EMERGENCY COLUMN: It Was Time (maybe past time) for James Franklin to go. It Remains to be Seen if his Replacement can do Better.

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It’s an argument that can be applied to all sorts of life situations but was ready-made for football coaches:

Do you go with the devil you know, or the devil you don’t?

Penn State fans had been going around and around with this one for a few years before this season and the fateful three-week stretch that sealed James Franklin’s fate. On the one side, you had the optimists, who felt Franklin was pushing the program ever closer to the top of the summit, one that was more easily accessible with the expanded playoff format, and that maybe they were a player or a coordinator or a fat donation away. On the other, the fans who had long since made up their mind about the — and they never tired of using this term — “used-car salesman” whose tendency to come up short in big games was about a sure a thing as there was in sports. Give them someone else — anyone else.

I guess now we’ll find out one way or the other, right?

Maybe it’s just that simple, and the next coach will finally bring home that coveted natty, vindicating Team Other Guy, or maybe he’ll fall straight on his face and vindicate Team James. But there are just too many shades of gray in life and particularly in this fickle 22-man sport where games are decided by the spin off a kicker’s laces or whether a knee was down a millisecond before the ball came free.

The Franklin supporters had to admit that there was just something different about the way the Lions played and the way the coaches coached in the biggest games. Imagine if Marcus Allen’s amazing field-goal block had bounced anywhere other than into the hands of Grant Haley (what was I saying about fickle?). Franklin would then be 0-11 against Ohio State, despite having teams ranked in the top 20 at the time in eight of those 11 matchups. In the early years, the strange post-sanctions purgatory, you could chalk up those defeats to a disparity in talent. But during the past few, that talent gap had closed considerably to the point where it nearly didn’t exist, and yet that didn’t matter because Franklin’s most talented teams never played like it when the chips were down. That is important.

The Franklin haters, for lack of a better term, must in turn admit that when he took the helm, a few days after Bill O’Brien bolted to the NFL when he had said he wasn’t going to bolt to the NFL, Penn State was not the Penn State that they had in their minds, the great sleeping giant of the Northeast. The sanctions did not have the death penalty effect that some had predicted (or hoped?) thanks to O’Brien and a group of tough and stubborn fighters, but the Lions were vulnerable, fragile, just as likely to slip into the no man’s land of Purdue and Illinois as they were to rise up to challenge Ohio State and Michigan, let alone the beasts of the SEC. Franklin, brick by brick, recruiting win by recruiting win, built Penn State back. Yes, he had some early struggles and yes, he probably ruined Christian Hackenberg but when the dust had settled, the Nittany Lions had a Big Ten crown, had sent not only a ton of players to the NFL but several who became the league’s biggest stars, and were among the nation’s top 10 in most years. His players graduated, were involved in the community, and stayed largely out of major trouble. That doesn’t happen with a lot of the Other Guys, and that, too, is important.

There are rumblings that there was more going on this past season behind the scenes than what is currently public knowledge, and whether that leaks from Franklin’s end, from the players’ end or somewhere else or at all will be revealed. Or it won’t. Whatever the case, something stunk in Denmark this season. The Lions choked on the cupcakiest of cupcake non-con schedules, turned in three quarters of a hairball in the White Out against Oregon, somehow got it to overtime, then gave it away again. Vintage Big Game James. But we all figured that, after what would probably be another sleepy start, Penn State would bounce back on the road against a hapless UCLA team and the Lions would see what they could accomplish in Columbus at the end of October. Just as Franklin could always be counted on to fold on the big stages, he could be counted on to own the off-Broadway stages.

Except this time, the bottom fell out. And then it did again. And then Pat Kraft, the third athletic director to be put in charge of the program since Franklin’s hire, who had probably heard both sides of the argument at the top of this column all summer, suddenly had what was both an easy decision to make and a difficult trigger to pull. I’ve never thought firing coaches mid-season makes sense, but at the same time I understood that there is no sense in playing out the string, and that was surely the case here. I would be very surprised if we did not see Franklin helming another program in the very near future, and probably with a good deal of success, too.

And suddenly, crazily, that is not Penn State’s concern any longer. Terry Smith, one of the last links to the Paterno era, was the clear choice to guide the team through whatever the hell the last two months will be. Hopefully no other veterans who passed up NFL dollars to come back for one more year will get injured, as Drew Allar did, and hopefully the coaches find some time to play the young guys, if for no other reason than to give them some tape for when they transfer this winter. Any recruits that were committed or close to committing a few weeks ago are likely as good as gone but that’ll be balanced out by The New Coach Bump, which attracts talented prospects as reliably as grilled stickies attract the people reading this column.

To say that it’s a pivotal moment and monumental hire for Kraft is an understatement. Though he tried, Franklin was never quite able to seal the rift between the old guard of fans, the Success With Honor crowd, and the new guard, who never saw Paterno coach a game and don’t much care how the success comes as long as it comes. The same dynamic still exists, though now those fans’ dollars factor more directly into how the program—and the rickety stadium in which it plays—is (re)built. You don’t get rid of the devil you know, regardless of how much of a mess he made over the last month, unless you are confident that you can replace him with one that will do at least as well and, you had better hope, even better. The next guy will have to deal with the shadow of Paterno, the constant specter of the Buckeyes, and the wiles of a deep and deep-pocketed fan base that doesn’t always act like it, just as Franklin did, and he’ll have to do it in a rapidly changing college football landscape that currently has Indy-freaking-ana staring down at all but two other teams. It’s a great opportunity for a hot young coach, or perhaps a wily old coach, just as it is for Kraft. But it could also be a point in program history that we’ll look back on as the apex, not the nadir.

Godspeed, James, and thank you. You’ll be missed—just how much, we won’t know for a few years.