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The Athletic had an article yesterday titled Penn State Emergency Coaching Search Committee: 6 solutions for the Nittany Lions where their suggestions were still just as fanciful as Kraft's opinion of the job. (Commentary, unless quoted, is mine.)

- Terry Smith, Penn State interim coach: The text started, "Just do it."
- Matt Campbell, Iowa State head coach: I'm sure everybody else has tried to pry him away from Iowa State, why would Penn State succeed here?
- Kalen DeBoer, Alabama head coach: Text: First wave is over, why not wait for DeBoer?
- Jeff Brohm, Louisville head coach: I'd considered this more an expansion candidate for his alma mater rather than a Penn State target, and history has proven me right.
- Bob Chesney, James Madison → UCLA head coach: Text: "Chesney knows damn well how much better of a job Penn State is than UCLA. Has he signed? Has he not signed? Even if Penn State has to compensate UCLA, do it. It will be worth it." lawl
- Jeff Monken, Army head coach: Yeah, they could probably get him, but should they really want him? Severe downgrade from Franklin, but then again, any realistic target by now would be.

Their latest football coaching carousel article from today doesn't have much more:

Penn State: It's obviously not going well. There was a belief around Penn State this week that BYU head coach Kalani Sitake would be the guy, only for him to stay at BYU after the school stepped up to commit resources to football in a way that it hadn't done before (and to a level Sitake perhaps didn't think it would after trying for years). Then Louisville head coach Jeff Brohm on Wednesday decided to stick with the Cardinals, per sources briefed on the talks. Brohm and Louisville have been working on a contract extension for weeks, and Brohm had spoken with Penn State multiple times.

So where does it go now? It's hard to say. Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell has deep Ohio ties and has brought unprecedented success to the Cyclones. Former New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll has been involved, with support from the Pegula family, owners of the Buffalo Bills and big Penn State donors. There remains some internal push for interim head coach Terry Smith, who helped flip quarterback Peyton Falzone to the Nittany Lions on signing day. Would Green Bay Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley come back to college football? He's worked with Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft before, but he also might be in line to become an NFL head coach, and the NFL calendar makes a move to college difficult. On Wednesday evening, Penn State had the 150th-ranked recruiting class on 247Sports with two commits, ranked behind McNeese and West Georgia.

Enjoy your crumbl cookies, Pat. lawl

I mean let's be honest for a second the big reason why our recruiting took a shit over the last 15 years was because James Franklin was at Penn St. He understood recruiting far better than anyone at Virginia Tech has ever understood it as far back as I can remember.

There have been multiple times over the years where I told myself that I would love to have a coach like James Franklin at Virginia Tech. I always thought a great recruiter could clean up here and get us back to where we were when I was at school.

I never thought Penn St would b dumb enough to fire him. I still can't believe they did. And they basically gifted us the absolute perfect coach to help us see our potential.

I never hated him, I hated Penn St. I hated that they kicked our ass for recruits in our backyard. I hated they built an empire off our talent. But as a coach I always thought he was among the elites.

And I love the fact that he's now our coach and he's seemingly making it his life mission to destroy Penn St as we know them. As someone who hates that they never got NCAA punished over Sandusky, knowing we did this to them over the past few weeks is like a fever dream that I don't want to wake up from.

"The Pat McAfee School For Kids Who Can't Kick Football Good"

The best part of this whole thing is watching Penn St fans cling desperately to the notion that they didn't massively fuck up in forcing Franklin out.

Franklin had been there for 12 years and had slow built them into a powerhouse that was slowly approaching the top of the mountain. A perennial Top 5 team that just made it to the Final Four and was a last second FG away from the NCG. He cleaned up in recruiting, dominated regions outside of the state and was being held back because the school refused to fund him on an equal footing that the peers at the top of the mountain were doing.

A couple losses into the next season when they had some Portal misses and they fire him before the season was halfway over and now they can't get anyone to return their calls. Because every coach in the world out there knows that the expectations at Penn St do not align with what they are reasonably capable of doing. You want to beat Ohio St and Michigan more times than not, fund your program at the same rate. Give your coach a blank check to do whatever he needs to match them. When Franklin asked for this there he was met with pushback and ridicule, and everyone saw it, and nobody else wants to put their career in those hands.

And the more I think of it the more I get a feeling that Franklin might be here for the long haul. If he gets us to where he had Penn St, the only step up will be to a program where the expectations are Natty or bust every year and I wouldn't blame him if he wants no part of that after what happened in Happy Valley. And by being here he has a unique chance to permanently fuck over the two schools that screwed him the most in Maryland and Penn St.

You know that I am longtime SP+ fan, as we have discussed it a lot over the years, but I have found his divergence from FPI pretty significantly this year to be a bug rather than a feature. I haven't seen the final numbers yet, but FPI has felt much more accurate in its assessment of the top teams, and SOR has seemed a lot better than Resume SP+ to my eyes.

Also some weird things are going on at WVU they are setting up a shadow college inside it where the curriculum isnt accredited. So money has been diverted to this effort in some sleazy ways.

Interesting.

That certainly made Franklin's job easier over the past two weeks.

Never been more proud of my hometown than seeing this story go national its epic. The bars in town were selling trashed panda cocktails since this in Ashland for those who want to celebrate.

Yeah, Chris Coleman talked about this briefly on the TSL signing day podcast. According to him, WVU missed on a few dudes and pooled the NIL money that would have gone to several guys to get him on board. Franklin has some established pay structure that he wasn't willing to bend for this one guy.

inability to build a team? If they are recruiting a bunch of love-me-some-me kids its kind of hard to build a cohesive team environment.

Damningly enough for the FuCorn years, the forfeited classes were actually 2020 and 2021 more so than the transitional class in 2022