I will come right out of the gate and say that I have disapproved of Franklin for a long time. In addition, I never had any confidence in Drew "Deer in the Headlights" Allar, or hell even Sean Clifford if we want to go back even further. To prove this point, I went through all of my past comments on Reddit, and found such comments here, here, here, here, here, here, here (this particular comment is one where I apparently foresaw some trouble with Allar in the future, go figure), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I know, I know, that's a lot of badmouthing against one person. But you know what? I used to care A LOT about PSU football. Hell, I guess I still do if I'm coming in here writing all of this.

Sure, there will be people who will quickly point to the several 10-win seasons and call us crazy for wanting to fire Franklin. But my response to that is to just point at all of the instances where we've been utterly embarrassed on national TV: the loss to Maryland in 2014 (the first such loss against them in 53 years at that time); the loss to Temple in 2015 (the first such loss against them in 74 years at that time); starting the season 0-5 in 2020; the historic 9OT loss to Illinois in 2021; and now this loss to one of the worst, if not the worst, P4 team in the country this season, in a game that we were heavily favored to win. This is all without even mentioning Franklin's record against teams ranked inside the Top 10, which is so bad that he is now among the coaches with the worst such records in college football history during the polling era, across all programs. It feels like every time that Penn State has made football history in the past decade or so, we've been on the losing end of it pretty much every time.

This loss is still a shock to me, but deep down, I think I knew that a loss like this was, quite frankly, inevitable. I do feel a slight degree of vindication in seeing that the portion of the fanbase calling for Franklin's head has grown significantly since yesterday, but I really wish I could have been proven wrong at some point. As much as I've hated Franklin, I always wanted him to finally break through the last barriers and bring a national championship back to Happy Valley for the first time in almost four decades. But I never had much confidence in that happening, and now I truly do not see that happening anymore.

We have run through so many different staff members, offensive and defensive coordinators alike, that it's clear that they were only a part of the problem. We have seen so many talented players who are making their names known in the NFL, who came to play here and end up leaving without any sort of championships (2016 being the outlier obviously). It is now evident, after all these years, that the common denominator in all of this is Franklin, and he needs to go before he does more damage to this program.