Come Jan. 9, 2018, every FBS football team will be able to hire a new, full-time assistant coach.
Including Penn State.
The addition of a 10th on-field assistant coach was approved Friday by the NCAA Division I Council and now needs only the OK of the Division I Board of Directors in two weeks.
That approval should happen, giving James Franklin from this moment forward a total of 268 days to think about how he wants to fill that position.
He’ll no doubt get plenty of input, not only from his nine full-time assistants, but also from his admin people — like chief of staff Jemal Griffin and director of operations Michael Hazel — and some outside sources, like PSU’s analytics vendor.
Not that Franklin hasn’t already given it some serious thought already. He has.
Which we’ll get to a minute, as we take a semi-deep dive into Penn State’s process of adding #AssistantNumber10.
FIRST AND TEN
1. THE CURRENT BREAKDOWN. Franklin’s full-time staff has five offensive coaches and four defensive coaches, with two of those assistants also handling special teams. Here’s the breakdown:
OFFENSE (5) — Joe Moorhead (coordinator/quarterbacks), Matt Limegrover (line), running backs (Charles Huff), wide receivers (Josh Gattis) and tight ends (Ricky Rahne).
DEFENSE (4) — Brent Pry (coordinator/linebackers), Sean Spencer (line), Terry Smith (cornerbacks) and Tim Banks (safeties).
SPECIAL TEAMS — Huff oversees the special teams (kickoff, kickoff return, punt, punt return, field goals, PATs), with an assist from Gattis, plus Sam Williams, who is listed as special teams recruiting assistant for quality control. (Williams is not currently a FT, on-the-field coach.)
2. OFFENSE OR DEFENSE? Franklin is leaning toward adding a special teams coach, perhaps one who can also help coach defense. Likely, that would mean assisting either Pry — who coaches three position players vs. two each for Smith and Banks — or Spencer, who directs four players along the D-line. (Both Pry and Spencer now have graduate assistants who help them.)
Or, less likely, Franklin could have the 10th assistant oversee special teams and help Limegrover, who’s done a great job as a line grower. Right now, 45% of the offensive players on the field are Limegrover ‘direct reports,’ if you look at these things from an org chart POV. (Which you know Franklin does.)
3. WHAT FRANKLIN SAYS. Penn State’s fourth-year head coach talked about the possibility of a No. 10 last fall. Here is what CJF had to say about a new FT AC: ‘What I think a lot of people will do is they’ll probably go two directions. You go the NFL model, where you go with a special teams coordinator. Instead of having a special teams coordinator that coaches a position and coordinates special teams, you have a special teams coordinator and that’s his main responsibility. He may help out with another position, but that’s his main responsibility.
‘Or, the other thing you can always do — like anything in life — you just go best available. So you may say my model is to go with a special teams coordinator, but Coach X is available and wants to come and he’s just so experienced and so valuable that you go with that guy as well. There’s two different models.
‘I’m probably leaning more towards a special teams coordinator that would help out on defense, because typically with nine coaches, you have five on offense and four on defense (with) one of those offensive coaches splitting time as a special teams coordinator. Putting a special teams coordinator on the defensive side of the ball as well, those guys would be like co-coordinators and even out your coaches five and five.’
4. IS HE HERE? In early March, Franklin hired former Rutgers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers assistant Phil Galiano as a defensive consultant (meaning, technically, he can’t coach players on the practice field or in games). Galiano had three separate stints at Rutgers, most recently as a special teams and tight ends coach. He spent 2012-2013 in the NFL as the Bucs’ special teams coach, when former Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano left Rutgers to be the head coach in Tampa Bay. (Schiano, fired by Tampa Bay after the 2013 season, is in his second year as associate head and co-defensive coordinator at Ohio State.)
In his various times at Rutgers, Galiano was also director of recruiting operations and coached the defensive line and linebackers. After the 2014 season at Rutgers, Galiano was promoted from recruiting coordinator to special teams/tight ends coach. A native of Norristown, he was a three-year starter at safety for Shippensburg.
Then there’s Williams, a former colleague of Galiano’s at Rutgers who is starting his third year at Penn State. Williams was a grad assistant at Rutgers in 2013 (special teams) and 2014 (offensive line; attn: M. Limegrover). Williams joined the Nittany Lions in March 2015 in his current role. He was an offensive quality control assistant for Franklin at Vanderbilt in 2012.
Also this offseason, Franklin added former Alderson Broaddus head football coach Kirk Campbell as an offensive analyst. But it seems unlikely he’ll be No. 10, given his background as an O-coordinator and QB coach. Unless…well, see No. 10.
5. IS HASLETT MATERIAL? Let’s look at history. Before the 2015-16 off-season, the last time Franklin added to his staff in a big way was in spring 2015, when he brought in former New Orleans Saints head coach and standout NFL linebacker Jim Haslett as consultant at PSU for a season. Definitely a defensive guy. He left last year to be a linebackers coach for the Cincinnati Bengals in the NFL.
6. COACHING STABILITY. The off-season before 2016 was a rarity for Franklin in his six, going on seven years, as a head coach. He had to replace three assistant coaches. He didn’t even make that many new hires when he went from Vandy to Penn State. When Franklin was hired by Penn State in January 2014, eight of the nine assistants he brought to Happy Valley he had worked with at Vandy. (Smith, a PSU alum who was at Temple, was the outlier.)
