Penn State football coach James Franklin is at MIT in Boston today.
(And yes, we did say James Franklin – and not John Urschel.)
The Penn State football coach is one busy guy lately. How busy? Let’s do the MapQuest Math.
Last Saturday morning, Franklin joined Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher and Minnesota’s Jerry Kill as keynote speakers at a Nike coaches clinic at the Westin hotel by Dulles Airport in suburban Washington, D.C.
It’s one of 15 “Coach of the Year” clinics Nike puts on in 14 states all over the country from late January to early April. (Pennsylvania is the only state in 2015 that hosts two Nike clinics, in Allentown and Pittsburgh. Makes sense. According to the PIAA, there were 578 high school teams in A, AA, AAA and AAAA that played football in the Commonwealth in 2014-15.)
The Nike part makes dollars. Franklin’s six-year contract with Penn State stipulates that he gets $500,000 a year from Nike each calendar year, beginning in 2014 and ending in 2019, for a cool $3 million. As part of the deal, he must annually deliver a couple of lectures and chalk talks.
The DMV
At the D.C. event, Franklin addressed a couple hundred high school coaches on “Developing a Game Plan: The Nittany Lion Way.” The lecture lasted 75 minutes and was full of PowerPoints — of which Franklin is a fanboy. In some ways, he was preaching to the choir. The three-day clinic was in the heart of the DMV recruiting zone — Washington, D.C., Maryland and northern Virginia. It’s an area Franklin knows well, having spent eight years coaching and recruiting at the University of Maryland, and is teeming with longtime friends.
He was a hit. As one coach in the audience Tweeted, “Nike COY Clinic Penn State Head Coach James Franklin. Positive, hard work ethic, competitive, and sacrificing are his cornerstones.”
When Franklin said it all and was finally done, he hopped into a car and headed 111 long, slippery and snowy miles north to Camp Hill, Pa., to the Radisson Hotel and Convention Center. That was the site of the fifth annual Mr. Pennsylvania high school football awards dinner. And he was the featured speaker. Again. A morning-night keynote double-header.
Franklin, a star quarterback at Neshaminy High School and East Stroudsburg University, saw dozens of familiar faces at the event. But two of his most favorite belonged to recent Class of 2015 signees Whitehall running back Saquon Barkley and Bishop McDevitt running back Andre Robinson.
The BJC
That night, Franklin made the 94-mile drive home. The next day, he headed over to THON in the Bryce Jordan Center with his wife Fumi and daughters Addy and Shola. There, the coach and his family took the stage and he gave a rousing 129-second pep talk. (Watch it here.) Then Franklin gave THON a donation of $13,000, a decent portion of which looked like it came from his daughters’ piggybanks.
“If you want to talk about Penn State’s culture, look around,” was Franklin’s finishing line. “This is Penn State’s culture.”
Franklin concentrated most of the past week on football. There were 5 a.m. workouts on both Tuesday and Thursday, and lots of planning for a huge Junior Day event on Saturday. Franklin and Co. will host several top prospects for the Class of 2016, as well as some from the Class of the 2017, in hopes of adding to Penn State’s four verbal commitments for next season. On Wednesday, Franklin went back to the BJC at the invitation of Nittany Lion basketball coach Pat Chambers. Franklin, by insider accounts, delivered a fiery speech to Chambers’ squad that was heavy on fire and Jimstone.
Today, though, Franklin made the 368-mile air trip from University Park Airport to Boston, where he is taking part in the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The only college head coach presenting at the conference, Franklin is a panelist at this afternoon’s hour-long session, entitled, “The Formula to Win: College Football Analytics.” He’s joined on the panel by CNN’s Rachel Nichols; Oliver Luck, NCAA executive vice president for regulatory affairs and former A.D. at West Virginia; ESPN college football analyst Tom Luginbill; and Bill Connelly, analytics director for SB Nation.
The panel, according to the event’s website, “The new college football playoff system impacts much more than how teams are selected to vie for the national championship. It is forcing programs to reconsider their scheduling strategy, how to train for facing a broader variety of teams, and which types of players they recruit. …College football experts [will talk] about what they’ve learned over the course of year one, how they expect the game to evolve going forward, and what innovative technologies are helping teams gain an edge.”
Saturday is Junior Day on Penn State’s campus. On Sunday, he pulls double duty. Again. First, Franklin is a featured speaker at Penn State’s fifth annual TEDxPSU conference in Schwab Auditorium on campus. Then it’s back on the road that afternoon. Franklin heads 169.5 miles due east to the Northampton Memorial Community Center, where he will be – you guessed it, the keynote speaker – at the 55th annual National Football Foundation/Lehigh Valley Chapter scholar-athlete banquet.
THE NIKES
Next week Franklin is back home to oversee a few more morning workouts, plan for the March 20 start of official spring practice and pack for his next Nike trip.
At the end of next week Franklin will fly 1,955 nautical miles west, to Portland, Ore., where on Saturday, March 7, he will give his second Nike-sponsored lecture in two weeks. (Same topic as D.C.) Former Nebraska coach Gary Andersen, now at Oregon State, and Mike Leach, the pass-crazy czar at Washington State, will join Franklin on the clinic’s docket. (Franklin knows the Great Northwest; he got his master’s degree and met his wife at Washington State.)
Nike headquarters, located at One Bowerman Drive in Beaverton, is just 17.7 miles from where Franklin is speaking on Saturday. Maybe he’ll stop by the HQ, if only to ask Nike CEO and Penn State grad Mark Parker for some new running shoes.
Franklin probably needs a pair. At this rate, his old ones must be getting worn out.
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