College football’s transactional ruthlessness is inescapable. The billions that networks pay for rights fees, the riches that schools lavish on coaches, administrators and, now, athletes, not to mention the incessant legal and political warfare, remind us daily that money is paramount.
Winning fuels the money train, and absent fuel, the train slows. And if the train slows, or heaven forbid derails, folks get fired.
Indeed, as the 2025 season hits halftime, six power-conference schools have already dismissed their head coaches. Penn State’s James Franklin on Sunday became the most prominent casualty, a jarring divorce that especially resonated at Old Dominion.
Understand that ODU coach Ricky Rahne last month saw a close friend, Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry, lose his job less than 24 hours after Rahne’s Monarchs routed the Hokies in Blacksburg. But everyone, Pry and Rahne included, understood Pry’s hot-seat plight entering the season, and Tech’s 0-3 start made change inevitable.
ODU turns in sizzling first half to dominate Virginia Tech, send Hokies to 0-3
Conversely, Franklin’s demise was unfathomable.
For nine years, Rahne and Pry worked together under Franklin, three at Vanderbilt and six at Penn State. They were wildly successful at each stop.
Franklin remains the only coach to steer the Commodores to three consecutive bowls and back-to-back seasons of at least nine wins. In 11-plus years with the Nittany Lions, he fashioned a 104-45 record highlighted by a Big Ten championship and last season’s College Football Playoff semifinal appearance.
Penn State began 2025 with reasonable national-title aspirations, and an overtime loss to Oregon that dropped the Nittany Lions to 4-21 versus top-10 opponents on Franklin’s watch did not extinguish those hopes. But then Penn State became the first team in history to lose consecutive games, to UCLA and Northwestern, when favored by at least 20 points, falling to 3-3 overall, 0-3 in the Big Ten.
With the season torched and a $700 million stadium renovation in progress, Penn State swallowed a buyout of nearly $50 million to part ways.
“Am I surprised they would let a man go who has won double-digit games six times out of the last nine years? Yep, sure am,” Rahne said Monday. “I know what type of man he is. I know the type of care that he has about the people in his program and that university.
“And I also know that the loud minority is exactly that. They are a minority and there is an awful lot, hundreds of thousands of Penn State fans, that hold James Franklin in incredible esteem and are very happy with what he did to return their beloved university to glory. I think there are a lot of people hurt, maybe, by how fast this went down because that place has always been about loyalty.”
Rahne and I conversed on the Sun Belt Conference’s weekly coaches Zoom, where he was followed by Southern Mississippi’s Charles Huff, a former Hampton University player and assistant coach who also worked for Franklin at Penn State.
“Disturbed by the news,” Huff called Franklin a “phenomenal” mentor to this day.
“I don’t know the details,” Huff said. “… I do know we’re in a business, and you gotta perform, and I’m not saying he did or didn’t. I’m just saying I have a conversation with our staff every day. We have to go out every day and put a good product on the field. My (athletic director), my board, the people that are above me and I work for, have an expectation. So, I have to make sure I do a job and meet and exceed that expectation.
“With that news coming out … I kind of tightened my bootstraps and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to figure out how to be the best that we can be this week.’”
Penn State, Virginia Tech, UCLA, Arkansas, Oklahoma State and Stanford soon will have company from other Power Four programs searching for a coach. Marquee jobs such as Florida, Wisconsin and Auburn could open, and the ensuing ripples will impact lesser-resourced conferences such as the Sun Belt, American and Mountain West.
“Maybe college football’s changed a little bit,” Rahne said.
There’s no “maybe,” and the changes have been seismic, from athlete compensation and transfer freedom to the playoff field, from conference realignment to network influence.
“The more our business changes,” Huff said, “the more eye-opening things are going to happen. … You can’t allow the business to change you. But you have to change with the business and still keep your core values.”
Rahne vowed that he, Huff and their Sun Belt colleagues will turn aside such matters and continue to focus on developing quality football players and young men.
That admirable aim becomes more challenging with each turbulent day.
David Teel, david.teel@virginiamedia.com
