Sunday Column: Rolls of the Dice in March and April Suggest Franklin is Feeling Confident and Creative

Two Penn State football developments this past week indicated two levels of risk. Both hinted very strongly that James Franklin feels pretty good about where his program is.

The announcement of former defensive end and defensive assistant Deion Barnes as the team’s new defensive line coach was a popular one among much of the fan base and, as a short video released by the team showed, even more popular with the players. And it’s not hard to see why. Barnes possesses just about every quality you would like to see in a young coach: He’s played the game at a high level, earning Big Ten Freshman of the Year honors in 2012, has a knack for teaching it, has recruiting ties in a relatively key region, and has the sort of grinder mentality one needs to survive the ultracompetitive world of college football.

He’s missing one quality, though: This is his first big-boy coaching job.

Barnes’ predecessors—John Scott, Sean Spencer, and Larry Johnson—were massively important to the program in terms of their development of a key position group, the culture they established along the line and on the entire squad, and, consequently, the impact they made as recruiters. Penn State was Johnson’s first college job, in 1996, but he’d been a high school coach for more than two decades at that point. Spencer had coached the defensive line for seven programs, including Vanderbilt, by the time he followed Franklin to State College in 2014. Scott had led the D-lines at Texas Tech, Arkansas and South Carolina and had spent two seasons in the NFL before he succeeded Spencer in 2020. Collectively, they’ve helped 21 Penn State defensive linemen become NFL draft choices since 1997.

The entirety of Barnes’ coaching experience has come in the last three seasons as a GA and assistant DL coach at Penn State. The impact he’s made in those roles made him a strong candidate, but the Nittany Lions reportedly interviewed a number of others, including those with NFL ties. Did Franklin wind up going with the internal candidate because he saw a true coaching star about to blossom, merely interviewing other candidates to get a feel for them for potential jobs down the road? Or was Barnes the second or third choice after those other interviewees didn’t pan out or want the position?

Either way, taking on a coach with this level of experience represents a risk for a program and a coach that have not been shy about taking big swings at star candidates—Joe Moorhead, Mike Yurcich, Manny Diaz—and is feverishly trying to knock Michigan off its spot at the top of the Big Ten. The makeup of the rest of the defensive staff, which includes veterans Diaz, Terry Smith, and Anthony Poindexter, mitigates some of that risk and will provide Barnes with excellent peer role models, but the next few seasons will reveal the wisdom of Franklin’s choice.

The week’s other interesting development was tucked away among a bunch of similarly miscellaneous notes from Penn State’s spring media day press conference. Franklin said that he was considering returning to a traditional scrimmage format for the 2023 Blue-White Game, which in recent years had become more of a light practice dressed up with some quirky scoring. The main reason for that, of course, was a lack of depth on an offensive line that needed to rely on the transfer portal to fill out its two-deep, but the Nittany Lions entered this spring with a group that went two or three deep at all five O-line positions.

The risk with a traditional scrimmage is that it presents more opportunities for injury in arguably the world’s most perilous sport. The potential rewards, however, are numerous. Besides giving fans a better experience, even if the starters are only on the field for a couple of series, putting players in situations that more closely resemble what they’ll see in meaningful games, and doing it in front of a sizable crowd, would be huge for both starters and backups on a group that has a lot of depth and talent but should collectively be one of the younger teams Penn State has fielded in recent years.

It will be interesting to see if Franklin embraces other forms of risk as the season approaches, simply because—a few curious fake field-goal attempts aside—he’s been largely risk-averse during his nine years at Penn State, both in terms of football strategy and in the way he’s built the infrastructure of the program. At heart, football coaches hope to avoid risk. They strive to develop enough depth so that an injury to a key starter doesn’t tank the entire unit. They hope to recruit and develop enough talent that they can run simple, effective plays that the defense can’t stop rather than try to fool more talented squads with misdirection. The Nick Sabans and Ryan Days of the world don’t need to take a lot of risks. But if Franklin is going to take a risk here and there, it could be an indicator that he is allowing himself to breathe a bit more freely coming off an 11-win season than he was after the relative nightmares of 2020 and 2021.

Franklin will enter his 10^th campaign in Happy Valley with little to prove, but he still hasn’t taken Penn State where he wants to go. If he believes that taking big-scale or small-scale risks is the way to get his team to playoffs or national titles, he isn’t likely to hesitate—especially with Penn State’s sails still full after a bounce-back 2022 season.