James Franklin was fired in the middle of the 2025 season at Penn State, took the Virginia Tech job five weeks later, and now has the Hokies 4-0 for the first time since 2017. The quarterback who knows him best is not remotely surprised.
Drew Allar, now a rookie with the Pittsburgh Steelers, was asked this week about his former head coach’s start in Blacksburg. “I’m not really surprised at all,” Allar said. “I think he has a good track record of turning programs around from his days at Vanderbilt and then when he first got to Penn State and now obviously at a great school like Virginia Tech.”
Coming from Allar, that read carries some weight. He threw for 7,402 yards with 61 touchdowns and 13 interceptions in Franklin’s program and went 26-9 as the starter before an ankle injury ended his 2025 season. Pittsburgh took him at No. 76 overall in the third round of this year’s draft.
The Hokies Were Stuck, And Now They Are Not
Penn State cut Franklin loose on October 12, 2025, with the Nittany Lions sitting at 3-3. Virginia Tech hired him on November 17 and handed him a program that had spent years spinning its wheels. Four games in, the scoreboard has stopped arguing: VMI by 73-3, Old Dominion by 44-21, Maryland on the road 35-26, and Boston College 21-14 last weekend.
That Boston College result is the one that actually tells you something. Virginia Tech trailed 7-6 and had to grind out a comeback, which is exactly the type of game this program has been losing for the better part of a decade. It was Franklin’s first one-score win with the Hokies, and running back Jeffrey Overton Jr. carried it with 209 rushing yards, 140 of those in the fourth quarter alone.
Grunkemeyer Is The Engine
Quarterback Ethan Grunkemeyer has been the cleanest part of the whole operation. He is 101-for-136 on the season, a 74.2 percent completion rate, for 1,012 yards, eight touchdowns and zero interceptions. Zero, four games into a brand new system under a brand new staff.
That is the Franklin formula announcing itself early. His Penn State offenses got hammered as too conservative, and the criticism was fair when the games got large. The flip side of that reputation is a quarterback who does not hand the opposing defense free possessions, and Virginia Tech has not needed to win a shootout yet.
The Hokies are still unranked, though they are piling up AP votes at 86 points. Beat Pittsburgh at home Friday night and that almost certainly changes.
Penn State Fans Should Probably Look Away
Here is the uncomfortable part for State College. The knock that ended Franklin’s twelve-year run was his ceiling, the sense that he would get you to nine or ten wins and stall out against the sport’s actual heavyweights. Fair enough. But that critique quietly ignored what he is elite at, which is taking over a broken situation and making it functional in a hurry.
He went 24-15 at Vanderbilt with three straight bowl trips at a school that historically could not sniff one. He then rebuilt a scandal-gutted Penn State roster into a 104-45 record and a Big Ten title in 2016. Virginia Tech hired the version of Franklin that does the building, not the version that needs to beat Ohio State in November.
Allar watched the whole thing from the huddle, and his assessment is the right one. Franklin’s resume is a rebuilding resume, and the Hokies needed a rebuild more than they needed a closer. Four games into the experiment, Virginia Tech looks like the best possible landing spot for both sides.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.