What’s In a Name? When it Comes to ‘Big Game James’ the Answer Lies in the Latest in a Long Line of Opportunities

Beaver Stadium will once again be in the national spotlight this week, when the Nittany Lions host their first playoff game. Abdul Carter and Tyler Warren and Drew Allar and Nick Singleton will all attract that figurative spotlight as well, though probably not to the extent that the man who leads them will command it.

It’s yet another big game for James Franklin, who has not exactly risen to the challenge in, well, almost any of the big games he’s seen at Penn State.

It’s really the only major knock on an 11-year coaching stint that has otherwise been sparkling, even when graded on a sanctions curve. Franklin recruits at a high level. He gets his players to the NFL. He beats the teams he is supposed to beat (read that sentence again, and file it away for just a bit later), and often by several touchdowns. He understands and protects the value of the Penn State brand, and he has spent a decade behind the scenes beating down doors and slashing through red tape to bring his program up to par from a resource standpoint.

In short, he has created a program that is the envy of all but a handful of teams in the country.

Other than the couple of times each year he runs into a more talented opponent, that is.

And now, despite two more losses to teams ranked ahead of his own, Franklin, at long last, has brought his team to the playoff. And awaiting the Nittany Lions is …

… a team Penn State is supposed to beat!

SMU, in its first season in a Power 5 conference, had a terrific season. It boasts one of the nation’s highest-scoring offenses, a sneaky-good defense that is allowing the same yards-per-play average (4.65) as Penn State’s, and several guys who will play on Sundays, including All-American running back Brashard Smith and defensive tackle Jared Harrison-Hunte.

What the Mustangs lack, of course, is a big win of their own. They lost their only two games against ranked opponents this fall, to BYU in September and to Clemson in the ACC Championship last week.

This leads to an interesting dynamic for Franklin. It is a quality opponent that Penn State is favored against, so even a win probably doesn’t do that much to change the “He can’t win the big one” narrative. At the same time, this is the biggest, high-stakiest game that Franklin has ever coached in, regardless of opponent, so in that sense it very much belongs in that narrative.

If they win this game, the Nittany Lions will likely also be a healthy favorite against Boise State, so they might have to win two games to give Franklin another opportunity to lead his team as an underdog, against either Georgia or Notre Dame.

Franklin is aware of all this stuff, and so are the coaches and players who work with and play for him, but their larger and more appropriate concern is just winning the next game on the schedule, narratives be damned. But it does present a couple of wildly different hypotheticals:

1)    Penn State gets to the national semis, or maybe even further, without pulling an upset.

2)    The Nittany Lions get bounced by the Mustangs, leaving them with 11 unfulfilling wins, three what-could-have-been losses and an offseason of listening to pundits explain why they’ll never get back to elite status.

What this line of thinking continues to overlook, though, is a simple but important fact: Franklin is continuing to put Penn State in games that matter.

Look, I know every Penn State fan reading this and a couple million others expect the Lions to dominate every time they take the field and believe that Franklin’s decisions in close games or a lack of NIL resources or untimely, undisciplined penalties called by Penn State-hating officials are the only things standing in the way of a string of national championships or, at the very least, wins over Ohio State or Michigan every couple of years. The truth is that while Penn State has suffered some great disappointments over Franklin’s tenure, the intensity of those disappointments is a direct result of all that was mentioned above—the recruitment and development of the nation’s best players, the NIL funds he’s scratched and clawed for, the wins against inferior opponents. None of it should be taken for granted.

The last few years have shown that no program is immune to coaching changes or conference geography shifts or transfer portal blows, that winning is hard and that coming back and doing it again the next year with rosters that are almost completely different is even harder. Case in point? The Alabama team that missed out on playing in this game by a narrow but wholly justified margin. There are reasons why Penn State has continued to come up short in the biggest moments, but there are reasons why those moments are bigger than most programs and most coaches could even fathom in the first place.

So take your shots at “Big Game James” if you like. He’s earned them. He owns those losses. Just also take a second to remember how many programs are hosting a game this week, how many programs have a shot to win the final game of the season, and how many games and recruits and setbacks it took to get Penn State to this point. Would you rather have a coach who just can’t seem to get over the hump … or a coach who can’t get his program within sniffing distance of the hump at all?