If you’re a Penn State fan and you love James Franklin, Tuesday was a great day.
If you’re a Penn State fan and you’ve had your fill of James Franklin, it was a pretty good day, too.
The university announced a handsome contract extension for the Nittany Lions’ eight-year football coach that will keep him — barring buyout — with the program through the 2031 season, a not-so-surprising end to a not-so-secretive two-month stretch of negotiations between the coach (OK, his agent, Jimmy Sexton) and the administration.
The obvious upshot is continued or reinforced stability. Penn State, which will be bringing in a new president within the next year, gets to avoid a potentially ugly divorce and a coaching search in a year without a lot of enticing names on the market. Franklin gets to continue to chase a national title in his home state and one of the best (not-yet-signed) recruiting classes the program has collected in some time gets to breathe a little easier, as do the hordes of fans whose sleep quality is strongly proportional to those recruits’ decisions.
