Franklin to Blacksburg, Foster, Babcock and members of the Virginia Tech board of visitors needed to convince him that the Hokies were ready to get back in the game after sinking to near the bottom of the ACC in athletic spending.
The board had approved a plan to increase Virginia Techs athletic budget by $229 million in September.
Advertisement Armed with that plan, board member Ryan McCarthy, the former Secretary of the Army, said his role in the courting of Franklin was to tap into his passion for program building and assure the coach the Invest to Win initiative was more than just wishful thinking.
Virginia Tech hired Franklin on Nov.
17, agreeing to a five-year, $41.75 million deal while turning the page to a new era of investment in Hokies athletics.
I told him if the investment in football occurs like they were discussing thered be an opportunity to compete for the league, said Brent Pry, the longtime Franklin assistant who the Hokies fired as head coach last September.
The irony is Invest to Win was critical to land Franklin, but landing Franklin is also a significant step toward executing the plan by motivating donors and potential investors.
In early June, Virginia Tech announced a $75 million donation from an anonymous donor.
Though Franklin couldnt shed the cant-win-the-big-one label that hounded him at Penn State, he comfortably makes a case for being one of the best coaches in college football over the last decade and a half and one of the most accomplished to ever enter the ACC.
Virginia Tech hasnt even played in a big game in years.
The Hokies havent been ranked since early in the 2021 season.
They have not played in a game matching ranked teams since October 2020.
They last reached eight victories in 2019.
They have not finished ranked since 2017.
What Foster and the rest of the search committee made clear in their pursuit of Franklin was they liked him just the way he is.
Heck, in a way, if he did bring the exact same Penn State model here, I wouldnt mind playing in the final four and the Playoff, Babcock said.
Part of the pitch to Franklin was that at some places Florida and Auburn come to mind he would have been a candidate to fill an open job.
At Virginia Tech, he was THE candidate.
Advertisement This dude is a chance to go get the five-star, said J.
Pearson, Virginia Tech Class of 1987 and the boards athletic committee chairman.
This is (former No.
1 recruit) Kevin Jones.
This is the superstar that we have a chance to get.
So what went wrong at Penn State? The first thing Franklin points to when asked about lessons learned is staffing.
As time went on there, you build it, and you lose really good people, right? Franklin said.
You lose Manny Diaz, you lose Joe Moorhead, you lose Ricky Rahne.
Brent Pry.
All four of those former coordinators left Penn State to become head coaches, including Pry at Virginia Tech.
During Franklins final two seasons at Penn State, he made two headline-grabbing and expensive hires, bringing offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki from Kansas after the 2023 season and luring defensive coordinator Jim Knowles from Ohio State after the Buckeyes won the national championship.
One of the things that I think that I had really done a pretty good job of at Vanderbilt and at Penn State was hiring complementary pieces.
So we may never have been the best in the country on offense, or the best in the country on defense, or the best in the country on special teams, but we played really good complementary football, Franklin said.
And early on at Vanderbilt, and early on at Penn State, I was heavily involved in the offense, and as time went on, and youre able to hire people with much more significant resumes, you get further and further away from it.
And youre struggling with, I brought this person in to do a job, and youre going to let them do the job.
Franklin stresses this was not just a 2025 issue.
That whole dynamic pushes you further and further away from the actual football, and to be honest with you, especially early on with NIL and the transfer portal, things have changed so much that in my mind, OK, those things made sense because I needed the right amount of attention on these other things, he said.
So that was a dynamic now coming to Virginia Tech that Im never going to do that again.
Advertisement To that end, Franklins Virginia Tech staff has a familiar feel to it, including the coach he replaced.
Pry, who spent more than a decade with Franklin at Vanderbilt and Penn State, agreed to stay as defensive coordinator.
Franklin knows exactly what he is getting with Pry, one of his closest friends.
As for the offense, it was a nagging problem for Franklin for much of his time at Penn State.
His first offensive coordinator at Virginia Tech is Ty Howle, 34, who spent the past six seasons at Penn State working his way up from offensive analyst to tight ends coach.
We see the game very similar, and in my opinion, I can have a very different conversation with Ty Howle in what I want because hes been a coordinator before, but not at this level, Franklin said.
So I can say, Ty, this is what I want, very specific, A, B, C, D, and E, and are you comfortable doing these things, and us working together? This allows me to put my head on the pillow at night because its going to be how I want it to be.
Franklin said he has made other adjustments that you would have to be inside the machine to notice.
Changes to the way the team practices he hopes will help the defense.
He redid his org chart to create more efficient lines of communication in an expanding operation.
Hes even upgraded the location of parking designated for athletes and coaches adjacent to the Merryman Center training facility.
