Wednesday: James Franklin’s Hot Seat

Should Penn State consider moving on from their head football coach?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's the Indie Average Show, where at Roque and Martillo.
Jeff trailer in about an hour and forty minutes, and
we'll talk to him about the upcoming game with Rice
and get the low down on the game this weekend
with Temple. Utsa had his chances in that one couldn't
quite get things done. Detroit has a force to Game five,
and the Yankees will start their game here pretty soon

(00:25):
with Toronto. I didn't see the Cubs score a little
while ago. We'll get we'll get an update on the
Cub score, Shane. If you've got this holler out there
in a second, it's on here on one of the TV's,
but it's a ways away and I've got pretty good
eyesight from a distance.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah, but this is it?

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Four to one?

Speaker 2 (00:42):
It's four to one, bottom of the herd.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
I guess right, four to one Cubs, right, yes, all right.
James Franklin is in the news again. And James Franklin
has a terrible record against teams that are better than
he is or equal to him, four and twenty one
against top twenty five teams and his career, I think
that there was a time after the Joe Paterno situation

(01:08):
and James Franklin, where Penn State was an irrelevant football program.
The fallout from what happened under his watch with Jerry
Sandusky and all of that took a toll on Penn
State and it took them a while before they were
able to get to a situation where they could find
somebody that could kind of lead that team. And they

(01:29):
kind of went through a couple of differences at scenarios,
and James Franklin I think kind of turned the program
around and made them relevant. I understand fan base passion,
but as a fan of a team, I would like
to always be there with a chance then to only
occasionally be there and be careful what you wish for

(01:51):
when it comes to replacing a coach that has been
as successful as he is in terms of number of wins. Okay,
he doesn't Ohio State every year, he doesn't be Michigan
every year, but he wins the games he's supposed to
win every year and unfortunately doesn't quite have his fair
share of the five hundred wins, the games that are

(02:12):
the fifty to fifty wins when you lose to teams
that are not as good as you are on paper,
that's when fan bases should really be upset. I don't
care if you beat your rival and then you go
eight losses against teams that are not as good as
your rival, because for one lucky day, you got better.

(02:32):
I would rather be in the conversation every year as
to being a playoff team, a top twenty five team,
a top ten team, a top five team, whatever that
bar is, and the immediate response when a team struggles
is fire the coach. He was terrible. Coaches are human beings,

(02:54):
but they only can coach them. They can only teach them.
They can only put people in a position to do
things great, and then they have to go have the
players go out and execute those things as goodly as
good as they can. And when a player does what
he's supposed to do as a great athlete, the coach
looks like a genius. The quarterback looks like a stud.

(03:16):
The team is awesome, and the next week they can
have it can be just the opposite. He can throw
a pick, he can fumble, and the coach was a
bum for sending in that play. I think Jim, I
think James Franklin is a really good football coach. And
my guess is if Penn State wants to spend the
money on him. You Now, obviously, buyouts are usually have

(03:38):
another clause in them if you if you get fired,
you get the buyout unless somebody else hires you, and
then you only get the difference between how much the
other school pays you and what's left of your buyout.
So if your buyouts fifteen million dollars and you sign
a seventy million dollar deal, well that fifteen million dollars
gets wiped out. But if you're making fifteen million and

(03:59):
you sign up three year, twelve million dollar deal, then
you get three million of your buyout. That's typically the
way buyouts have worked in the past. I don't know
the language of his doesn't really necessarily matter. But guess what,
there's a lot of schools in the Big ten that
would hire James Franklin, and especially if they have in
I owe money, if he could recruit the similar players
at Penn State's having, they would gladly take it. Every school.

(04:22):
And I had this conversation with some UTSA coaches over
the years and over the last few months and days.
To be a matter of fact, if you go back
and look, and I do this every week, because every
week UTSA plays a different team and I fill out
my I do my own depth chart boards spotterboards as
we call them, so that I kind of have an
idea who's playing and where they are on the field,

(04:45):
and what their positions are and all that and every team.
And what I used to do is so, for example,
UTSA is playing Rice this week, so I would take
last year's board and I would update the players on
that board offense and defense. So there's probably probably somewhere
eleven positions in each one, and each position is either
two deep or three deep, and probably of the say

(05:09):
thirty players on my defensive board and thirty players on
my offensive board. Of those sixty players five years ago,
three years ago, certainly eight or nine years ago, almost
the entire team was coming back unless they were seniors.
Anybody that was a sophomore junior was coming back. You
update their height, their weight, in their classification, their hometown
doesn't change. Maybe they changed numbers, but the board kind

(05:32):
of stayed the same. Starting with Texas A and M
that was a fresh one. But to Texas State board
that I put together in week two, I might as
well not even pulled up last year's because none of
the players were there. There may have been a couple
of guys here there. We didn't play in Carnate Word
in the past, so that was a clean slate, and

(05:53):
we didn't play Colorado State. But we played Temple last year,
and of the sixty guys, there were probably about fifty
five that changed, maybe fifty that changed. So your roster
is constantly turning over and constantly changing from year to year.
There's hardly any way that fans can even keep up
sometimes with who their key players are, and because it

(06:14):
comes down sometimes it's money and sometimes it's an nil situation.
But for the most part, you go to school a
thinking that you're the best player on the team. Then
you realize you're not, and then you're not getting playing time.
So you transfer to a school where you think they're
weak in a position that you can play at, and
that gives you more opportunity to play. Players want to play.

