Excuse James Franklin if he slipped this week.
The way the Penn State head coach was going, it almost sounded as if the University of Maryland is Penn State’s rival.
A rival of sorts. Sometimes. On the road.
(Just not on autumn Saturdays, especially lately, as Penn State has bested the Terrapins 142 to 20 over the past three seasons.)
“With our staffs, there’s a lot of crossover there, and just being so close to each other,” said Franklin. “All those things factor in. I think that’s where football is in some ways maybe different than other sports is how competitive it is year-round.
“You are trying to protect your state. You’re trying to protect your footprint. You’re battling with these guys year-round. It’s not just Saturday afternoon and it’s not just the week of the game. It’s in recruiting. It’s in the region. It’s in the footprint. It’s in the state. It’s all of it. They come to Pennsylvania. We try to go to the DMV.”
In some ways Penn State vs. Maryland does have many of the trappings of a rivalry — bad blood (remember Maryland’s captains refusing to shake hands in 2014?), proximity, familiarity, coaching ties and year-in, year-out divisional scheduling. For example:
Franklin spent 2,876 days working for the University of Maryland — in chunks of 1,788 days and then, a few years later, for 1,088 days. (Friday, while in Maryland, will mark his 2,085th day at Penn State.)
Eleven Nittany Lions are from Maryland. Six Terps are from PA. Penn State defensive end Shane Simmons will be facing 13 former DeMatha Catholic (Md.) teammates on Friday night, and his high school head coach, Elijah Brooks, is now the Terps’ running backs coach.
In addition to Franklin, these Penn State staffers also worked at Maryland: tight end coach Tyler Bowen (who holds undergrad and grad degrees from Maryland), safeties coach Tim Banks, strength coach Dwight Galt and assistant AD/chief of staff Kevin Threlkel. And new Lion wide receiver coach Gerad Parker was a GA at Kentucky when current Terp O-coordinator Joker Phillips coached there.
These are the ties that bind.
TERP TIME…AGAIN
If it seems like the Nittany Lions are always playing the Terrapins, well…that’s because they are. Counting Friday night’s game (8 p.m., FS1), the two teams will have met twice in the past six games and three times in the past 19 games.
Last year’s Penn State-Maryland game was the final Big Ten conference game for both teams and this year’s game is the first conference contest for both schools. (Shades of 1971-72, when Penn State ended its regular seasons by losing 31-11 at Tennessee, beat Texas 30-6 in the Cotton Bowl, then opened the next regular season by falling 28-21 at Tennessee.)
But one thing is missing — the one true element in any true rivalry:
Parity, or a reasonable facsimilie, on the playing field.
Franklin is 4-1 against his former employer, and the Terps’ 20-19 win in 2014 was Maryland’s first (and only other) victory against the Nittany Lions since 1961. The 2015 contest was played in Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium, and PSU won, 31-20.
Since then, the Nittany Lions have thrashed the Terps by scores of 38-14, 66-3 and 38-3.
Maryland’s last TD against Penn State came 11 quarters of play ago, when Tyrell Pigrome’s 7-yard run in the second quarter of the 2016 game at University Park, which pulled the Terps to within 17-14.
Since then, Penn State has partied like it was 1969 — when Joe Paterno’s fifth-ranked squad won 48-0 against Roy Lester’s Terps in Beaver Stadium. Overall, Penn State is 39-2-1 against Maryland, in a series that goes back to 1917. Two victories. C’mon, here’s a short list of teams that have also beaten Penn State two times: Altoona Athletic Association (1890 and 1907, when Neil Rudel may have been the AAA QB), Bellefonte Academy, Dickinson Seminary and Swarthmore.
This Mason-Dixon series? Penn State is #unrivaled.
“A true rival has to win some games against you,” Penn State football historian Lou Prato reminded me this week, flexing his prodigious Nittany memory muscles. “Maryland hasn’t spoiled any of our seasons. Their 13-13 tie against Penn State in 1989 (in Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium) was a moral victory for them.
“On the other hand, Penn State has spoiled their season. Look back to 1985, when Maryland was ranked No. 1 by some people in the preseason. Penn State went down there and won 20-18 in the heat.”
IS LOCKS THE KEY?
