After more than a decade as the head coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions, James Franklin was sent packing in the midst of a brutally disappointing season.
What was supposed to be a championship window of a season for Penn State in 2025 ended with a record just a touch above .500 and a new head coach.
For Franklin, it meant new beginnings, and after a short time away from the headset, the 54-year-old native Pennsylvanian landed a few hundred miles down the road in Blacksburg to coach the Virginia Tech Hokies.
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While it’s a new locale for the one-time Big Ten championship-winning coach, his quotes at ACC Media Days on Thursday morning sound all too familiar for those who have heard Franklin speak during past offseasons in State College.
One could argue that you’d rather hear a coach boast about “winning the offseason” than losing it. Franklin’s last several years in Happy Valley will cause all but the most optimistic fans of his to roll their eyes upon hearing this quote.
It’s a similar refrain for anyone familiar with the Penn State program under Franklin, with his boasts of having all the pieces in place being followed by good-yet-disappointing campaigns year after year causing Nittany Lions fans to wince.
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Franklin was famously 4-21 against top-ten opponents while at Penn State, and the fact that he only won one Big Ten title in his 11 and a half seasons with the program doesn’t help his cause.
It even earned him the name “Big Game James,” a moniker that was mostly tongue-in-cheek and more of a pejorative than anything else.
If you don’t believe me, take the word of the fans in the comments section beneath On3 reporter Brett McMurphy’s post.
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The reviews are scathing, but until Franklin can prove the doubters wrong, he will have to endure.
I’m sure he doesn’t care what folks on the internet have to say, but they aren’t wrong in their assessments either.
Here’s the catch: the expectations aren’t quite the same at Virginia Tech as they were at Penn State (yet).
While the Hokies were an established winner under longtime head coach Frank Beamer, the truth is that they’ve fallen on some hard times since the turn of the decade, bottoming out to a 3-9 record in 2025 under Brent Pry.
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Despite my reservations with Franklin being elite, I think he’s a very good coach and I believe he will have Virginia Tech back to a position of national relevance in no time.
What he does after that remains to be seen, and whether Franklin becomes a victim of his own success in Blacksburg with regard to increased expectations will be interesting to watch.
For now, he will have to prove this “offseason championship” can translate to wins on the field, otherwise this quote could come back to haunt him come December.