In fact, as he heads into his seventh season as a head coach, Franklin has only had 16 different assistant coaches. When you do the math — nine spots times seven seasons equals 63 potential assistants — that’s pretty darn stable. Maybe even very. Throw in strength and conditioning guru Dwight Galt, who also doubles as Franklin’s Yoda, and Franklin hasn’t made a ton of hires. Which is almost always perceived as a good thing.
(The former Franklin assistants, in case you were wondering: Charles Bankins, George Barlow, Chris Beatty, John Donovan, Herb Hand, Wesley McGriff and Bob Shoop.)
7. THE FRANKLIN FIT. When adding an assistant, chemistry is important. Nowhere is that clearer than on Franklin’s administrative support team, as the same four key players — Griffin, Hazel, director of administration Kevin Threlkel and director of player personnel Andy Frank — have been with Franklin for, at least, the past seven years. Threlkel’s ties to Franklin go all the way back to Kansas State in 2006 (as do Rahne’s), and Griffin worked with Franklin at Maryland almost a decade ago.
Chemistry is important, as Pry adroitly shared with me last December in the run-up to the Rose Bowl. He should know; his relationship with Franklin goes back to East Stroudsburg in 1993, when Pry coached the linebackers and defensive backs, and his dad Jim was Franklin’s offensive coordinator when CJF was the QB at ESU.
“When you bring new guys in, it’s not easy or guaranteed it’s going to work,” Pry said. “That’s a credit to James. He’s always done a tremendous job recognizing those intangibles that are so important to the chemistry. Whether it’s a player or a coach or a player personnel guy, getting that right fit is so important.
“When Joe (Moorhead) was hired, believe me, that position was vetted. We had a lot of conversations about it. Just the fit, the right kind of guy. You find a lot of guys with a good deal of experience and you get that pool of coaches. But then you need to find out, who’s your kind of guy? Not everyone weighs that as heavily as they should.”
8. THE NOTEBOOK. Not that sappy movie, with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (a personal fav, I must admit). Or those day-planners from FranklinCovey. I’m talking about the one in Franklin’s desk drawer, with names of possible new hires.
Since the day he was named the head coach at Penn State, Franklin has said he keeps a book filled with info and bios of potential future assistants. And while that is true, his last three hires also came in via additional avenues. Two were a FOJ (one a Friend of James, another a Friend of Joe).
Moorhead’s name was brought to the fore by SportsSource Analytics, which researched the field of possible candidates — in uptempo fashion; John Donovan was fired Nov. 29, 2015, and Moorhead was hired on Dec. 12 — and came up with Joe Moorpoints. (More on that in No. 9.)
Limegrover would have popped up for many reasons. He had a lot of Big Ten experience (he spent five years at Minnesota as O-coordinator and line coach), he had strong Pennsylvania roots and he had the personal endorsement of Moorhead himself, which meant a great deal. Both are Pittsburgh natives. Limegrover is five years older than Moorhead, but the two went to the same elementary school (St. Bartholomew’s in Penn Hills) and high school (Pittsburgh Central Catholic). Limegrover went to school with Moorhead’s siblings and Moorhead’s dad was Limegrover’s first tackle football coach.
Banks, too, had Big Ten ties (he was D-coordinator at Illinois from 2012-15) and he also worked with Franklin at Maryland — pre-Big Ten Conference for the Terps — in 2003-2004.
9. BIG DATA. Franklin didn’t go all relationships when hiring Moorehead. He went metrics. Penn State had utilized SportsSource Analytics – an Atlanta-based firm built by a Vanderbilt grad — to help analyze and implement statistics and trends across 100 different statistical categories using 100 million statistical data points.
They were a key player in Franklin’s coaching search that yielded Moorhead. In a big way, squared. “For me, it was the data,” Franklin said when Moorhead was hired. “As you mentioned I have a list (of potential coaches) at each position, but with the coordinator positions you want to study data…
“At the end of the day, you take all of those guys on the list and you run all of that data. You look at third-down percentage, scoring offense, red zone and every other piece of information you can get and you look at who is consistently at the top of each of those categories. Joe kept jumping out in almost every single category and I was very impressed.”
So were the folks at SSA. On Monday, Dec. 14, 2015 – with Moorhead firmly committed to Penn State and the hiring process complete — @SportSourceA Tweeted out these Moorhead stats that just didn’t come in over the transom:
Compared to prior 5 yrs, @BallCoachJoeMo increased avg
scoring O at Fordham by 61%, yds per play by 20%, rush yds
by 14%, & pass yds by 25%.
5 years before Moorhead, Fordham scored 30+ pts 23% of games
& 40+ pts 4%. Under Moorhead, scored 30+ pts 71% of games
& 40+ pts 49 of games #PennSt
10. SO, WHAT IF JOE GOES? Or Brent? Or both? Let’s just say CJF takes PSU to the CFP. That makes Moorhead an even hotter ticket than he was last year. It also means the Nittany Lion defense — and Pry — had a great campaign.
Which means either or both could be long gone by the time Jan. 9, 2018, rolls around.
You can bet that Franklin has that possibility — both good and bad depending, on your point of view — in his notebook as well. And just like that other Notebook, there may also be some tears as well.
