Sunday Column: Current Season Sobering Proof That Expectations Are Everything When It Comes To Fan Satisfaction – Or A Coach’s Employment

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Expectation: Adding Jim Knowles, the coordinator of the nation’s best defense a year ago, to a Penn State defense that was already among the nation’s top 10 would allow the Nittany Lions to be a true lockdown unit.

Reality: Penn State is a middle-of-the-pack defense in the Big Ten that hasn’t really stopped the run at all since conference play began.

Expectation: Five-star running back Nick Singleton, who ran for 2,912 yards in his first three seasons, would have another banner year behind a veteran offensive line despite continuing to split carries and reps with roommate Kaytron Allen.

Reality: Singleton is averaging 3.6 yards per carry, doesn’t yet have 100 yards total in four Big Ten games, and can’t seem to stop running directly into defenders.

Expectation: Penn State, a couple of plays from the national title game last season, would be one of the country’s best teams and primed for another deep playoff run in 2025.

Reality: The bottom fell out after three straight defeats and the Lions are currently searching for another head coach.

How upset/disappointed/despondent you want to get after reading what is by no means a comprehensive list of Penn State’s expectation-reality gap above is in many ways what brought us to this critical juncture for the program, and by critical juncture I’m referring to the decision Pat Kraft will make sometime in the next few months and not the Lions’ trip to the Horseshoe next weekend. The relationship between the expectations of the AD, the fans, and the team and the staff themselves and the product actually put on the field spelled the end for what had been a fairly successful decade of football, all things considered.

The question is, will the expectations match what the next coach does or is capable of doing?

Look, I don’t think Kraft had much of a choice after the Northwestern game, and I think Franklin was going to be gone after the season even if his team had won that one and a few more games anyway. What shouldn’t get lost among all the hand-wringing about his firing by national pundits and fickle fans who had talked smack on Franklin for years is the simple fact that Franklin, who replaced John Donovan, Kirk Ciarrocca, and Mike Yurcich after their offenses (OK maybe not Donovan’s, but there were some mitigating sanction circumstances at play there) performed at a much higher level than Andy Kotelnicki’s has to date, would have also fired Franklin had he been in Kraft’s shoes. The program was basically bleeding out, any true connection between the staff and the players frayed if not entirely severed, and there were no answers forthcoming. For any number of reasons, the Lions were dead in the water, and the drop from No. 2 in the polls to, um, something resembling No. 2 was so quick that it justified a regime change even without factoring in Franklin’s dismal record against marquee opponents over his tenure here.

So Kraft is replacing him. But how he—and several million concerned alumni and fans—set expectations for the next coach will be a key indicator of how likely the Lions are to either take the next step or return right back to this moment in a few years.

Kraft says he wants to win national championships—not just in football, but in every sport. On the one hand, that’s what you want to hear from the boss of bosses. It’s aspirational, aggressive, the antithesis of complacency. On the other hand, no one is going to expect the Nittany Lions to win championships in every sport. Wrestling? Of course. Women’s volleyball? Sure. Men’s hockey? Certainly possible. Women’s soccer? Why not? But men’s golf? Nah. Softball? Nope. Men’s or women’s hoops? Have you been to the BJC?

Should football fall into the former category or the latter? The Lions’ last natty was in 1986, when Terry Smith was a recruit, Kraft was in grade school, the Big Ten had 10 teams and there were no scholarship restrictions. They were denied a chance to compete for one in 1994, when they fielded one of the best teams the college game has ever seen, and missed a great chance by a few plays in 2005. Since? They haven’t been closer than they were this past January, but they got to that fourth quarter in Miami thanks to a favorable playoff bracket, a whole lot of Tyler Warren and Abdul Carter and a revamped playoff system that allows a team to lose its biggest regular season games and still get a chance to be the last one standing.

It says here that, thanks to its considerable tradition, the resource improvements that Franklin helped to facilitate, and its massive alumni base and set of (just enough) motivated donors should allow Penn State to be a factor for national championships in the foreseeable future, especially given the playoff system and how NIL has changed the recruiting game. It also says that there are more other programs (Oh hey, Indiana) who should also be counted in that group than there were even five years ago and might be still more going forward.

There is a difference—a big difference—between hoping for something and knowing that you have a legit chance to pull it off if a few things break right and expecting it to happen when it hasn’t happened in the current environment. Penn State’s 2024 season raised the bar for those expectations when, really, it wasn’t much different from the good-but-not-good-enough 2022 or 2023 campaigns. Could better in-game coaching have been the difference in those years and even in this one? Is the level of recruiting success the program enjoyed under Franklin truly the ceiling? The answers to those questions could be revealed after a few seasons of the next man up but are difficult to predict in a sport that has so many moving parts on and off the field.

What’s easier to predict is that the lofty, natty-or-bust expectations probably aren’t going anywhere, and if anything will only get loftier. I don’t know if that’s fair to the next guy, even if he will assuredly be compensated like a national championship-caliber coach, but I also don’t know if it’s any different in Tuscaloosa or Columbus or Athens or even Bloomington these days. It does seem like a recipe for disappointment, but maybe it was time for a roll of the dice instead of another season or two or five of close but not close enough.

In any case, 2025 is going to go down as a season that did not meet expectations whether it continues on its current trajectory or the Lions pull off any miracles against the heavyweights still left on the schedule. Someone had to take the fall, and Franklin, while far from the only reason for the collapse, was the guy. Now it’s up to Kraft and the legions of fans who support this program to decide what they want their expectations to be from here on out, which will in turn decide how much they’re able to enjoy the seasons ahead and how many other coaching changes are in store.