(06:35):
So I'll look at the rice board this week, and
there are players who transferred from Stanford, and there's players
who transferred from Rutgers or Maryland or Nebraska or wherever.
And I'm just throwing out a big power for schools
that have these players have determined, Yeah, I can stay
here and maybe get a few snaps as I get older,

(06:56):
but for the most part, I'm not going to get
to play very much. But I can go to a
smaller school and play a lot. And now, all of
a sudden, schools in the Big Big Ten like Illinois
and Indiana that have sucked for years are pretty decent.
And Minnesota that's been terrible for me for years has
players on it. In Michigan State and maybe not Rutgers
because they're still not very good, but they're better than

(07:19):
they were because their roster is full, but filled with
players that went somewhere that they thought they were could
play and they just didn't work out. So you're going
to get competition every week that is ridiculously difficult, and
there are no easy games. It's the NFL every week,
especially in the Power for conferences, and I even think
it's in the in the American and and Conference USA conferences.

(07:44):
The teams are very evenly matched. If you look at
the American Conference this year, I think to Memphis, South
Florida and likely TU Lane are the three best teams.
Everybody else is in the same boat. You could win,
You could lose on any given night, and if you're
in anybody could even beat those top three teams if
they have a good game, because the rosters are amazingly

(08:06):
put together with parody because of the transfer portal. So
James Franklin, I don't think is a bad coach. He
does not have a good record against good teams, but
that should not but at Penn State thinks they can
do better. You better be careful because you might not
do better, and may you may struggle like you did
after Joe Paterno and before James Franklin for a few

(08:27):
years Andy.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
But the thing is the fans and booshs don't care
about all the extra minutia facts behind that. Because James Franklin,
in his ten or eleven seasons he's been in Penn
State is six and six in the postseason, and he's
able to have a huge winning record against teams below
five hundred. He is, essentially, I'll give you a comparison,
he is what Mike McCarthy was with the Cowboys. They
can win twelve games three years in a row, but

(08:49):
they keep getting to the posting in the same fast
as they can't beat the teams that are a playoffs year.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
So if the next coach comes in and goes seven
and five, how are they gonna field in.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
It doesn't matter because you can't gep go in the
same route. If your expectation is to go beyond where
you already are, they can. They've been at the last
twenty years, not count the COVID season. They've been in
a bowl game nineteen of those seasons. That's more of
the same. If they're trying to get past that and
get to where Ohio State is and LSU is and
Alabama in the championship, and they think that James frankl
is go enough to get us at least in the
playoffs but not to the championship, then yes, they needy

(09:17):
consider moving on.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
Well, by my point is, yeah, go ahead and consider
moving on, but expect some bad seasons before you get
back to where you were. Just because you bring in
a new coach doesn't mean you're gonna go ten and
two so that you can put yourself in the postseason.
I think there's got to be something that you identify.
What's wrong, Why don't you win the bigger games? What's

(09:39):
the what can you fix to win the bigger games?
And if the answer is nothing, and you want to
move on, move on, But who are you gonna hire
that's ain't gonna be able to attract the talent to
make sure that you go eleven and one so that
you have an opportunity to win that next bigger game.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
But just because you're comfortable with James Franklin doesn't mean
that he's gonna get No.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
I don't want to be comfortable. I want to figure
out what we can change to make those those postseason
games better. But I think we ought to be careful
by just you know, oh, let's just go get the
next hottest coach out there that's coaching at Minnesota or
coaching at Kansas or coaching at Mississippi State. Bringing him
in doesn't necessarily mean that you're even going to get
back to the playoffs. You've got to make sure that

(10:20):
you're there all the time. And maybe maybe somebody else
needs to call plays, maybe there's a personnel change here
there with coordinators or position coaches. There's always ways to
tweak it. But I want to make sure I protect
that I'm always in the picture. I'm always in the conversation.
And I don't think Penn State season's over yet. I
think they can bounce back and get close to maybe
get in the CFP if they can win, win out,

(10:42):
maybe even win the Big Ten conference. All Right, the
NCAA is pretty much decided on this. It looks like
in a month college athletes are going to be able
to bet on pro games. We'll tell you about that
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