James Franklin vets NIL info with questionnaire, recruiting, friendships

INDIANAPOLIS – After Penn State football coach James Franklin hires a new staff member, he’ll provide the new hire with a wide-ranging questionnaire, which helps the Nittany Lions learn about other programs’ approaches to NIL strategy and deals.

“One of the best things I think we do is a new staff questionnaire when I hire people after they’ve been on campus for about a month,” Franklin said Wednesday at Big Ten Football Media Days. “I interview them about a ton of subjects. They have to fill out this paperwork. So, you’re able to gain information like that from people you hire from other programs, getting specific information.”

Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft said he learned about Franklin’s questionnaire at a retreat and he praised the practice.

“I think anytime you hire people you want to know, ‘Ok, well are they doing it differently? How are they handling this?'” Kraft told On3. “NIL’s a perfect example. Like what are they doing there? Is that good? Is it bad? Is it what we’re hearing? Because a lot of it is innuendo. Candidly, I think it’s brilliant.

“But we all do that when we get staff from different schools. ‘How did you handle this?’ James does a really good job of asking staff, ‘Hey, who are the staffs that you would really want to work with?’ Because when he hires someone he wants to make sure that they fit the culture and so he asks a lot of those questions, which I think is really good. But this is a new element that we’re trying to learn. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If someone’s figured it out, happily do that.”

Coaches source NIL info through friendships, recruiting

James Franklin cited the questionnaire as one of several ways he vets information about NIL deals in college football. Other ways include reading publicly available information and talking to players about their friends who play for other programs.

“You’re trying to benchmark as much as you can with things that have been said publicly,” Franklin said. “You’re using that. The other thing you’re using is when you’re talking to your current players and they have good friends at other programs. That’s a way to gain some information.”

Another tool, Franklin said, is to utilize relationships in the coaching community that Penn State coaches have with programs with whom the Nittany Lions don’t necessarily compete.

“You have some people that you may compete with,” Franklin said. “More times [than] not you find programs that you’re not really competing with that you have very significant relationships with on their staff and you can ask directly what exactly’s happening. And then obviously, you hear a lot in recruiting. Obviously, a lot of these things are verbal. But you can learn a lot from talking to a lot of different resources, whether it’s high school coaches or trainers or parents or prospects as well. You get a pretty good understanding of what is happening nationally.”

Franklin said some Penn State players received offers for NIL deals to enter the transfer portal to play for other programs.

“Some of our current players were offered opportunities,” Franklin said. “I say it because it’s happening all over college where our players after the season were contacted from other programs to transfer and were offered deals. So, there’s a lot of ways to get that information.”