42 wins in four years, a Big 10 championship and NY6 bowls….there’s your defense of his coaching performance. And he has a lot of players leave early. And this isn’t a PlayStation game where he controls the players with a joystick…the players have quite a bit to do with the losses. And the NFL has a lot of guys he recruited and developed. Who’s the magical coach out there that’s going to turn PSU into a perennial CFP team?
Fans do have to take his 42 wins in 4 years into account.
They also cannot ignore that he's 11-11 in his past 2 years.
You can't just pick one data set and discard others. On either side of the debate.
The question is, can Franklin get back to where we were in 2016-19?
He hasn't beaten a top-10 team since 2016. 9 straight losses and counting. That's simply not a feature of an elite-level coach. Now......if his only 9 losses were to top-10 teams, that's different. But it's clearly not.
Hell, Les Miles won 44 games in a 4-season stretch. And then fell off. John Cooper won 43 games in 4 seasons before then going 6-6 and 8-4 and getting fired. Mack Brown won 45 games in 4 seasons before then losing 7, 5, 4, and 5 games and getting fired.
We'll see if Franklin turns it around, but he'd hardly be the first guy to have a great 4-year run and then implode. There's valid reason to be concerned about exactly that.