Speaking publicly for the first time since the Big Ten’s decision last week to cancel the fall sports calendar, Penn State coach James Franklin expressed frustration with the decision making process and the lack of clarity coming from the conference.
‘We as a coaching staff and administration fought as hard as we could to fulfill the desires of our student-athletes and their parents to play this fall,’ Franklin said during an occasionally emotional Zoom call with reporters Wednesday.
‘While I appreciate the complexities and difficulties of this decision for the leaders of our conference, I’m extremely frustrated because we still have very few answers to communicate to our young men and their families about their futures and very little understanding of the factors contributing to the decisions.’
Franklin’s sentiments have been echoed across the Big Ten and even on Penn State’s own campus as Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Sandy Barbour shared similar thoughts earlier in the week. While Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren has cited COVID-19 health concerns as the cause for cancelation, the conference has released little in the way of meaningful information on what led to that decision.
For the likes of Franklin the frustration was only multiplied as the decision to cancel came roughly a week following the Big Ten’s own schedule announcement. The implication: something had changed, but Warren has done little to expand on that conclusion.
As a result of both the abruptness of the decision and the seemingly unclear motivations behind it, an untold number of questions are left on the table ranging from on-campus testing, practice schedules and scholarship and eligibility issues.
‘It was challenging to keep getting up in front of my team and getting up in front of my parents, and not having answers to their questions,’ Franklin added, also noting he had yet another call with parents on Tuesday evening. ‘So to me, if we were going to make the decision to delay the season, that we at least took the time to work with the NCAA and the Big Ten, to have all the answers for what that’s going to mean, when it comes to eligibility. You know when it comes to scholarships, when it comes to the next opportunity to play.’
Speaking for nearly an hour, Franklin’s frustration and disappointment were palpable as he navigated various details about what the Nittany Lions will do next. The challenge is that a lack of answers has put coaches like Franklin, who thrive in a world where they can control everything, in a position where they have little power to control much of anything at all.
And so the frustration grows, and the lingering desire to have simply tried to pull off the season grows with it. Especially when the current plan seemed to be going so well.
‘We weren’t naive, that we didn’t think there were going to be challenges and there were going to be some positive cases in the community and on campus and within our football team, but everybody was at a place where we felt like we were controlling as many of the variables as we possibly could,’ Franklin said passionately.
‘And it was working, and literally to get the test back [Franklin reported no positive COVID-19 test results within the program] that after doing it and essentially practicing within what the rules would allow us to do…we’re pretty much doing everything that we would do [normally in practice]. And we were doing it for a period of time that if we didn’t have the right structure in place, it would have been obvious. And we did it and didn’t have one positive over that period of time. So I think we were showing that the plan worked.’
Unfortunately for Franklin, that plan won’t be moving forward anytime soon, the Big Ten unlikely to reverse course despite growing discontent among players, families and coaches. To a certain extent Franklin is OK with this, because the decision may very well turn out to be the smart, safe and eventual route the rest of college football takes in the coming month.
So it’s less a matter of what happened, as it is how it happened.
‘I think in some ways, there should be, you know, there should be some praise for the decision that was made,’ Franklin said. ‘But as I’ve stated before, my issue has been the process, and the timing of it, not necessarily the actual decision that was made.’
