For James Franklin, his obsession over Penn State’s preparation truly has been key to victory
The energy and attention to detail the 52-year-old coach has exhibited daily for the Nittany Lions have not wavered. Now, becoming the first Black coach in a national title game could be his reward.
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — James Franklin received a text from a former coaching buddy three days after Penn State’s Fiesta Bowl win over Boise State. The contents of the text were an offensive game plan from the 1991 Penn State-Notre Dame game, which ended in a 35-13 Nittany Lions victory.
The person who sent the text was Ray Rychleski, who was a graduate assistant offensive line coach under former Penn State coach Joe Paterno. At tight end for the Nittany Lions was Al Golden, the former Temple coach who now leads Notre Dame’s defense into a Thursday night matchup against his alma mater at the Orange Bowl in a College Football Playoff semifinal (7:30 p.m., ESPN).
“For whatever reason, I saved the game plan from that year, and I just texted [Franklin] the pictures of that game plan, front and back, and he texted me back. He goes, ‘Where do you get all this stuff?’” Rychleski, now 67, said during a telephone interview.
Franklin and Rychleski coached together at Maryland from 2000 to 2004. Franklin coached wide receivers, and Rychleski led the tight ends and special teams. But their familiarity with each other dates back to when Franklin was a sophomore backup quarterback at East Stroudsburg in 1992. Rychleski was the Division II program’s defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach.
A lot has changed since those six years that Franklin and Rychleski spent together between East Stroudsburg and Maryland. But the energy and attention to detail the 52-year-old Franklin has exhibited on a day-to-day basis with Penn State for the last 11 seasons has not.
“James is the same guy he was when I met him when I worked with him at Maryland in 2001, and now it’s 24 years later,” Rychleski said. “He wants to continue to learn, and that’s why I think he appreciates texts from me or whoever he talks to. He wants to always make his program better.
“His story is not told yet.”
‘He is homegrown’
Franklin takes great pride in his Pennsylvania and Division II roots. Last week before the Fiesta Bowl game, the Langhorne native and Neshaminy graduate reminisced on his first coaching job in 1995 at Kutztown, how he’d refill the soda machine on campus while his players made fun of him. But those early years, more than anything, taught Franklin the value of humility as a football coach.
“When you’re a Division II coach and a Division II player, a lot of the things that maybe our team takes for granted, or the staff takes for granted, we don’t,” Franklin said. “When you’re a Division II guy, you have to do it all. I think there’s a lot of value in that. … You had to work your way up the ladder.”
Before entering the coaching ranks, Franklin spent four seasons playing quarterback for East Stroudsburg’s longtime coach, Denny Douds, and set several school records as “the best dual [threat] quarterback that ever played in the [Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference],” according to Douds.
Two years after his final season with the Warriors, that humility showed up again when Franklin returned to his alma mater as a graduate assistant coaching defensive backs. Before Franklin joined the staff, Douds said the young coach was unsure of what he wanted to do next. Douds allowed his former player to stay at his house for a few months until he could find a place of his own.
“We used to get up, go to work in the morning, work out, come home, and we’d sit out on the back deck eating [Klondike bars], talking about world situations and football,” Douds said. “He busted his backside to maximize the opportunity for him. He’s a great communicator. He loves the game, and he looks upon his players as being able to help them get from wherever they are.”
Added Rychleski: “To have a guy from Pennsylvania, born and raised, played high school football in Pennsylvania, played college football in Pennsylvania, and now lead Penn State University is special. I’m hoping he can win it all, to be honest with you. … I do know James, and we do have a very good relationship. I’m happy for him, and I think they got the perfect guy at that university. I think he has a great deal of pride that he is homegrown, for lack of better words.”
‘Exceeding at a high level’
Before his more than a decade at Penn State, Franklin’s longest coaching tenure was at Maryland, where he spent eight years in two stints. After briefly working in the NFL in 2005 as the Green Bay Packers’ wide receivers coach and spending the 2006-07 seasons as Kansas State’s offensive coordinator, Franklin returned as Maryland’s assistant head coach and offensive coordinator under then-head coach Ralph Friedgen.
During his second stint, he worked with Lee Hull and Jemal Griffin. The latter became a big part of Franklin’s staff at Vanderbilt and Penn State. Hull met Franklin at a minority coaches conference, he says, while coaching wide receivers at Oregon State. Franklin was Kansas State’s offense coordinator under Ron Prince. Hull says he saw a “star in the making” even back then, and a year later, Hull was coaching receivers on Franklin’s offensive staff.
