MIAMI — The hairs on James Franklin’s beard have gone gray. Franklin has aged and evolved in synchrony with his sport. He’s become outspoken, his seniority adding a self-imposed responsibility to publicly address matters concerning college football. And, in some ways, he deserves that voice. In other ways, it’s questionable. His story hasn’t changed.
It’s the story of the big game. The big stage. The big hope. The big loss. The big disappointment. It’s become an inevitable cycle. Thursday’s Orange Bowl was his opportunity to finally break free from the narrative. To silence the critics. But the story rewrote itself, as it has throughout his 11-year Penn State career.
Franklin was in line to claim a national championship game berth. He possessed a roster likely more talented than Notre Dame. The Nittany Lions commanded the first half. They made game-changing plays in critical moments. But they lost, 27-24.
The once young and promising coach has aged. And the sport around him has evolved and grown. Franklin was raised in a world where paying dues and putting in the hours translated to rewards. But he’s stuck around long enough to see how unrealistic that can be. Marcus Freeman, 14 years younger than Franklin, has surpassed him. Franklin lost his 12th consecutive game against a top-five team. Freeman will play for a title in just third season as a head coach.
“Maybe I’m old school,” an emotional Franklin said postgame. “I don’t know when I became the old coach, but I did at some point.”
Drew Allar couldn’t believe it. The taste of hope had gone sour in his mouth. He faced a deflated sideline that had, just seconds before, rocked with electricity. Allar placed both palms on the sides of his helmet and walked off the field. Franklin briefly consoled him. What once appeared as a win in the making, or at least an overtime showdown, was gone. Thrown away.
It was almost as if some mystical force slipped the ball out of Allar’s right hand and into the chest of Notre Dame’s Christian Gray. It must have been the same force that held Penn State to a goal-line stand in a 20-13 loss to Ohio State on Nov. 2. Something like it almost annually makes its way into Franklin-coached “big games.”
“I was going through my progression, got to the back side, and, honestly, I was just trying to dirt it at his feet,” Allar said of his fourth quarter interception. “But I should have just thrown it away when I saw the first two progressions not open just because of the situation we were in.”
The emotions in the postgame locker room were raw. Dani Dennis-Sutton, a 6-foot-5, 266-pound defensive end whose leaping interception gave Penn State a lead in the fourth quarter, was in tears. Dvon J-Thomas, the typically outspoken and positive sixth-year defensive tackle, could hardly speak. All he could do was hug his teammates.
And there sat wide receivers coach Marques Hagans with a ghost-like expression. His unit accounted for not a single catch. That’s right: No Penn State wide receiver recorded a reception in Thursday’s loss. It almost didn’t matter behind a dynamic rushing attack that couldn’t be stopped through the first two quarters. But it ultimately did. The Nittany Lions needed everything to go right.
“It’s a team game. Other guys get catches, and that’s what gives us the best chance to win. That’s just the way it is,” Hagans said. “It’s a team game, so there’s no selfishness here, and whatever our team needs us to do to give us the best chance to win, that’s what we do. It could be one catch, it could be 30 catches. It’s a team game. That’s all my guys care about. That’s all we focus on.”
The experiment of competing without a true reliable, dominating wide receiver threat is up. It will not work if Penn State wants to win a national championship. That was evident last season. And it was again this year.
This was a team that could’ve made it to the top of the mountain, a team that felt it had broken through. Instead, the Nittany Lions walk away disappointed at coming up just short — again and again and again.
“All the f—— hours of work that we put in, the time we’ve spent,” center Nick Dawkins said. “We miss Christmas, we miss Easter, we miss everything with our families and we devote so much time to this, to our craft, to this team, to this university, to each other. And to not be able to send them out on the right note, it makes me sick to my stomach.”
Franklin couldn’t have been granted a more favorable path to the title. He breezed by his first two College Football Playoff opponents, SMU and Boise State. But when it came time to face a truly legitimate contender, with a storied history and the potential to compete for a championship, Franklin’s group couldn’t get it done.
This year was different. Franklin didn’t have to beat Ohio State and Michigan to get to the postseason. Penn State defeated the teams it was supposed to defeat and lost in all three of the toss-ups: Ohio State, Oregon and now Notre Dame. It’s difficult to imagine if Franklin will ever have an opportunity as promising as this one.
It took 11 seasons. It took an expanded playoff. It took investment and alignment with the athletic department and administration. The Nittany Lions have improved immensely since Franklin took over. There’s no question. But the same story has dragged on for almost a decade now. If Franklin can’t overcome his big-game hump, what’s it all worth?
Franklin, though, remains optimistic.
“As you can imagine, there’s a thousand different emotions going on and feelings,” Franklin said. “But as the head coach, I’ve got to put on the right face for the guys in the locker room for what they need right now and for my family.”
“And the sun will come up tomorrow, and the one thing I want to make sure that all those guys do is walk out of that locker room with their heads high and their chests out because they have a ton to be proud of. There’s about 128 teams that would give their right arm to have the season that we just had this year. It doesn’t feel that way right now, but there’s a ton to be proud of.”