The faux rivalry did get a little hotter on December 4, 2018. That’s when Maryland hired Mike Locksley away from Alabama, where he was the offensive coordinator, to be the Terps’ head coach. (Some reports had him bringing along Josh Gattis from the Tide staff, but the former PSU WR coach ended up in Ann Arbor.)
Locksley is a DMV — District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia — guy through and through. Born in D.C. on Christmas Day 1969, he played defensive back at Towson State in the Baltimore suburbs. He’s coached at Towson, Navy Prep and at Maryland — three times: in 1997-2002 as the running backs coach and recruiting coordinator, on the staff from ’00-02 with Franklin; in 2012-15 as O-coordinator and QB coach and then as interim head coach; and now again as head coach.
He’s hoping three time’s a charm. For that to happen, he’ll have to beat Penn State and his old co-worker on a regular basis — on the recruiting trail and on the playing field. It’s a very tall task.
Locks and James have a long history.
“James and I, our relationship goes back to ’98 or ’99, when he came here as a young coach,” Locksley recalled this week. “I think he was leaving Idaho State, and we were both young coaches on Ron Vanderlinden’s first staff, and then we both stayed on through Coach (Ralph) Friedgen. And we maintained a relationship over the years.
“Obviously, James has had a great success as a head coach at Vanderbilt and now Penn State, so I’m always glad to see guys do well — and, again, in all games except the one we play them in. So, again, we are both guys who grew up in this program here and both having coached under Coach Friedgen. But we do have a cordial relationship.”
Franklin wasn’t nearly as expansive when I asked him on Tuesday about his relationship with Locksley.
“You see each other at Big Ten meetings. You see each other on the road recruiting,” Franklin said. “You see each other at the Fiesta Summit. I saw them out there at that, Mike and his wife, Kia, who I have known for a long time.”
WHAT ABOUT RALPH?
Their relationships with Friedgen are more complicated.
Friedgen will be a present at the game in College Park and will be honored on Friday night. A cynic may say that Locksley is trolling Franklin a bit by having Frieden on hand for the game.
In February 2009, then Maryland-athletic director Debbie Yow named Franklin the head coach-in-waiting to replace veteran coach Friedgen, who had a 64-36 record from 2001-08 at College Park (and was 75-50 in 10 seasons). At the time, Franklin was the offensive coordinator and assistant head coach heading into his seventh season on the Terps’ staff and a hot commodity in the pro and college coaching ranks. Still a wunderkid in his 30s, Franklin was promised $1 million from the school if he was not named to succeed Friedgen by Jan. 2, 2012.
In June 2010, Yow left Maryland for N.C. State — leaving Franklin in the lurch. Kevin Anderson, Yow’s successor and a former athletic director at Army, disliked coach-in-waiting agreements and said there were no guarantees for succession. Anderson’s word, to be exact: ‘I’m going to go out on this limb: I can’t see how this (head coach-in-waiting plan) serves the program well. Because what happens now is you have two people that a staff has to serve.’
Neither of those two people lasted. Franklin left for Vanderbilt in December 2010, and Friedgen eventually got the boot from Anderson. Friedgen and Maryland had been on frosty terms since.
This week, Franklin said, “I had a great experience” at Maryland. “I’m very appreciative.”
FRANKLIN: 53 GAMES, BUT 1-0
Speaking of trolling, at his Tuesday press conference Franklin took a nuanced shot at Maryland, when he spoke of the deficiencies of Capital One Field at Maryland Stadium — a venue Franklin knows quite well, back to the days when it was called Byrd Stadium (a moniker removed in 2015, when Harry “Curley” Byrds history of supporting segregation came to the fore.)
Franklin coached in Byrd 52 times as a Terp assistant. He is 1-0 there as the Penn State head coach.
“One of the challenges this year, they have one of the smaller visiting locker rooms,” Franklin said. “In the past, we taped outside. The coaches usually change at the hotel because there’s not a lot of room to change over there. There’s a lot of things that I think if you prepare your team and staff ahead of time for those things, there’s value.”
Value. I like that.
It’s what Maryland adds to Penn State’s schedule. (I appreciate the value of Capital One Field being just a bit more than a three-hour drive from my house.)
Just don’t call them a rival.
