James Franklin is rapidly approaching his 3,000th day at Penn State, which is March 30.
When he was introduced as the Nittany Lions’ head football coach on Jan. 11, 2014, Penn State was undergoing turbulent times.
Rod Erickson was president. David Joyner was athletic director. Penn State was under heavy NCAA sanctions. And Franklin was the fourth head coach in two years, two months and two days at a school where Joe Paterno had been the top dog for 46 years.
There was no transfer portal, no Name Image Likeness, no $100 million-plus of football facility renovations. The inaugural College Football Playoff was a year away.
Franklin brought in at least 16 coaches and staffers who he had worked with at Vanderbilt and Maryland to rebuild Penn State. Three remain:
Chief of staff Kevin Threlkel and recently-promoted football performance director Chuck Losey, both now assistant athletic directors, and director of player personnel Andy Frank.
In addition to his previous institution connections, Franklin also hired Terry Smith, the former Nittany Lion co-captain, to coach the cornerbacks and Anthony Crespino to be director of player development.
Smith is still coaching at his alma mater — the last assistant standing from Franklin’s first season at Happy Valley. Crespino lasted four months.
There’s a full rundown of Franklin’s first staff from those first few months on pages 31 to 34 of Penn Stater’s 2014 Spring Media Guide.
There are 45 people listed. Twelve are at Penn State now. Not counting the aforementioned quartet, nine of that dozen were already at PSU when CJF arrived.
They include football staffers Jevin Stone (video), Bake Newsock (video), Angie Hummel (admin) and Todd Kulka (advising). These others still work a great deal with football, but have additional duties in Penn State athletics: Rick Kaluza (finance/business), Jim Nachtman (broadcast), Kris Petersen (stratcomm) and Stephanie Petulla (branding).
Then there’s Ty Howle, a recruiting GA when Franklin arrived who quickly left for N.C. State that fall and then coached for four seasons at Western Illinois under former Penn State QB coach Charlie Fisher. Howle returned in 2020 and is now Penn State’s tight ends coach.
As Franklin enters his ninth spring practice at Penn State, beginning March 21, he has coached 101 games at PSU, going 67-34. He went 14-12 in his first 26 games and 14-13 in his latest 27. In-between was a stellar 3-9 mark that included a Big Ten title, a high-water No. 2 ranking for two weeks in 2017 and three trips to New York 6 bowls.
In Ann Arbor this fall, he will pass Hugo Bezdek (65-30-11) to become No. 4 on the all-time list in longevity for Penn State head football coaches. And, with a 10-year, $85 million contract in hand, Franklin is poised to pass Rip Engle (156 games) and Bob Higgins (159) sometime during the 2026 season. Joe Paterno’s record of 548 games seems safe.
As Franklin begins Year 9 at Penn State, he has already had five offensive coordinators, four special team coordinators and three defensive coordinators. And soon, three university presidents.
Such sustained turnover is nothing new in college football these days. Nick Saban has won multiple national championships at Alabama with a turnstile of assistants, which has included former PSU football coaches Charles Huff, Josh Gattis and Bill O’Brien over the past four years.
At Michigan, which won the Big Ten East division last season, Jim Harbaugh – who almost left himself several weeks ago – has three new fulltime assistants, and five more in their second season. That’s out of 10 full-time coaching assistants. (For comparison, five of Franklin’s 10 assistants have been at Penn State for two years or less).
The longest tenured assistant coach on Harbaugh’s staff? His son Jay. At Ohio State, Ryan Day brought in a new defensive coordinator, Jim Knowles, in the offseason.
Franklin himself is the third-longest tenured head coach in the 14-team Big Ten Conference, behind Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz (24 seasons) and Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald (17). Since Franklin was hired, there have been 32 other head coaches in the conference, an average of about 2.5 per program. Illinois has had five, while Penn State’s nearest B10 neighbors, Maryland and Rutgers, both have had four.
In college football in 2022, the only constant is change.
WHERE HAVE THEY GONE?
With Brent Pry’s offseason move to Virginia Tech to become head coach, Franklin’s coaching tree now has four former assistants who are head coaches. That’s a credit to him.
(The four were all on Penn State’s staff in 2016-17, when PSU went 22-5.)
And, it explains some of the turnover in Franklin’s staff, coaching and otherwise, in recent years. Franklin has not only had to replace trusted and experienced coaches, but other, lower-level employees who did great work anonymously and behind the scenes.
Take Virginia Tech. Pry hired, at minimum, eight former assistants and staffers who have Penn State roots. At Old Dominion, head coach – and former Penn State assistant – Ricky Rahne has had at least a half-dozen Penn Staters on his staff.
Here’s a quick overview of those four head coaches from the Franklin tree and the former Penn Staters now in their employ:
BRENT PRY, VIRGINIA TECH
Pry returned to Blacksburg, where he was a grad assistant under the legendary Bud Foster in 1995-97, for his first yead coaching gig. Pry’s first game as the Hokies’ head coach will be on Sept. 2, on the road at Old Dominion against Rahne, his former co-worker at Vanderbilt and Penn State.
