Coach deep dive - James Franklin - part 1
Record vs OOC and Conference teams
A lot has been said about James Franklin over the past six months as he was forced out at Penn State and then hired at Virginia Tech. What has been interesting is how some people started to question his record and doubt his ability. But the stats often shared only showed part of the story. So how good is he really?
Note #1: My data only goes back to the 2015 season so I won’t be able to include his first season at Penn State. And obviously I won’t have his three years at Vanderbilt. But what I do have is the ability to directly compare him against all other FBS coaches during the years 2015-2025.
Note #2: My data purposefully only includes FBS vs FBS games. So any games against FCS schools are not shown in any of my charts.
Let’s start with the regular season big picture. Conference games and OOC games.
During those 11 seasons he was 87-32 overall. This included 62-30 in the Big Ten and a very impressive 25-2 in OOC games. Looking more closely at the OOC games, we can see that PSU beat teams from the SEC, ACC, and B12 along with consistent winning against the G5.
But it’s the conference games that people talk about the most. So let’s see the data from a few different angles. First we can do a comparison of quality. This is basically looking to see if PSU was a 10+ win team, how did they do against other 10+ win teams in the regular season.
Edited: These charts with win totals were impacted by the abnormal 2020 season when many teams did not play a full schedule. I have removed the 2020 data and now show it separately below.
We can clearly see the two rough spots. He had 11 losses when playing as a mid-level team vs a better top-level team (based on final records). And he had 10 losses when playing as a top-level team against another top-level team. But adding location shows us that 14 of those losses were on the road against top-level teams.
And here is the 2020 season by itself for reference. Separating this out since the BIG schools all played partial schedules.
So we have established that of his 30 conference losses, 21 of them were against top-level opponents who finished the year with 10+ wins (that is 70% of his conference losses). We have also established that 14 of those losses were on the road against the top-level opponents.
Now it’s important to put in perspective who Penn State was competing against. The most recent three years of financial data show how PSU compared in overall athletic department spending against the rest of the BIG. You can clearly see the two teams above them, Michigan and Ohio State.
With that perspective in mind, let’s see how James Franklin did against each of the other BIG schools.
And now we can see that 15 of his 30 conference losses (50%) were against the two schools with significantly more resources. Against everyone else in the conference over the 11 years of my data, James Franklin was 58-15. That’s a 79% winning percentage.
Note: it is also worth mentioning that three of those Michigan losses were in 2021-2023, which is when they were stealing signs from opponents.
Bottom line, James Franklin can win. He has won…a lot. Can he win against programs with far more resources? His past records against OSU and Michigan suggest that might be a challenge. But OSU and Michigan are also among the top 5 highest spending schools in all of FBS. So anyone is going to struggle against that type of competition.
Based on past results, Virginia Tech got a steal and James Franklin will very quickly make his mark on the ACC.
Part 2 of the James Franklin deep dive looks at his teams scoring on offense and defense.