Penn State couldn’t settle for mediocrity. Not after giving head coach James Franklin a defensive coordinator worth $3.1 million annually.
The return of stars like Drew Allar and Kaytron Allen, paired with the arrival of former Ohio State coordinator Jim Knowles as the NCAA’s highest-paid assistant, set massive expectations for the Nittany Lions‘ 2025. Instead, fans in State College got the familiar dose of a Franklin letdown against a top team. A Week 4 whiteout couldn’t spur Penn State to a primetime win over then-No. 6 Oregon.
Advertisement
Franklin probably could have survived that. He couldn’t keep his job after what came next. The Nittany Lions lost back-to-back games as 20-plus point favorites to UCLA and Northwestern. One day after losing to the Wildcats at home, Franklin was dismissed after 12 seasons as the team’s head coach.
It was a stunning turnaround for a play-caller and recruiter who’d been consistently good and never great. Franklin arrived in his home state after three seasons making the Vanderbilt Commodores relevant. Nearly a dozen years in Happy Valley returned only a single losing record — and that was a 4-5 stretch through the Covid-19-affected 2020 campaign, which barely counts. Franklin averaged 9.2 wins per season before 2025, won at least 11 games five times in the last nine years and was coming off an appearance in the College Football Playoff’s national semifinal.
But Franklin also went 8-26 against top 15 opponents. He won a single game against top five competition in 16 tries — and that win over No. 1 Ohio State came back in 2016. That was already a tough sell for a blue blood program that dreamed of more. Franklin might have survived his overtime loss to the Ducks had he gotten back to what he does best; beating the teams he’s supposed to. Instead, Penn State lost to a UCLA team that had fired its head coach two weeks before, then couldn’t overcome the FBS’s 99th-ranked scoring offense to lose to Northwestern in front of a frustrated crowd.
Rather than let him dangle in the midst of a lost season that wasn’t going to improve after losing Allar to a leg injury, the Nittany Lions let him get a head start on his job search. All it cost them was the second-highest buyout in college football history, trailing only Texas A&M’s $77 million cost to get rid of Jimbo Fisher.
Advertisement
What is James Franklin’s buyout at Penn State?
While we don’t know the specific number, Franklin’s buyout would have stood at $48,666,667 as of December 1, per USA Today’s database of publicly reported coaching salaries. That’s a remarkable cost for a team that will need to handle that expense on top of scraping together a new roster following a post-Franklin player exodus; players will have 15 days to announce their intention to transfer from the program, down from what had previously been a 30-day window.
Relieving the long-tenured head coach of his duties means dropping more cash in the portal — something that could hamstring Penn State’s next hire if the Franklin buyout leads to fewer NIL donations beyond the cash laid out in the House settlement. The Nittany Lions can sell prospects on tradition and history, but will be working against that good-not-great stigma and do so without a head coach who’d lured blue chip prosects to the SEC’s doormat before moving to Pennsylvania and making Happy Valley the place for a litany of top-15 recruiting classes.
Advertisement
That’s the next challenge whose most recent coach was crushed by the weight of high expectations. Penn State will pay Franklin and his staff more than $50 million and potentially up to $60 million (depending on assistant buyouts) just to stop coming to work. In a landscape where funding has helped push Texas Tech from the middle of the Big 12 to a top 10 ranking, that can’t be ignored.
But neither could Franklin’s inability to win the games he needed to most. Penn State went from the doorstep of the National Championship Game to losing, at home, to a forgettable Northwestern team one week after getting pantsed by a UCLA program that had a very real chance to go 0-12 before finding optimism in putting the boots to a new conference rival. Avoiding that embarrassment and starting fresh, for the Nittany Lions, was deemed worthy of a $50-plus million expense.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Penn State ate nearly $50M to rid itself of James Franklin’s mediocrity
