Pre-season prediction as National Champion; six games in; National Chumpion. From ranked to just plain rank! Fifth year $3 million Senior QB fell flat in his lack of performance. The $2 million Offensive Coordinator; offensive, and worse than that the newly acquired Defensive Coordinator being paid 3.1 million dollars; absolutely indefensible. Whom you might ask? None other than the overhyped and tarnished Penn State Football team and coaching staff!

Then we have the absolute ineptitude of a man who is being paid the grand sum of $8.5 million with a record of 15-28 against ranked teams, and 4-21 against top ten teams, earning him the nickname “Big Game James”, and rightfully so. Yes, he has mostly beaten the teams that he was expected to beat, but along came 0-4 unranked, weak defense UCLA, a team with an interim Coach and Offensive Coordinator, both of whom took Mr. Franklin to the woodshed for a spanking. This is not to say that these interim coaching individuals were ignorant to the game of football, but the experience level vs experience level of the then number 7 team should have resulted in a thrashing of the home team without question. Instead, what happened was the questionable calls by the highly paid and supposedly talented coaching staff were so ridiculously incorrect and easily recognized by the UCLA defense. The offense was lackadaisical and looked like they had no idea where they were or what they were doing. All of this for $13.6 million is absolutely disgusting and the whole lot should pack up and resign without hesitation. Again, for the second week in a row, in the waning minutes of the game, an unsuccessful comeback was attempted with poor play selection the major cause of failure. Fourth down and two and the vaunted super senior Quarterback couldn’t be trusted to complete a short pass to pick up the yards needed. Didn’t Mr. Franklin just obtain, via the portal, two of the better receivers in football who were supposed to be the “cure” for last year’s failure?

James Franklin will never fill the shoes of Joe Paterno and Penn State administration finally got off their rear end and did what they should have done last year after the Notre Dame debacle. Franklin is a great orator who would do great in a political arena, would excel as an automobile salesman with his “gift of gab”, but had hit his coaching ceiling years ago. PSU will most likely lose the next 3 games and could possibly end the season with a 3 and 9 record and that will be the legacy of the Franklin era at PSU. I wish the interim coach good luck and hopefully he will be able to steer the program in the direction of success despite the mess that Franklin left.

To paraphrase President Reagan who once said; Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” could now be stated as “Mr. Franklin, pack up your bags”!

MEL BENJAMIN

Watsontown

Submitted by Virtual Newsroom