Sunday Tuesday Column: No Matter Your Feelings on the Coach Sticking Around, A Day of Celebration for Penn State Fans

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.

What this renegotiated deal truly means, though, is what Penn State fans should be excited about, whether they believe Franklin is the right guy and a player or two — or fourth-down call or three — away from graduating the program to elite status or whether they believe he’s more sizzle than steak and that the team is ripe for new leadership.

This deal signals commitment, not just to the head football coach but to the program at large. It shows recruits and rivals and anyone else who might be paying attention that Penn State is finally ready to put its paycheck where its mouth is and join the money-burning circus that college football has become.

If you’re reading this, chances are good you’ve either recently read or participated in arguments about Penn State’s facilities — how far behind are they compared to the nation’s best? To what extent do they truly influence a team’s win-loss record? Those answers are subjective, but also irrelevant. If the athletic department isn’t doing everything it can — or at least giving the appearance that it is doing everything it can — to construct top-of-the-line facilities filled with the best assistant coaches, strength staff, psychologists, nutritionists, medical staff, academic support, and every other piece of the team that every recruit will come in contact with, then the Nittany Lions are at a disadvantage no matter who the coach is.

The old, worn chestnut, “College football isn’t about the Xs and the Os, it’s about the Jimmys and the Joes,” is overly simplistic, half-wrong and incomplete. It’s about both, but it’s also about making sure that you not only recruit better Jimmys and Joes than Ohio State and Michigan and Alabama but that you also develop them, keep them in the fold even if they get beaten out for a starting job (injuries happen), and get them to help you convince future recruits that yes, Penn State is the best place to go to school and play football, and hey, have you seen the new chocolate waterfall in the locker room?!?! Recruiting in this day and age isn’t about giving prospects reasons to choose you. It’s about removing reasons for them to disqualify you from their numerous other options.

Franklin has known this from the very beginning. Yes, this new deal will put more money in his pocket, but it will also provide him assurances that his current and future requests to put his program on equal or even greater footing compared to the nation’s truly elite will receive every effort to be granted. It will allow him to tell recruits that, not only does he believe in them, but that the university truly believes in the men who will be coaching them.

Now, if you’re in the non-Franklin camp (bless you for getting this far in the column), and you’ve been clenching your jaw since the second half in Iowa City, there is much to rejoice about here, too. If Franklin leaves on his own accord, either for the NFL or what he believes are greener college pastures, the school will have now become a more attractive destination to candidates for his replacement, not just in terms of salary but in the resources they would have at their disposal.

And if the administration is crazy enough/fortunate enough to find a deep-pocketed donor to buy out Franklin at $8 million times the remaining years on his deal, that very act is a signal to the next coach that this university, after so many years of trying to run a major program at a relative discount, is indeed ready and willing to spend money to make money. So if you were incensed at the thought of a coach losing to Illinois on Saturday and asking for more money on Monday, just know that those negotiations are going to benefit Franklin OR the next guy in essentially equal measure.

Also, the longer Franklin stays, and the more facility upgrades and program improvements are made, the more excuses for a lack of success disappear. This is not to say that Franklin has publicly leaned on these excuses very often or to say that there weren’t some substantial stones to remove from the garden in his first few years here, but if Penn State is investing and recruiting on the same level as the nation’s best teams in a few years and not winning at that level, it won’t be hard to identify the missing ingredient.

So yes, Tuesday was a good day in Happy Valley, unless of course you’re one of those folks who believes that college athletics has gone so far beyond the pale that people have lost all sight of the true priorities of higher education. To those people I would say — you may be right. But if Penn State is consistently going to fill a stadium with 107,000 people to watch a team play and spend several million dollars to fund that team — which helps fund just about every other sport on campus — it might as well push all the chips into the center of the table.

Penn State might not be all-in quite yet. But this was as handsome a bet as it has made to date.