It’s your expectation. It’s my expectation. It’s James Franklin’s expectation. It’s Jim Knowles’s expectation. It’s Pat Kraft’s expectation. It’s your grandma’s expectation.
Penn State just set its new expectation with everyone for the 2025 season by hiring Knowles, the Ohio State defensive coordinator. The defensive coordinator that just won a national championship. The national champion defensive coordinator that’s made you pull out your hair the last three times Penn State has played the Buckeyes. The guy who has made you pull out your hair so much that your program’s head coach spent much of the last few years chasing after him, trying to hire him.
Of course Penn State is all-in after it. That doesn’t take a bachelor’s in sports management to figure out.
But what’s more fascinating about the Knowles hire is that it shows just how much power the head coach finally has.
For the zero ifs, ands or buts about Penn State being all in on 2025, there are now zero ifs ands or buts on being all in on James Franklin and he’s getting what he wants.
The reported $3.1 million per year that Knowles will be making once he comes to Happy Valley is more than 65 FBS head coaches, according to On3’s salary database. That list includes teams like SMU and Boise State – the teams Penn State just beat in the College Football Playoff. It doesn’t just make Knowles the highest paid assistant in the country but also makes him one of the highest paid people in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
And that doesn’t happen when there’s not the collective “buy-in” that we’ve all been hammered into our head by Franklin over the last 11 seasons.
Earlier this year, there was emphasized rhetoric from the coach about how things around Penn State felt different and that he was finally getting the buy-in it takes to compete at the highest levels of college football. He showered compliments to those who cut his check, mainly Neeli Bendapudi, Kraft and the Board of Trustees. There were columns written about it. There were debates on message boards about it. It was posited as a new start for Franklin.
And it irked some of those that follow Penn State football.
“He’s been asking for facility upgrades and getting them.”
“He’s been asking for a training table and getting them.”
Well now he went out and asked for a national champion defensive coordinator and got it.
The buy-in is very real and it’s very different than before because – quite literally around college football – we have never seen someone get so much money for being an assistant coach. Simply, Franklin is getting what he’s asking for but it’s also hard to see what more Franklin needs.
So that’s why the expectations, rightly so, have shifted since Sunday afternoon when the Knowles hire went from rumor to confirmed. There are no more excuses. Penn State has the facilities. Penn State has the players. Penn State has the assistant coaches. Penn State has the coach it needs to go all-in.
The hire of Knowles is a definitive line that Penn State just stepped over that can’t be undone.
It doesn’t do those things if the leadership doesn’t think that Franklin is the one that can get Penn State to the promised land – or two more wins from where it ended 2024. That’s also why he made such a big deal about it. Change had already been put into motion.
For some, that’s an uncomfortable idea because there’s a vocal sect of Nittany Lion fans always looking for green grass.
For those buying or “locking” in, this is proof that things won’t be changing in terms of the leadership of the football department anytime soon either. And while that may have really started during Franklin’s last new contract, there’s investment not just in the program but investment in the leader of the program.
The $3.1 million dollar paycheck to his assistant is proof.
It is, however, a double-edged sword.
It’s hard to hide from any of those excuses moving forward – the excuses being things that have held Penn State back. In some of that rhetoric from Franklin, there’s been a woe-is-me attitude that Penn State is a have not in a college football world of haves. It’s always been a very (emphasis on “very”) well-funded operation but maybe not the well-funded operation that the vision of Franklin sees when he looks to Columbus, Ann Arbor, Tuscaloosa or Athens.
Franklin’s been a good enough coach to get the program within sniffing distance of those teams. He’s now getting the buy-in to become one of those teams, and the hiring of Knowles should help him get there.
Knowles’s defense put teams into fits, made Tennessee look silly, shut down Oregon in the Rose Bowl, won the game against Texas in the Cotton Bowl and never truly let Notre Dame enter the game in the national title.
But in the decision to make the hire – and further make him the highest paid coordinator in the country – this is a tone shift for Penn State.
Penn State is no longer anything resembling a have not. It’s a have program.
So yes. Go ahead and adjust your expectations because the leadership is also making it clear.
The expectations have shifted and so has the standing.
Penn State wants and needs to be where Knowles was about a week ago.
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