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Grading the James Franklin Swap at Midseason: Penn State Is Sweating, Virginia Tech Is Almost There

By MVPeav · @MVPeav · Oct 21, 2026

A year and a week ago, Penn State fired James Franklin at 3-3. The replacement, Matt Campbell, is now 3-4 with four straight losses. Franklin, meanwhile, is 5-2 at Virginia Tech, and the Hokies can get bowl-eligible this Saturday.

That's the swap at midseason. One fanbase wanted a coach who could win the big one and got a coach who can't win the close one. The other fanbase got a coach with a famous close-game problem and is, by its own standards, having a blast.

If I'm in State College after the way this season has gone, I'm starting to get worried we made the wrong decision. If I'm in Blacksburg, I think things are trending the right way, with the fair warning that some of the shaky stuff looks awfully familiar.

Penn State: Four Straight Losses and a Lot of Fourth-Quarter Heartburn

I'm giving Penn State a C so far, and I'm being kind to a 3-4 team because it is Matt Campbell's first year. The Penn State fans I know and work with have already practically given up hope. They sound borderline chicken little "the season's over", and "it's hard to tell if the Nittany Lions or the Eagles are the worst-managed team in Pennsylvania".

The résumé is ugly in a very specific way. Penn State started 3-0, then dropped four in a row in Big Ten play, the latest a 21-18 loss at Michigan where the Wolverines ran for 211 yards to Penn State's 65. It's 0-2 against Quad 1 and sits 84th in my Quads résumé ranking. Franklin got fired at 3-3. This is worse.

The thing that really stings is the shape of the losses. In 3 of the 4, Penn State had a fourth-quarter lead or had the ball with a chance to tie or go ahead. Campbell said it himself after Michigan: "You've got to win in the margins right now, for sure, and we're not doing that." That was supposed to be the whole point of hiring him.

The fair counterpoint is that this is a talented team playing badly, not a "bad" team. Penn State is 47th in SP+, three of the four losses were one-score games, but Iowa State hasn't collapsed without him (3-3, with all three losses in Quad 1, at Iowa, Utah and at BYU) so not sure how much the impact the Matt Campbell supposedly made in Ames was actually him. The contract is an 8-year deal with $70.5M guaranteed, approved by the trustees in December, so this is a patience story whether anyone in State College likes it or not. He may simply be too expensive to fire, so the Penn State faithful probably have to convince themselves that Matt Campbell needs a few years to get his system set up.

That argument has a shelf life, tho. Bob Chesney is 6-0 at UCLA with a win at Oregon in his first season. Curt Cignetti is 6-1 at Indiana but completely turned around that program in his first year. New coaches winning right away is not a fantasy in this sport anymore, and "give him time" sounds a lot better when your fan base isn't watching two stories of instant success in their own conference.

Virginia Tech: Better, Just Not Finished

Virginia Tech gets a B from me, and I'll be honest about why it's not higher. The actual output is basically the same as what got Franklin fired at Penn State. The difference is the VT fans I know and work with have had expectations so low for so long that anything is exciting, and for the first time in a while there's real hope for the future.

The progress is real. Going from 3-9 to 5-2 is a different program than the one he walked into, and the numbers back it up on both counts: VT is 40th in SP+ to Penn State's 47th, and 54th in my Quads ranking to Penn State's 84th.

But watch the two losses and tell me you don't see the Penn State version of him. At home against Pitt, VT led 14-0 and 24-14, gave up 21 straight, turned it over four times, and John Love's 36-yarder went wide left as time expired in a 35-33 loss. At Cal, Grunkemeyer snuck it in from the 1 to go up 20-19 with 1:15 left, Cal scored with 18 seconds to go, and VT's last pass fell incomplete from the 7. Cal is 87th in SP+ at midseason, down from 56th preseason. Love missed from 39 and 55 that night too, three straight misses for the first time in his career.

Franklin's own line after Cal was that "we did not play well enough to get a win on the road in the ACC," which is a very James Franklin sentence. Five straight VT games have been decided by 10 points or fewer. That's either a team learning to close, or a coach who still can't. We don't know yet, because the Hokies haven't played a Quad 1 game (0-0, and I'd want to see one before I call anyone a contender).

