INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The empty trophy case that stares back at the players in the Penn State team meeting room says as much about the program as it does about its coach.
James Franklin was in on the decision to place it there. With one exception in 2016, there hasn’t been much to put in it since Franklin arrived a decade back to restore solidness, if not greatness, to one of the nation’s most storied but also troubled programs.
The Nittany Lions and their 52-year-old coach have a chance to place something in the empty case — first if they can win the Big Ten title game Saturday against No. 1 and undefeated Oregon, then again in the College Football Playoff — a 12-team affair that No. 3 Penn State is virtually certain be part of, win or lose, against the Ducks.
“We’ve wanted to fill up one of our cases that we have empty on purpose, and that’s just the next thing ahead,” sophomore linebacker Tony Rojas said. “The Big Ten championship, it starts with Coach Franklin and us.”
At first glance, the numbers are impressive. The 99-40 record, the five finishes among the AP’s top 15, the regular appearances in big-time bowl games — Rose, Cotton, Fiesta — put Franklin in with company almost any college coach would envy.
Franklin is the quintessential coach who treats players like family, does his best to hold them accountable on and off the field and does things “the right way.” That’s something that carries weight everywhere, but especially at Penn State.
He came to Happy Valley from Vanderbilt, where he turned that SEC straggler into a winner, two seasons after the sex-abuse scandal involving Joe Paterno’s assistant, Jerry Sandusky, delivered a near-fatal blow to a program that had long been revered as a buttoned-down bastion of success.
Franklin, from the Philadelphia suburbs and a self-described “Pennsylvania boy with a Penn State heart,” figured out the delicate balance between respecting Paterno and his 56 years at the school (45 as head coach) without deifying him.
“We’ll do everything we can to bring this community back together,” the new coach said when he arrived in 2014, “and really take pride in this program.”
But thanks more to the standard Paterno set than the program he left, there are bigger expectations at Penn State than simply being solid.
This is a program that won national titles (1982, 1986), had perfect seasons (five) and even won the Big Ten three times under JoePa after coming out of its century-plus stance as an independent in 1993.
That’s the prism through which a lot of the school’s diehards view Franklin’s 1-10 record against Ohio State. That’s how they view his 3-18 record in games against teams in the AP top 10. That’s why they look sideways at the fact that the coach is on his sixth offensive coordinator in 11 years. It’s why they say that, yes, Franklin wins lots of games — just not the big ones.
“I understand the frustration for sure,” said Steelers tight end Pat Freiermuth, who played for Franklin from 2018-20.
Others see that, but also look at the task Franklin took on in 2014, when the team was coming off a postseason ban, massive scholarship losses and a backlash against what many felt had become an untethered sports program in the wake of the abuse scandal.
This will mark the first time since the early 1980s that Penn State has strung together three straight seasons with double-digit wins.
“He takes over a team with bare cupboards,” Nittany Lion great LaVar Arrington said in an interview with the Reading Eagle earlier this year.. “He comes here and brings in recruits. For him to turn Penn State back into a very, very reputable and respectable place to play football was probably a job that very few people realize how daunting a task it was.”
After this year’s 20-13 loss to Ohio State — a tepid offensive performance in which Penn State failed to score on two trips inside the Buckeyes 5 — Franklin got booed off the field, and barked back at fans heckling him.
After the game, he spoke to his own frustration, which involved the difficult losses, but also all those wins.
“Nobody is looking in the mirror harder than I am,” he said. “I’ve said this before, but 99% of the programs across college football would die to do what we’ve been able to do in our time here.”
In some ways, then, the expanded playoff was built for a program like Penn State.
Even had the Buckeyes not lost to Michigan last week, thus allowing Franklin and Co. into the Big Ten title game, they would be in the playoff. In fact, they have been ranked in the top 12 by the CFP playoff committee in five of the 10 seasons it has existed.
Maybe a new setting with new stakes is the thing that gets Franklin over the hump. Even his lone Big Ten title, in 2016, did not bring with it a trip to the playoffs, which was only four teams then.
“Regardless of how this game goes, going to the playoffs and making some noise in there, I think that’s going to help him out a lot,” Freiermuth said.
This week, though, the coach is looking only at Oregon — a challenge that’s daunting enough without worrying about that empty trophy case sitting back home.
“I understand the question and I appreciate the question, but we’re just focused on trying to beat the No. 1 team in the country,” Franklin said. “Totally focused on that and not the other scenarios or discussions.”
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AP National Writer Will Graves and AP freelance writer Travis Johnson contributed to this report.
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