In a lot of ways, now former Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich was a pragmatic hire coming out of a brief but uninteresting stint with then offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca. The two were almost polar opposites in style and demeanor, Yurcich fitting more to Penn State coach James Franklin’s personality as well as offensive sensibilities. In fact, at one point Franklin openly noted that Yurcich had long been on his coordinator wish list. The fit made sense and Yurcich’s resume was an easy sell to everyone outside the program.
And in a lot of ways it was a good hire, too. Penn State — especially in 2022 and even in spite of the outcome in 2023 — scored a ton of points, moved the ball and generally didn’t lose games that it shouldn’t have. There were oddities sprinkled over Yurcich’s three-year tenure, 2023 in particular becoming an interesting exercise in scoring 30+ but not looking terribly impressive in the process, but nothing about his time at Penn State was an objective disaster. That is to some degree, success in its own right.
But if there was a knock on Yurcich, who was fired on Sunday, it would be that he never felt like the missing piece the Nittany Lions had been lacking in the season’s biggest games. In turn, for all the success Yurcich did have elsewhere, he fell short when faced with his biggest assignments. In many ways, Penn States’ offensive coordinator isn’t really hired to beat the teams Penn State can simply outmuscle with skill and power. He’s hired to beat the two biggest teams on the schedule. Aside from Joe Moorhead, no offensive coordinator under Franklin has hit that mark. Albeit these losses are not singularly the fault of the coordinator, but they’re certainly part of the equation.
Another part is James Franklin.
Throughout his time at Penn State, the role Franklin has taken as partial architect of the Nittany Lions’ offense has always been a bit ambiguous at best to the outside eye. Franklin seems to float between offering direction, guidance and observations on game days to his coordinator to a more hands-on approach, all while offering up the occasional lament that something he was well within his rights to control simply never happened for inexplicable reasons. Without truly knowing the distribution of power both on game days and schematically throughout the week, it’s hard to know much blame to ascribe Franklin for any given offensive shortcoming.
That aside, it’s safe to say Franklin’s fingerprints are more visibly part of Penn State’s offensive makeup than its defense. As a matter of fairness, this is undoubtedly true for any head coach with an offensive background or vice versa. Still, it is a matter of public record that Penn State has had more issues in big games on the offensive side of the ball than the defensive side. To what degree these things related is up for debate.
Nevertheless, it seems increasingly likely that Franklin’s next hire will be among the most important he has made while at Penn State as the Big Ten adds four programs in 2024, three of which are known for their offense and the fourth led by Chip Kelly, who possesses no small amount of offensive innovation in his own right. Equally true is whatever Franklin does with the lessons he has learned as the common denominator between a handful of offensive coordinators who have ultimately not panned out as hoped. Franklin’s ability to self-assess, learn and adjust [or not] rank high among the most consequential moments of his tenure at Penn State. He likely had to swallow no too small a pill on Sunday knowing that he was about fire the offensive coordinator he fired a different offensive coordinator in order to hire. But the move buys Franklin more time and a splash of goodwill among a fanbase that is running low on both as of late.
Back at the job at hand, hiring an offensive coordinator who is capable of beating two of the best teams in American on a semi-regular basis, potentially while being the less talented team in said game, is an unenviable task. If anything, hiring someone to be that kind of coordinator is really just a lot of educated guesses all at once. None of this is helped by a simple fact that Penn State has personnel issues which transcend Yurcich this season, but perhaps not to the extent at which this offense struggled. Hence Sunday’s news.
All of this is framed in front of the perpetual threat of a second departure in defensive coordinator Manny Diaz, who has expressed a general interest in one day becoming a head coach again. This becomes particularly relevant as Diaz is set to no longer receive buyout money from Miami next year, effectively resulting in a pay cut to stay as Penn State’s defensive coordinator if he doesn’t find a head coaching job willing to pay him something in the range of $6-8 million. So Franklin could very find himself looking to hire two new cornerstone coordinators this offseason, and even if both are filled by in-house promotions that would still leave him with two meaningful positional vacancies for a program that has looked to maintain continuity as best as possible.
Totaled up you get to a key juncture in Franklin’s tenure at Penn State both in the hire(s) that he makes and how they are managed once they’re on campus. Only Franklin can tell everyone where it all went wrong. The question will be if he can tell himself, and what he does with that information.
