James Franklin reveals how he's achieved success at Penn State

It wasn’t always pretty, but James Franklin has Penn State in a position that most college football fanbases would die for.

The Nittany Lions are ready to compete for the College Football Playoff, but Franklin joined Adam Breneman’s Next Up show to elaborate on some things before the season. One of the topics was a reflection on how Franklin’s built Penn State into a contender, amid all the challenges he’s faced.

“Well I think that goes back to kind of an earlier question about kind of, some of the challenges early on,” started Franklin. “What typically, young people feel like there’s only one way to be successful. This is what we know. So they’re resistant to change. On top of that, for me, I took a job at Vanderbilt. One winning season in 30 years before I had gotten there. Had gone 2-10 I think the two previous years, before we showed up on campus. I was juts naive enough to take that job, and confident enough. And then we were able to have success there. So I knew that if we could go to a place like Vanderbilt, and have success at a place that had never really had it before, in the SEC. Obviously very well-respected conference. That we had to do it there with less.

“So if we could do it there with less, now let’s come to Penn State and do more with more. But the success that we had there really gave me confidence in our model, and how we do it. It really did.”

Still, Franklin couldn’t just do the same thing over again from Vanderbilt and apply it to the Nittany Lions, the Penn State leader had to get deep in the weeds to find success.

“So coming to Penn State it was, ‘Okay, we need to figure out the institutional knowledge. We’ve got to figure out the community knowledge as quickly as we possibly can,’ but the model of how we do football? That I was confident in,” added Franklin. “If it’s major college football or the NFL or a business that you’re running, you better have conviction in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, or the guys will never buy in. And that’s something that I’ve always had, is great conviction in what we do and how we do it.”

That conviction has paid off for James Franklin and Penn State thus far, and there isn’t any reason to think it won’t continue to into the future.