James Franklin provides origin story on undercover Eli Manning trip to Penn State

With his playing days behind him, former Ole Miss great and two-time Super Bowl winning quarterback Eli Manning has gotten heavily into the broadcasting scene, offering some unique insight and analysis on football broadcasts via the ‘ManningCast’ as well as chipping in on various other ESPN productions.

On Monday, ESPN+ released some ‘teasers’ of a segment at Penn State featuring a walk-on attempt by an undercover Eli Manning, working under the alias ‘Chad Powers.’

Those teasers came as a surprise to Penn State coach James Franklin, even though he was in on the bit.

“When it comes to Chad Powers and Eli, we’ve got a pretty good relationship with the Manning family,” Franklin explained this week. “Obviously you could make the argument or not, it could be a statement, they’re like the first family of college football or football in general. The impact that that family has had has been significant and pretty cool.

“So for me when they reached out about doing this, obviously we wanted to be a part of it because I think Eli’s done a great job with all of this.”

Sure enough, as soon as ESPN began dropping the clips on social media through various channels they spread like wildfire on the Internet.

Undercover Eli Manning gave Penn State unique opportunity

Perhaps the best part of the segment Manning shot while at Penn State was not the hilarious quips or one-liners he dropped as he was going through workouts or his big reveal toward the end but instead the opportunity it provided the Nittany Lions to recognize a hard-working walk-on.

Franklin and his staff were thinking quick on their feet to involve Manning, who was only too happy to oblige.

So toward the end of fall camp as the team gathered around one day, Manning jumped in for a speech. Walk-on specialist Barney Amor was listening, unaware what was about to take place.

Manning finished his speech, letting Amor in on the fact that he’d earned a scholarship as the team celebrated around him.

“It was all so cool because we were able to couple it with, what you guys saw, we were able to couple it with Barney being able to get his scholarship,” Franklin explained.

Moments like that are one of the reasons Franklin agreed to let Manning film the segment at Penn State.

“Whenever you’re able to have somebody like that on campus, whether it’s a coach or a former player or somebody that can get up in front of the team and deliver a message, obviously he’s been able to win at the very, very highest level,” Franklin said. “So that was a good opportunity as well. It just made sense.”

Penn State wanted to ensure Eli wasn’t a distraction

One thing Franklin did look into carefully before agreeing to Eli’s pitch was whether it would take away from the normal flow of things at Penn State.

“At the end of the day for me I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to disturb our process of what we needed to do and not become a distraction,” Franklin explained. “Once I was comfortable with the fact that we were going to be able to do that and it not impact our normal routine or become a distraction then we were all about it.”

All in all a pretty cool moment for the Nittany Lions and a memory many will likely never forget.

But rest assured: Not all has been revealed just yet.

“There’s obviously a lot more content in the show that I hope people watch, because it was pretty cool and it was funny,” Franklin said.

So be sure to check out the full episode of ‘Eli’s Places‘ on ESPN+.