Ricky Rahne isn’t shy about what James Franklin meant to Penn State, even with Old Dominion set to face Franklin’s Virginia Tech team in Blacksburg this weekend.
Rahne, who spent nearly two decades alongside Franklin dating back to their days on the offensive staff at Kansas State, said Monday that Penn State fans didn’t fully appreciate what Franklin delivered in State College.
“Certainly at the last program it was. I think his impact on that program is undervalued,” Rahne told reporters.
That defense came with context from someone who knows Franklin well. Rahne worked with him at Vanderbilt as offensive coordinator and then spent six years with him at Penn State before leaving after the 2019 season to become head coach at Old Dominion. He said the conditions Franklin inherited and the conditions before him mattered a lot more than many people realized.
“I respect Coach O’Brien. The guy before Franklin did a great job because he was able to get through the sanctions and is a really good football coach. That said, the sanctions when we first got there were affecting us more than they affected him,” Rahne, who led Penn State to the Big Ten title in 2016, Fiesta Bowl in 2017 and had two quarterbacks drafted, said.
“They got to keep all their seniors, but we didn’t have very many left because they just couldn’t recruit very many. It’s not that they did a bad job recruiting - in fact they did an excellent job recruiting.
If you look at that 2016 team, a lot of his recruits were a huge part of our foundation. He [O’Brien] needs to get a lot of credit there.”
Rahne also pushed back on the idea that Penn State’s expectations were rooted in a more recent championship standard. He pointed out how long it had been since the program last won it all, even if the school and its fans count the 1994 team as a national champion.
“I was six years old the last time Penn State won a national championship,” Rahne said. “So I think people’s expectations and what was going on there was not quite equal to what’s really been transpiring.
He called the offense and the statistics from that 1994 team ‘mind blowing’ and ‘the best team’ college football.
“Still that’s 1994. I was 14. For me to be an old man now and those things happened before I could drive a car, they probably don’t speak to what coach Franklin was able to do,” Rahne said.
For Rahne, the biggest point is that Franklin’s ceiling at Penn State wasn’t limited by effort or ambition. It was about how hard it is to keep stacking wins at that level year after year.
“Ten or 11 wins every year is really hard. It’s very difficult.
Did he want to win a national championship there? More than people can even know.
It consumed him. It didn’t happen but that doesn’t mean he’s not a great football coach.”
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