Which brings up the dark-horse stuff. The ACC media picked VT 8th preseason and the win total was 6.5. They're on pace to clear that, but there were also plenty of talking heads trying to cast VT as a dark horse candidate to at least make the ACC Title game in Franklin's first year. The dark-horse version of the season, though, needs a win over Clemson or Miami, and those are both on the road in the next three weeks.

Feelings in Blacksburg

I gave VT a B, so I went and asked a VT alum I know how year one actually feels from the inside. My grade comes from the box scores. His answer came from somewhere else.

His read on how Franklin landed in Blacksburg goes back a decade. Early in Beamer's tenure, he told me, the program was well funded for its era, and that dwindled into a good ole boys club that never adjusted to the 2010s. Fuente gave it a pulse off Beamer recruits and a couple of great Bud Foster defenses, but then Fuente flirted with Baylor around 2020, which came across as a coach trying to jump ship to school with more investment even with lack of ability to rally anyone around him. He continues that VT is an engineering and agriculture school, not a factory of high net worth donors, and unfortunately the Sugar Bowl in 2012, an ACC title game in 2016 and the bowl streak never lit a fire under the small number of boosters they do have. Pry tried,but just didn't have the stature. The end of Fuente, the Pry era, realignment and NIL were the wake up call. The Board of Visitors got some football minded people on it and went after Franklin as soon as he was fired and the job opened up.

What Franklin changed off the field is the part he calls a resounding success. Hundreds of millions from the university, some of the largest individual donations in the history of the school, the locker room, the meeting rooms, the stadium. Franklin keeps saying everything has to look and feel like big time college football, and the stuff that wore on Penn State fans over the years has been welcomed with open arms by a fanbase that thought its administration needed a kick. On recruiting, he says these are the highest ranked VT classes of the modern recruiting era, and the portal did the rest: Luke Reynolds and Ethan Grunkemeyer both followed Franklin down from Penn State as transfers, and Reynolds is the first 5 star they've had since Kendall Fuller in the 2013 class, and probably Kevin Jones in the 2001 class before that. He's cackled at multiple Reynolds plays and remarked to his wife "how fun it is to have a 5 star for once." The difference in talent is easy to see from years past.

On the field he's about as honest as my B. The offense has been electric in a number of first halves and has a habit of petering out. The D-line is great and is being held back by the linebackers and the secondary. Pry coming back is, in his words, makes for one of the most unusual situations in the history of college football (a coach getting fired and immediately coming back to that same school as a coordinator under the new head coach), and he won't say a word against him as a man, but he's definitely on the hottest seat. The Pitt and Cal losses were "VT of the past 10 years," the losing of stupid games and blowing leads version, and that's caused some agitation even in a fanbase he describes as very patient.

Success, to him, is plain. 3-9 to 7-5 or 8-4 is a success, with the caveat that it has to keep going, because that much money raises the bar. 9 or 10 wins is joy and exhilaration, especially if it sets VT up for the next wave of realignment. Underneath it is something simpler: he loves Lane Stadium, he loves Blacksburg, he wants to take his sons to a game and let them feel the electricity he's felt there. After they got curb stomped by ODU last year that dream was fading fast. The results are still a work in progress, but he couldn't have dreamed of this season back in September of last year. Thanks to the rejuvenation injected into the program by the Franklin hire, that dream is alive and well now.

The Quarterback Swap: Grunkemeyer Is Thriving, Becht Is Throwing It to the Other Guys

The human part of this is that each quarterback followed his coach, and only one of them looks happy about it.

Ethan Grunkemeyer went with Franklin and is 167-of-229 for 1,984 yards with 15 TD and 2 INT. He threw for 250 yards and 3 TD on my Jackets, which I did not enjoy. He's also got Luke Reynolds, a Penn State transfer at tight end, who's an AP midseason first-team All-American. Two guys who walked out of State College and are the best part of a 5-2 team.

Rocco Becht went with Campbell and opened like a Heisman guy: 13-of-18 for 271 yards and 4 TD in a 45-0 win over Marshall. Since then it's been a slow bleed. He's at 12 TD and 5 INT on the year, all 5 picks in Big Ten play against 3 TD, and he's been sacked 10 times. Michigan scored 21 second-half points off three Becht turnovers on Saturday.

The fans want backup Alex Manske. Campbell says he isn't considering a change. I think that's loyalty to the guy who got him the job, and I get it, but the Big Ten version of Becht is turning it over at the exact moments Campbell was hired to fix.

