James Franklin felt the hunger the moment he set foot in Blacksburg. Virginia Tech once mingled with college football’s elite, but the Hokies have been starved for success for years.

Franklin is hungry, too. He yearns to prove the last six games of his career don’t define it. He also wants to make changes to ensure he never has another period like the one that cost him his job at Penn State. 

“I’ve got a huge chip on my shoulder,” he says.

Franklin’s Nittany Lions had the ball with 33 seconds remaining in a tied College Football Playoff semifinal on Jan. 10, 2025. Following months of sky-high offseason expectations and half a season of dismal results, he was fired Oct. 12. Franklin had notched double-digit wins in six of eight non-pandemic seasons. He had come seconds away from the national title game. But the Penn State leaders decided they were willing to pay a $49 million buyout over five years to press the reset button.

Penn State won’t have to pay nearly that much for two reasons:

  • The market for Franklin’s services was robust. Multiple schools wanted him, which meant he would earn enough over the next few years to offset most of the buyout.
  • Franklin wanted to get back to work as soon as possible to start proving Penn State wrong. So he took a lump sum of $9 million so everyone could move on with their lives.

That figure is actually $2 million more than the entire NIL budget for the 2024 Penn State team that reached the CFP semifinals. In a season in which the teams that played for the title — and several that didn’t — eclipsed $20 million in roster spend, a roster that included future first-rounders Abdul Carter and Tyler Warren was balling on a budget.

The next year, the money came. The 2025 Penn State roster budget was more in line with the other teams at the top of the sport. Naturally, the expectations increased. But the roster probably still wouldn’t match the programs that had been spending at the top since NIL started in 2021. And here’s where Franklin identifies a mistake he made.

The coach who tweeted 1-0 every Monday during every season suddenly allowed internal and external conversations about the end of the road, rather than focusing only on the next opponent. A program that had succeeded mightily as a process-oriented outfit started thinking hard about the results.

“We made some philosophical tweaks and changes to be more aggressive and maybe more aware of these types of things,” Franklin says. “We allowed the players to have conversations and allowed the staff to have conversations that we typically hadn’t had in the past.”

So they talked about their ranking. They talked about the expectations. They thought about the playoff before a game was ever played. This may not sound like a big deal to someone who has never been around an elite college football program, but it was a serious philosophical shift. For as long as Nick Saban was at Alabama, he drilled into his players’ heads that the only thing that mattered was their next task of the day. They weren’t even supposed to consider the outcome of the next game, much less the entire season. 

How does a double-overtime loss to Oregon become a loss to UCLA and a loss to Northwestern? When you’re worried about how losing to Oregon affects your national title hopes and not worried about going 1-0 against UCLA.

Franklin does not intend to allow that to happen again. The philosophy that worked for him at Vanderbilt and worked for him in the first 11 seasons at Penn State will be the philosophy he carries into Virginia Tech. Yes, the fans want ACC titles. They want to compete for CFP berths. In Franklin’s program, going 1-0 each week will be the only objective.

Franklin also intends to be more involved in the offense. His involvement changed after longtime assistant Ricky Rahne left following the 2019 season to become Old Dominion’s head coach. First came Kirk Ciarrocca from Minnesota. When that didn’t work during the pandemic season, Franklin hired Mike Yurcich, who had worked at Ohio State and Texas following a great run at Oklahoma State. After Franklin fired Yurich in 2023, he hired Andy Kotelnicki from Kansas. 

“You go out and you hire some big-name offensive coordinators, and you want to allow them to do their jobs,” Franklin said. “There’s a fine line with that.”

We’d have to ask those coordinators whether they felt they had fully free reign, but it’s clear Franklin feels more comfortable when he has a heavier hand in the offense. Ty Howle has been with Franklin since 2020. Howle started as an analyst and worked his way up to tight ends coach and co-offensive coordinator. Franklin made sure Howle understood that if Howle came to Blacksburg as the OC, Franklin would be deeply involved in the offense.