Pry has hired several Penn Staters, including:
Tyler Bowen as offensive coordinator and tight ends coach. Bowen spent the 2021 football season coaching tight ends for the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars. He was an assistant at Penn State in 2018-20, and a GA in 2014.
Michael Hazel as chief of staff and assistant athletic director. Hazel had been with Franklin since Vanderbilt and at Penn State had such myriad duties as NIL, communications and facilities as senior director of operations.
Dwight Galt IV as director of strength and conditioning; he’s the son of recently-retired Penn State performance guru Dwight Galt.
Michael Villagrana as senior director, player personnel. Villagrana was the GM for Huff at Marshall, and worked at Mississippi State for both Joe Moorhead and his successor, Mike Leach. Villagrana was at Penn State in 2015-17.
Stewart Carter as director, equipment services for football. Carter had been assistant equipment manager at PSU since 2014.
Kevin Juszynski as assistant director of football operations. A recent Penn State graduate, Juszynski was a high performer who worked in a variety of roles in Lasch as an undergrad.
Jeff Carpenter as an offensive analyst. Carter spent the 2021 season as an analyst at LSU. He was at Penn State in 2018-20 as an analyst and GA, and in 2011-14 as an undergraduate assistant.
Jake Schell, football operations and analytics analyst. Schell worked for Pry for three years as an undergrad and wrote weekly freelance analytics reports for ESPN’s Chris Fowler.
RICKY RAHNE, OLD DOMINION
Rahne coached under Franklin at both Vanderbilt and Penn State, in such roles as QB coach, tight ends coach and offensive coordinator. He was hired as Old Dominion’s head coach in December 2019, but didn’t coach his first game at ODU until September 2021 because the Monarchs paused their football program due to the pandemic in 2020.
Rahne’s 2021 season started rough, going 1-6, before winning five straight games to earn a berth in the Myrtle Beach Bowl (a 30-17 loss). Their 6-7 record was a far cry from the 1-11 mark ODU had in 2019.
Old Dominion and Marshall, coached by Huff, squared off last season at Marshall, which won 20-13 in overtime. A standout for the Monarchs was tight end Zach Kuntz, a transfer from Penn State. Kuntz had 73 receptions – second-most among all tight ends in college football – for 692 yards and five TDs.
Rahne has a number of Penn Staters on his staff:
Kevin Smith, special teams coordinator and outside linebackers coach. He was a defensive GA at Penn State.
Mark Dupuis, wide receivers coach. He was an offensive GA at Penn State.
Kevin Reihner, offensive line coach. Reihner, whose father George played for Penn State and in the NFL, was a grad transfer who played O-lineman for the Nittany Lions after several seasons at Stanford. He also was a GA at Penn State.
Michael Shuster, a graduate assistant coaching quarterbacks. Shuster was a former backup QB at Penn State, where Rahne was his position coach.
Tristin Iannone, assistant director of operations, who was an operations assistant at Penn State.
Kirk Campbell, a former offensive analyst at Penn State, was Rahne’s offensive coordinator and QB coach for two years at ODU, but was fired after the 2021 season. Campbell is currently an offensive analyst for Michigan.
JOE MOORHEAD, AKRON
Moorhead, the former OC/QB coach who left after Penn State’s 2017 season to become head coach at Mississippi State in 2018-19. He is now back in a top job as head coach at Akron — where he was an assistant in 2004-08 — after two successful seasons as offensive coordinator at Oregon. Moorhead, who was also a head coach at Fordham, has a career record of 52-25 (.675). The Zips, who went 2-10 in the MAC in 2021, will be tested early in September: they have back-to-back road games at Michigan State and Tennessee.
Billy Fessler, the former Nittany Lion backup quarterback, is the only Penn Stater on Moorhead’s staff. Fessler is the Zips’ quarterback coach and co-passing game coordinator. Fessler was a grad assistant at Slippery Rock, then at Mississippi State for a season under Moorhead. In 2020-21, Fessler was an offensive GA at Ohio State, and was named to 247Sports’ Top 30 Coaches Under 30 list.
CHARLES HUFF, MARSHALL
Huff was 7-6 in his first season as head coach at Marshall in 2021, taking the Thundering Herd to the New Orleans Bowl against a Top 25 opponent in Louisiana. Four of Marshall’s losses were by a touchdown or less.
Huff, who coached at Maryland with Franklin, was at Penn State from 2014-17, coaching running backs and special teams. From there, he followed Moorhead to Mississippi State for a season, then coached at Alabama under Saban in 2019-20.
Huff doesn’t have any former Penn Staters on his Marshall staff, but he is married to one. His wife, Jessica Kern Huff, is a 2002 PSU grad who ran track and field at Penn State, and was a team captain and three-time All-Big Ten selection. She played pro basketball internationally and was the head women’s basketball coach at Tennessee State.