The Back Half: Death Valley vs. a Big Ten Soft Landing

VT's back half comes down to three road trips: at Clemson Saturday, then at SMU after a bye, then at Miami, with a Stanford home game tucked between the last two. Win Saturday and the Hokies are bowl-eligible, which is its own kind of statement for a program that was 3-9 last year. The catch is Clemson is 7-0 against Virginia Tech under Dabo Swinney, going back to 2011.

I've got Clemson in this one. Death Valley at night is the first reason. The second is that Clemson's defense has held up fine all year, and the offense being stuck doesn't change that. The third is that the Tigers basically had a week off, since their game last week was against FCS Charleston Southern. VT on the other hand has been in a dogfight every week. That Clemson offense really is stuck, averaging 340.7 yards a game, 110th in the FBS, with Tait Reynolds at 943 yards, 1 TD and 3 INT. So this is a defense-and-field-position game, and VT's kicker just missed three straight.

Two side plots worth knowing. Clemson's defensive coordinator Tom Allen ran Franklin's defense at Penn State in 2024, so he's game-planning against the guy who hired him. And Grunkemeyer already beat Clemson once, 260 yards and 2 TD in last year's Pinstripe Bowl, which Penn State won 22-10 to finish 7-6. Franklin had been fired by then. Nobody involved in this game has forgotten any of it.

Penn State, meanwhile, gets a bye and then the softest finish anyone could draw: Purdue on Halloween, at Washington, Minnesota, Rutgers, at Maryland. If the margins problem is fixable, that's the schedule to fix it on. If they drop two of those, the frustration in State College is going to follow Campbell into the offseason.

What the Sims Say About the Rest of the Way

I simmed the rest of all three seasons, Penn State, Virginia Tech and Iowa State, because the midseason grade only matters if you know what the finish probably looks like. Quick credibility check first: how my sims did in Week 7, 41-18 picking winners and three games better than ESPN's FPI. One honest line on method: this week's games ran 10,000 sims each, and later games use FPI's predicted margin since nothing's posted yet, so read everything below as "wins X% of my sims," not a forecast.

Penn State's expected record is 6.9-5.1.

The whole thing swings on Washington: Penn State wins that one in 53% of my sims and nothing else on the schedule is under 79%. They're bowl-eligible in 93% of sims, which is a long way from "the season's over," no matter what they naysayer Penn State fans I am surrounded by believe. For them tho, I still think the new coaching hire was supposed to be shooting for more than just being bowl eligible.

Virginia Tech's expected record is 7.2-4.8.

Clemson is the swing game, but Clemson wins it 54% of my sims with a median score of 25-24. Miami at 9.2% is close to a lost game, so the realistic path to 8-4 or better is stealing one at Clemson (45.7%) or at SMU (28.7%), and Clemson is probably gonna be the better of the two test. They do get to Bowl-eligible in 98% of sims tho for what its worth.

Iowa State is the sad one. Expected record 5.4-6.6, and the Cyclones are the underdog in all six remaining games.

They were 8-4 under Campbell last year and make a bowl in only 44% of my sims now. So no, they haven't collapsed, but the drop-off is showing up in the numbers before it shows up in the record.

The punchline of the whole exercise is that both Penn State and Virginia Tech most likely finish 7-5. The swap everybody's grading might end with the exact same record on both sides.

Final Grade Scenarios and the Bottom Line

Penn State at 8-4 makes this a rough first half with a decent ending, a season you survive. Penn State at 5-7 is a whole different thing: a $70.5M guaranteed coach, fully guaranteed if you fire him, who went 5-7 in year one with the roster Franklin left behind. That's when "I'm starting to get worried" becomes actual second-guessing in State College.

For VT, take two of Clemson, SMU and Miami and the rebuild in Blacksburg shows that it might be faster than expected, the dark-horse talk gets to live, and the Pitt and Cal nights become growing pains. Go 0-3 and it's the same old Franklin story: better roster, more wins in the fall, still the guy who can't get the big one on the road.

Right now, Virginia Tech is ahead on the swap. Not by a ton, and not for any reason that would survive a 9-3 Penn State finish, but the Hokies are 5-2 and happy and the Nittany Lions are 3-4 and arguing about the backup quarterback. The next three Saturdays in Blacksburg and State College decide whether it stays that way.