Franklin can do this in part because of a unique situation. His defensive coordinator at Virginia Tech is the head coach the Hokies fired last year to make way for Franklin.

Brent Pry left Franklin’s Penn State staff after the 2021 season to take over in Blacksburg. He went 16-24 and got fired after an 0-3 start. But Pry is one of the most humble, likable people in the sport, and he was willing to move offices to help a bunch of people he loved try to bring success to a place he loved. Because of all this, Franklin knows he can trust Pry to run the defense and Franklin is free to spend more time with the offense.

The Pry-Franklin reunion is just part of the getting-the-band-back-together feeling in Blacksburg. Michael Hazel ran operations for Franklin at Vandy and Penn State before joining Pry at Virginia Tech. Franklin and his former right-hand man have reunited, and one can guide the other with intimate knowledge of the new place. Defensive line coach Sean Spencer worked with Pry and Franklin in Nashville and State College before embarking on an odyssey that included stops in the NFL, at Florida and at Texas A&M. The man nicknamed Coach Chaos is back with the co-workers who helped him wreak the most havoc.

This is all happening now in Blacksburg because of something that happened while Franklin was considered quite safe at Penn State. In August 2025, Virginia Tech athletic director Whit Babcock made a presentation to the school’s Board of Visitors that may as well have been titled “Fund Me Or Fire Me.”

In the presentation, Babcock explained in stark terms where Virginia Tech’s athletic department — and specifically its football program — ranked in resources relative to the rest of the ACC. The numbers may have been shocking to some of the board members, but they weren’t to the people who had coached in the league. Under Frank Beamer, the Hokies dominated the league in the early 2000s shortly after coming over from the Big East. But the resource gap had grown so huge that under Justin Fuente and Pry the Hokies weren’t really playing the same sport as Clemson, Florida State and Miami. Franklin, who kept tabs on the Hokies because of his relationship with Pry, knew all this.

Franklin also understood that the board had decided to say yes to Babcock’s request — which required millions more in investment over a period of years — before the job opened. So he’d be in a different position than Justin Fuente and Pry started from. “It’s not like I had to come in and make all these asks,” Franklin says. “They had already done all their benchmarking. They had already made a commitment to football that they hadn’t made in a long time. It is easy to point the finger at the head coaches, but the last two head coaches, I don’t think, had the support that we have right now.”

Now Franklin needs to make that investment pay dividends. And he should immediately make the Hokies more competitive. Thanks to Pry and the other holdovers, Franklin knew exactly which Hokies he should work to keep. So players like tailback Marcellus Hawkins and receiver Ayden Greene stayed. Others, like quarterback Ethan Grunkemeyer, tight end Luke Reynolds and linebacker Keon Wylie, followed from Penn State. Meanwhile, 11 high school players who had committed to play for Franklin at Penn State — most of whom would have never considered Virginia Tech before — flipped and signed with the Hokies. 

Franklin promised real depth, and through half of spring practice, it certainly feels like the Hokies are deeper than they’ve been in years. And he’s trying to make them even deeper going forward. 

Behind James Franklin’s desk is a row of Virginia Tech helmets. Hanging on the walls on either side of his office? Penn State and Vanderbilt jerseys.

The players Franklin needs to truly revive Virginia Tech weren’t alive when Michael Vick played for the Hokies. They don’t know what Beamerball means. But they absolutely know Saquon Barkley and Micah Parsons. In fact, they revere them. So in addition to paying tribute to the favorite players he’s coached, Franklin knows he can deliver a message through those jerseys on the wall.

“I want these players to have success,” Franklin says. “They deserve it.”

Franklin could sense it last year when he watched Virginia Tech host Miami at Lane Stadium in November. The game was out of hand — it was a three-win team against a team that played for the national title — but fans stayed and yelled their support to Hokies players.

Franklin loved the appreciation those fans showed, and he could sense their hunger. And he knew he felt the same way but for a different reason.