Where Does Penn State Rank in the Big Ten Coaching Hierarchy?

Few coaching jobs in college football carry the weight and visibility of Penn State’s. 

Following the decision to part ways with James Franklin after more than a decade at the helm, the Nittany Lions now find themselves at a crossroads. The next head coach won’t just inherit a storied program, they’ll step into one of the most scrutinized roles in the sport.

Penn State remains one of the marquee brands in the Big Ten, yet, in a rapidly changing college football landscape — one now defined by NIL and the transfer portal — the program’s place among the conference’s elite isn’t as clear-cut as it once was.

FOX Sports’ RJ Young and Michael Cohen weighed in on a simple but essential question: Just how good of a job is Penn State right now? How does it stack up against the conference’s best coaching positions in 2025 and beyond?

RJ Young: Athletic director Pat Kraft kept it a buck. He didn’t fire James Franklin just because he went 4-21 against top-10 opponents. Or because he made defensive coordinator Jim Knowles the highest-paid assistant in college football history. Or because he dug deep into the coffers to bring back 14 starters from a team whose biggest win last year was over Boise State.

Kraft didn’t pull the plug only because Franklin had lost seven straight combined to Ohio State and Michigan — or because he somehow managed to lose to 0–4 UCLA and an otherwise forgettable Northwestern.

He fired Franklin — and found near $50 million to do so — because it was clear the standard Kraft had set was not met and would not be with a team that fell from No. 2 in the preseason AP poll to unranked at 3-3 before Halloween.

“I wanted to sleep on it,” Kraft said, “but I knew that night it was the right course of action. This is really diving into where we were as a program. I’m here to win a national championship.”

Penn State has made the CFP as often as it has won the Big Ten title. It really doesn’t matter that Franklin finished 104-45 and put together six 10-win seasons when the Buckeyes and Wolverines are making multiple trips to the CFP and winning national titles.

When the neighbors have a bigger house, your family doesn’t care how good the school system is.

But Kraft wants to go big-game hunting and go get a man who can bring the program its first national title since the 1980s in the CFP era.

When you can get Saquon Barkley from nearby New Jersey, Abdul Carter from Philly, and Micah Parson from around the way, you can build something mean, nasty and elite. 

Micah Parsons #11 of the Penn State Nittany Lions reacts during the Goodyear Cotton Bowl. (Photo by Benjamin Solomon/Getty Images)

Let me remind you that the first great high school football movie – “All the Right Moves” – was set in Pennsylvania at the fictional town of Ampipe and based on a Pat Jordan piece about how important football is in a steel town. They got Tom Cruise to play the lead. You can recruit Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey and Michigan and put together a national title team at Penn State. 

Pay locally-raised talent like you pay players from California, Texas and Florida and their associated schools via the transfer portal and then tell me Penn State isn’t the second-best job in the Big Ten, even as it’s been operating like an independent in a conference it joined 30 years ago.

Too many folks think it’s just the money that talks. Not enough know it’s the money that shows intent, announces value to the team and is considered most in a tiebreak for highly-desired talent. Penn State has money. Pennsylvania has talent. If Cael Sanderson can build a monster on the mat, so could the next man who gets to coach Penn State.

Interim head coach Terry Smith of the Penn State Nittany Lions enters the stadium before the matchup against the Iowa Hawkeyes.  (Photo by Matthew Holst/Getty Images)

Michael Cohen: Penn State is among the most attractive coaching jobs in the country, let alone the Big Ten. And by the end of former head coach James Franklin’s tenure, which spanned 11-plus seasons dating to his arrival in 2014, a remarkably transformative period for both the football program and the sport at large, he had everything he needed, thanks to exceptional levels of support from the university, from donors and from athletic director Pat Kraft, who worked hard behind the scenes to ensure the Nittany Lions were all in on their pursuit of a national championship. 

That meant making significant improvements to Beaver Stadium, the practice facilities, the training table, the sports science department and the salary pool afforded to Franklin, who pushed that limit by hiring scores of off-field staffers and paying offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki, formerly of Kansas, an annual salary north of $1.5 million and defensive coordinator Jim Knowles, formerly of Ohio State, an annual salary north of $3 million, which made Knowles the highest-paid coordinator in the sport.

It’s a long way of saying that, from an infrastructure and institutional standpoint, the next coach at Penn State should have a finely tuned mechanism at his disposal, one that can certainly compete with the conference’s other elite programs — Ohio State, Oregon, Michigan and, lately, Indiana — as well as any other school in the country.

In terms of a recruiting base, Penn State also has better access to highly ranked recruits than people might realize, even if it’s not as fertile as places like Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and California. Twelve of the top 400 players in the country for the 2026 recruiting class hail from Pennsylvania, according to the 247Sports Composite, with six of them already committed to Penn State. That’s something interim coach Terry Smith and the rest of Franklin’s former staff will work diligently to protect. And it’s not a fluke. Consider the depth of talent in Pennsylvania over the last handful of classes: 

2026: 12 prospects in the top 400, including 6 in the top 200

2025: 12 prospects in the top 400, including 4 in the top 200

2024: 6 prospects in the top 400, including 3 in the top 200

2023: 7 prospects in the top 400, including 2 in the top 200

2022: 12 prospects in the top 400, including 5 in the top 200

2021: 11 prospects in the top 400, including 8 in the top 200

That’s a strong local talent base from which to form the nucleus of each recruiting class, not to mention the school’s convenient proximity to border states Ohio and New Jersey, both well-regarded producers of blue-chip prospects. Even the Detroit suburbs, which sent standout defensive backs Kalen King and Jaylen Reed to Penn State in the last few years, both of whom would later earn All-Big Ten honors, are only six hours away by car. There’s no shortage of high-level recruits nearby.

Just about the only area where Penn State falls short, and recent history at places like Indiana, Texas Tech and Miami, among others, has shown how quickly this can be overcome, is the overall depth of talent on the current roster — or whatever is left of it by the time the new coach arrives and the transfer portal window closes. With so many potential draft picks choosing to return to school for the 2025 season — a list that includes quarterback Drew Allar, tailback Nicholas Singleton, edge rusher Dani Dennis-Sutton, tailback Kaytron Allen and defensive tackle Zane Durant — the Nittany Lions’ draft class next spring is expected to be quite large. 

Penn State center Nick Dawkins (53) congratulates Penn State running back Kaytron Allen (13) after his third period touchdown. (Photo by Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

The same pattern unfolded at Big Ten rivals Michigan and Ohio State when those programs leaned heavily on roster retention en route to winning national championships in 2023 and 2024, respectively. The Wolverines had 13 players drafted from their title-winning team, while the Buckeyes tied a school record with 14 draft picks earlier this year. Similar levels of attrition could happen at Penn State, where the new coach will need an immediate influx of talent. 

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports. Follow him @RJ_Young.

Michael Cohen covers college football and college basketball for FOX Sports. Follow him @Michael_Cohen13.

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