James Franklin was expected to compete for a national title with Penn State this year, but his season quickly turned sour and after an overtime loss to Oregon snowballed into back-to-back massive upsets at the hands of UCLA and Northwestern, he was dismissed.
The firing was one of the first seismic moves of what promises to be the wildest coaching carousel in modern history, and as a result, Franklin is a prime candidate to immediately land another prominent head coaching job, even after how his 2025 turned out. The program that has been most closely connected to Franklin early on in the hiring season: Virginia Tech, which fired Brent Pry (a longtime Franklin assistant in Happy Valley) after an 0–3 start to the season.
