It certainly looked like James Franklin’s future at Penn State was in jeopardy after the last two weeks, but that seemed like a decision to come after the season.
Instead, Penn State fired its longtime football Sunday morning, a day after Franklin’s Nittany Lions took their third straight loss and second straight stunning defeat. After losing on the road to previously-winless UCLA last week, Penn State lost 22-21 at home Saturday to Northwestern — another team expected to finish near the bottom of the Big Ten standings.
It has been a stunning collapse for the Nittany Lions, who opened the season ranked No. 2 in the country, dropped a dramatic double-overtime loss to a top-10 Oregon team at home and then totally came unraveled the last two weeks.
And it’s a stunning ending for Franklin, who finishes with a 104-45 record over 11.5 seasons at Penn State. He led the program to double-digit wins in six of those seasons, including a career-best 13 last year as the Nittany Lions reached the College Football Playoff semifinals and finished with a No. 5 national ranking.
Less than a year later, Penn State was willing to take on his $49 million buyout — the second-largest in college football history behind Jimbo Fisher’s $76 million buyout from Texas A&M — to make a change.
“Penn State owes an enormous amount of gratitude to Coach Franklin who rebuilt our football program into a national power,” Penn State athletic director Patrick Kraft said in a statement. “He won a Big Ten Championship, led us to seven New Year’s Six bowl games and a College Football Playoff appearance last year. However, we hold our athletics programs to the highest of standards, and we believe this is the right moment for new leadership at the helm of our football program to advance us toward Big Ten and national championships.”
The last two weeks were historically bad for the Nittany Lions. According to ESPN Research, Penn State is the first team since the FBS and FCS split in 1978 to lose consecutive games as at least a 20-point favorite in each.
It also didn’t help that the loss to Oregon dropped Franklin to 4-21 against AP top-10 opponents under Franklin
Franklin was the second-longest-tenured head coach in the Big Ten behind Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz. Only six FBS head coaches had been at their current school longer.
Penn State named associate head coach Terry Smith, who coaches the cornerbacks, as interim head coach.
But, of course, the school will look to make a high-profile hire to replace Franklin. Here are some names that should be high on Penn State’s list.
Five Coaching Candidates for Penn State
Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti
Every school with a head coach vacancy and the financial resources to make it realistic should be pursuing Cignetti after the season. Whether he’s interested in leaving is another matter.
Cignetti signed a new eight-year contract last November that pays him $9 million annually. He’s been worth every penny so far, leading the Hoosiers to an 11-2 record and CFP appearance last year and a 6-0 start this season with 30-20 win over Oregon on Saturday that vaulted Indiana to No. 3 in the AP poll.
Cignetti is from Pittsburgh and got his first head coaching job in the state of Pennsylvania at IUP from 2011-16.
Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule
This one just connects a lot of dots. Rhule was a walk-on linebacker at Penn State under Joe Paterno and got his big coaching break in the state of Pennsylvania as head coach at Temple from 2013-16. The athletic director who hired him there is none other than Kraft, PSU’s AD.
Rhule took Temple from 2 wins his first year to back-to-back 10-wins seasons his third and fourth seasons there before leaving for Baylor. He then took the Bears from 1-11 to 11-3 in the span of three seasons.
After a disappointing tenure as head coach of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, getting fired five games into his third season, Rhule is in his third year at Nebraska and has the No. 25 Cornhuskers off to a 5-1 start.
Rhule may be more obtainable than Cignetti given his ties to the school and Kraft.
Iowa State coach Matt Campbell
It’s surprising that Campbell hasn’t been hired away from Iowa State yet as he’s been there since 2016.
Taking over one of the toughest jobs in college football, Campbell is 69-53 in his time there, including a program-record 11 wins last year.
The question has always been how Campbell would fare as a recruiter at a blue-blood program with peak expectations, but there’s no denying his coaching abilities.
He’s also from Ohio, where he got his first head coaching job at Toledo.
LSU head coach Brian Kelly
Hear us out …
Kelly is in his fourth season at LSU and under a lot of pressure at a program where each of his three predecessors won a national championship. The Tigers have been good but not great under Kelly and finished last season unranked at 9-4.
This could be a make-or-break year for Kelly at LSU.
Or maybe Kelly makes the decision that he wants out of the SEC and back to a geographical region where he’s a more natural fit after incredibly successful tenures at Grand Valley State in Michigan, Central Michigan, Cincinnati and Notre Dame. He’s already made one bold career move, walking away from Notre Dame to take the LSU job. It’s not that far-fetched.
Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea
Would Penn State repeat history and hire its next head coach away from Vanderbilt, just as it did with Franklin? Why not.
Lea got off to a slow start at Vanderbilt, going 2-10, 5-7, 2-10 in his first three years, but the Commodores have been on the rise since then. Vandy went 7-6 last year with a monumental win over Alabama and is off to a 5-1 start this season and ranked 17th nationally.
Before Vanderbilt, Lea was the defensive coordinator at Notre Dame from 2018-20.