STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — James Franklin is out at Penn State.
The Big Ten football program fired its longtime head coach Sunday, less than 24 hours after a 22-21 home loss to Northwestern all but ended whatever remote chance the Nittany Lions, who entered the season No. 2 in the AP Top 25, had of reaching the 12-team College Football Playoff.
Terry Smith, an associate head coach who works with cornerbacks, will serve as interim head coach for the Nittany Lions (3-3, 0-3), who began the year with hopes of winning the program’s first national championship in four decades — only to have those hopes evaporate by early October with three consecutive losses, each one more stinging than the last.
Penn State, which reached the CFP semifinals 10 months ago, fell at home to reigning Big Ten champion Oregon in overtime in late September, a rematch of last year’s league championship game. A road loss at previously winless UCLA followed. The final straw came Saturday at Beaver Stadium, where the Nittany Lions let Northwestern escape with a victory and lost senior quarterback Drew Allar to injury for the rest of the season.
Franklin went 104-45 overall and 64-36 in Big Ten play during his 11-plus seasons at Penn State, where he landed after a three-year run at Vanderbilt in which he took the Commodores — annually an afterthought in the Southeastern Conference — to a bowl game each season after the program had never made consecutive bowl trips.