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As the news broke a few days ago that former Penn State graduate assistant Joe Brady was set to take an assistant position at LSU, a handful of tweets from otherwise informed Penn State fans showed up in my mentions asking the same question.
Who is Joe Brady?
And that’s a fair question, especially if you happen to do something unrelated to Penn State football for the majority of your day.
The program (cough, James Franklin, cough) employs a horde of assistants, coaches and advisors. Basically all of them don’t get TV coverage or otherwise, and a fair number of them don’t show up in the media guide or even in the Penn State athletics’ directory.
So even if you wanted to know about them, they’re largely unlisted in most public forums.
This is particularly true for a James Franklin-run program that travels nearly as many people who won’t wear pads on Saturday as it does players that will.
In the vast emptiness of the offseason it reminded me of a question I’ve always wondered. What would a ‘coaching tree’ look like on paper? Everyone hears about all of the coaches that Nick Saban or Andy Reid oversaw at some point in their careers. What does James Franklin’s coaching tree look like?
So I went digging for names.
Of course there are issues with this from the outset. Vanderbilt had/has quality control coaches while Penn State mostly has an entourage of advisors whose hires and departures go largely unpublished.
I settled on three categories there were otherwise consistent-ish: assistants coaches, graduate assistants and a combination of quality control coaches and the people at Penn State that otherwise fit a similar billing. This leaves out some faces likes Michael Hazel (directory of ops) or Jamal Griffin (chief of staff, yes that’s a thing) that you might recognize from the sideline, but it keeps the focus on the more ‘football’ related items.
A somewhat obvious caveat to go along with all of this: this chart is more a fluid listing of coaches James Franklin has worked with. It’s not necessarily an account of coaches he has clearly molded. Joe Moorhead for example, was Joe Moorhead before he met James Franklin, same with Jim Hasslett and others.
This is more of a ‘where are they now?’ relative to their time at the program.
Nevertheless, as you’ll see, the tree branches in many different directions, at every level of football.
Check it out in full here.
