Franklin has plan for Penn State
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Every aspiring head coach in college football seemingly has a master plan, copious notes and ideas about how to run a program gathered over years as an assistant. Maybe it is written in a notebook or scratched out on legal pads. Could be printed out and stacked in a file folder or two.
James Franklin’s master plan is in a three-ring binder, about 8 inches thick, and it sits on a book shelf in his office at Penn State.
“Training. Camps. Clinics. Fundraising. Spring. Fall. Potential staff members. Offensive staff. Defensive staff. Administrative staff. Strength staff. Special teams. Practice plans. Staff duties. Team prayer. Ticket policy,” Franklin rattles off the names of the sections and he is not even half done.
The 45-year-old Franklin has it all covered. He said he hardly ever opens the binder anymore, but the plan appears to be working to perfection.
In his fourth season as coach of the Nittany Lions (7-0), Franklin has the No. 2 team in the country and the Nittany Lions are playing as well as they did during Joe Paterno’s prime. Coaching in a division that was supposed to be owned by Ohio State’s Urban Meyer and Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, Franklin’s Penn State team is the defending champion.
Franklin has restored the pride in Penn State football to pre-Sandusky scandal levels, leading with a grand vision and big, bold personality. He is in many ways the epitome of the 21st century college football coach: An energetic CEO who has his hands in everything while giving his assistants room to work. Cool enough to relate to the players, but demanding enough to get them to embrace his process and give him their respect.
“Every game is like the Super Bowl for us,” Heisman Trophy contender Saquon Barkley said Wednesday, three days before Penn State visits No. 6 Ohio State for one of the biggest games of the season.
Franklin grew up in the Philadelphia area with a father who was in and out of his life. Jim Franklin, Franklin said, became violent when he drank. Once the younger Franklin became old enough to stand up for himself and his mother, Josie, his father left for good.
“What I learned very early on is that if you have a cycle in your family, whether it’s alcohol or abuse, the best way to break that cycle, the higher educated you are the better chance you have of not repeating it,” Franklin said. “I had major fears that I was going to turn into my father.”
Franklin played quarterback at East Stroudsburg University, a Division II school in northeast Pennsylvania and majored in psychology. He became a graduate assistant coach mostly to pay for grad school.
He spent a summer working at two psychiatric treatment centers in eastern Pennsylvania, one for adolescents and one for adults. He desired to help fix people’s problems, but in many cases the best that could be done was manage them. He recalled a woman who was seeking treatment for depression. She was sobbing.
“And I remember saying to myself, ‘I can’t do this. I cannot do this because I’m getting emotional with her,’” he said. “I want to reach over and put my hand on her, which is not appropriate and I’m sitting there saying to myself one of two things is going to happen: I’m either going to become desensitized to this … where you’re just kind of filling out the form and it doesn’t affect you anymore. I don’t want to be that person.”