Look, smell and feel like a big-time program, Babcock said, repeating a version of a line Franklin likes to use.
I dont know when the guy sleeps.
Franklin was caught in a time loop at Penn State.
He inherited a program from Bill OBrien still recovering from the Jerry Sandusky scandal and grappling with how to deal with the legacy of Penn State legend Joe Paterno.
Statues are a sore subject at Penn State and nobody would have ever suggested building one for Franklin.
Advertisement He led Penn State to its last Big Ten title in Year 3 and made the Nittany Lions nationally relevant again.
But over the next eight seasons, as good as things were, they never got better.
There were opportunities for Franklin to leave on his own terms.
Does he regret staying so long? Yes, he said, but thats easy to say in retrospect after getting fired with a .698 winning percentage at Penn State.
I say that because of how it ended, Franklin said.
I didnt feel like that at the time because when all these opportunities came I turned them down because we were so close.
From a big-picture standpoint, the lesson of 2025 for Franklin is dont get comfortable.
Dont ever think you have it figured out.
Six double-digit-victory seasons in the last nine full years might suggest the culture is solid and the program is strong, but what last year taught Franklin and what he wants to get across to the people he leads is that what took more than a decade to build can fall apart in three weeks.
I dont know if everybody in the building was working that way, Franklin said.
I think some people probably thought, hey, weve been here 12 years, weve been really successful, and I dont know if everybody was working with the same edge.
And its my job, right, to hold that standard.
Virginia Tech provides the opportunity to bask in smaller successes.
Ten years removed from Beamers retirement, Franklin follows the disappointing tenures of Justin Fuente, who parlayed a Memphis turnaround into being Beamers successor, and Pry, a former graduate assistant under Foster who vibed with the fan base but finished 16-24.
One thing is for sure: No one will stay on Virginia Tech officials to deliver on their promises to Franklin more than Franklin himself.
When you watch James Franklin walk into a room, when you watch James Franklin speak, when you watch James Franklin coach, it is an unbelievable difference between our previous coaches, Pearson said.
Advertisement After finally striking a deal with Virginia Tech, Franklin requested to meet with Beamer, outgoing Virginia Tech president Tony Sands, outgoing Gov.
Glenn Youngkin and incoming Gov.
Abigail Spanberger.
He also requested to be part of the search committee charged with finding Babcocks replacement, former Florida Atlantic AD Brian White.
That was a huge draw for me, White said of working with Franklin.
Throughout the recruiting process, James was very active on the committee.
We probably talked a dozen times-plus.
Every time I talked to him I became more interested.
Franklin can be relentlessly demanding of his bosses.
That wore on many at Penn State but was appealing to Virginia Tech officials, thrilled to hand him the keys and let him lead the way.
Theres always pressure, and hes always got to win, and one day, maybe here, hopefully, its if you dont win the national championship, its a disappointment, Babcock said.
But I think this will enable him to coach more freely, with less pressure, more aggressively, and maybe find that special spark.
I know he had an immense amount of pressure on him up there on Ohio State, Michigan and winning the national championship.
There is no Ohio State in the ACC.
The entire conference seems to be in transition, with Clemson descending, Florida State flailing and North Carolina doing whatever its doing with Bill Belichick.
Miami is the lone ACC school that seems to have figured out the NIL/transfer portal era.
What you see is you see opportunities, right? And you see some unusual paths, right? Franklin said about getting to the top of the ACC.
But you kind of look at the conference as a whole and you say, OK, Duke won the ACC championship last year and had a phenomenal season, and (Diaz) did a great job, but that looks very different than maybe a lot of other conferences in terms of who won the championship.
The Hokies were once like Clemson before Clemson took off and owned the conference during most of the 2010s.
Virginia Tech won the ACC four times during its first six seasons in the conference (2004-10) but has played in the title game just once in the last 14 years.
And that was 10 years ago.
Advertisement A statue depicting Frank Beamer, left leg propped up on a long empty bronze bench, play sheet in hand and headphones wrapped around his neck, sits outside the Southwest corner of Lane Stadium.
In Franklin, Virginia Tech believes it finally has a truly worthy successor to the programs patriarch.
I want you this to be your end and your last job, Foster said he told Franklin.
And I want a statue on the other side of Frank Beamer, with you in that spot right there.
And hes capable of doing that.
If nothing else, Hokie nation is confident it will be a lot better than where they have recently been.
But Franklin has already made it clear that Virginia Tech has only just begun to chase his ultimate goal, something Beamer came close to.
The Invest to Win campaign that this place made before I even took the job, that made me realize that this place wanted to compete, Franklin said.
But I will also say this: Theres a difference between competing to be competitive in the ACC and trying to win a national championship.