Hull, 59, a former Canadian Football League wide receiver with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Toronto Argonauts, coached several NFL receivers with Maryland, including first-round pick Darrius Heyward-Bey and second-rounder Torrey Smith. But when Hull left Maryland in 2014 for the head coaching position at Morgan State, he took lessons from Franklin.
“James was a stickler for when we did the playbook, for example. Every line, everything, had to be perfect,” Hull said. “We would call it a red line. We would do our part with the playbook, and we would give it to him, and he would sift through every page of the playbook, and he would just go in red line and say, ‘Hey, do this’ or ‘Do that,’ because his biggest thing was, and it’s something that I took with me as a head coach at Morgan State, was that if we’re going to ask the players to be detailed, we have to be detailed. You can’t misspell a word, and when you’re doing the pass drawings, they have to be precise.
“Everything has to be exactly how you want. Because a lot of players are visual learners, so they’re looking exactly [at what] you’re doing.”
Griffin joined Maryland as the assistant recruiting coordinator in 2006 and was promoted to director of football operations in 2008, the year Franklin returned to the Terrapins. But Griffin met Franklin seven years earlier when he was the football and baseball coach and a math teacher at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore. Franklin frequented the school during recruiting trips.
Griffin spent 12 years working with Franklin from their time at Maryland to his role as chief of staff at Vanderbilt and Penn State. He, too, says Franklin is detail-oriented beyond X’s and O’s on the field. Griffin added that the administrative structure he and Franklin created at Vanderbilt is something “that they still use to this day.”
“The way we run everything had to be first class, and that applied to every part of the program,” Griffin said. “He required a lot in terms of details when he had a project for you ... but it made everyone in the building sharper. And then what we found is when we went to other places, we were so used to being so detailed for him, that when we would give [other] people stuff, our superiors, our colleagues, it was always, ‘Wow. This is a lot. This is great. This is more than what I needed.’ He trained everyone to be that way.
“You understood the expectation and how high it was, and then you just did [the work]. It became part of the culture. Exceeding at a high level became part of the culture.”
Embracing the moment
Franklin publicly admitted he wanted to be the first Black coach to win a college football championship in Division I in 2019 during HBO’s 24/7 College Football series on Penn State. But behind the scenes, Franklin also has been adamant about providing opportunities for minority coaches. Hull, who had spent most of his career as a receivers coach until he got head coaching jobs with Morgan State and Delaware State, got advice from Franklin at Maryland that helped shift his mindset in the coaching profession.
“Being a minority coach, his biggest deal to me was, ‘Don’t just get pigeonholed as a receiver coach and just knowing the pass game. When they’re doing the run game, and they’re doing protections, make sure that you’re paying attention,’” Hull said. “‘Because, you know, obviously, one day you want to be a coordinator, a head coach, so you’re going to have to know the whole game plan.’ That was good advice to me. … James has always been like that with minority coaches, wanting to help them advance and not just get pigeonholed as just one type of coach. For us, we have to work twice as hard. We’ve got to do extra just to show what our worth is and that we know football.”
Though Franklin and Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman shared similar sentiments about the moment being special, neither is focused on what impact their matchup could mean for Black coaches elsewhere, but rather on Thursday night’s game. However, the opportunity is massive.
Hull and Griffin recognize the history that will come for the winner of Penn State-Notre Dame advancing to the national title game, which happens to fall on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year and will be hosted in the predominantly Black city of Atlanta on Jan. 20 (7:30 p.m., ESPN).
“To have the opportunity to be the first of anything is always a good thing and should be looked at favorably,” Griffin said. “I hope and pray for a time where every time a minority or person of color does something, it’s not the first time. I hope that there’s a progression of like you see, for example, with Black quarterbacks in the NFL. … We still don’t have enough Black coaches in major college football, and that’s not asking for anything. I think there are a lot of Black coaches that deserve those opportunities.
“[Franklin and Freeman] have earned it. Nothing has been given to either one of them.”
In a similar vein, Hull added: “I know both of them were saying that that’s not the important thing, being the first Black coach to win a national championship, [that it’s more] ‘I’m a coach that won the national championship,’” Hull said. “But we have to look at it as, as Black coaches, that it is important, and it will be history when one of the two becomes the first Black coach to win a national championship, because it just puts a spotlight on us, like ‘Hey, we can do this. We can go to Penn State. We can go to the Notre Dames of the world. And we can win and be successful.’”