He may be one of the top coaches in college football right now, but for the first six seasons of James Franklin's career, he spent just one season at each of his respective stops.
A former quarterback at East Stroudsburg (D-II - PA), Franklin coached defensive backs at his alma mater two years after graduating, and also had one-year stops on the offensive side of the ball at Kutztown (D-II - PA), James Madison, Washington State, and Idaho State as well as a stop overseas with the Roskilde Kings in Denmark.
He spent five seasons coaching the receivers at Maryland, a year in the NFL with the Green Bay Packers, and then spent a few seasons each as the offensive coordinator at Kansas State and Maryland before landing his first head coaching opportunity at Vanderbilt.
Rebuilding the Commodores, Franklin did an incredible job that has been well-documented. Before his arrival, Vanderbilt had won 9 games in a season just twice before (1904 and 1915), and he was able to put together back-to-back nine win campaigns in his second and third seasons in Nashville.
Since taking over at Penn State in 2014, Franklin is 78-36 in Happy Valley, with one Big Ten Title (2016) and is coming off an 11-2 season and Rose Bowl appearance.
As someone well traveled in the profession, who has also turned around å struggling program quickly, and is now someplace most would consider one of college football's most elite programs historically, Franklin was asked on Head Coach U with former BYU and Virginia head coach Bronco Mendenhall and Bryan Fischer what his advice would be for coaches considering other opportunities and how he weighed who he was working for (AD, head coaches, or presidents) carried.
"I think the reason why we work so hard, so that hopefully you can be in a position where you somewhat control your own fate and destiny where you can choose who you work with."
Franklin, who gave one of my all-time favorite graduation ceremony speeches a few years back where he encouraged graduates to "stay broke and chase your dreams," goes on to share a longwinded answer about his unique experience at Vanderbilt (a job he said no one else wanted when he took it) and Penn State, where there were plenty of leadership changes and challenges not knowing exactly who his boss would be before sharing a six-word phrase that I believe is super important.
"You work hard as an assistant coach, so that hopefully you have options where you can say, 'Hey, I want to go work for Bronco Mendenhall because he's a great coach and a better person, and that is going to be a great environment for me to grow and for me to raise my family."
"Or you're a head coach and you want to go work for this AD at this institution that has enough resources where - here's the big one for me - does the commitment match the expectations?"
"At very few schools, is that the case, where the commitment level actually matches the expectations. So being able to go to a place that has that type of support and those types of resources, is really why you work so hard and why coaches, a lot of times, leave and move on. Fans get mad and the media rips you, and they don't know why."
"But most coaches I know don't want to leave. They leave because they don't feel like they're getting the internal support that they need to reach their highest goals."
Hear more from Franklin on NIL and a variety of other topics in the clip, and listen to HCU podcasts wherever you listen to your favorite pods.