Yahoo Sports Penn State signs James Franklin to extension through 2025
Penn State announced Friday that it had agreed to a six-year contract extension with coach James Franklin.
Franklin is currently in his sixth year at Penn State. The extension goes through the 2025 season and adds three years to a contract extension that he signed in 2017 to go through the 2022 season.
"It's not often a coach gets an opportunity to move back to their home state and coach the team they grew up watching," Franklin said in a Penn State statement. "It's even more rare that it's a school as rich in history and tradition as Penn State. It's been an honor and privilege to be the head coach of the Penn State Football program for the last six years.”
The school didn’t release the terms of Franklin’s updated contract. The extension he signed in 2017 was worth an average of $5.75 million per year over the course of the deal. Franklin made over $5.6 million in 2019, according to USA Today’s annual coaching salary database and his salary made him the 11th-highest-paid coach in the country.
It seems a safe bet that the new contract will put Franklin in the top 10 among college football coaches in 2020. It also likely increases his buyout in case another power program would ever want to consider Franklin as its coach in the future.
Penn State is 10-2 in 2019
There’s a decent chance Penn State could head to the Rose Bowl on Sunday. The Nittany Lions are currently ranked 10th in the College Football Playoff rankings, two spots below Wisconsin. If the Badgers lose to No. 1 Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game then they could fall below Penn State in the rankings. With Ohio State heading to the playoff, the Rose Bowl would then be open for Penn State.
A bowl win would give Penn State its third 11-win season in the last four years. The Nittany Lions lost the Rose Bowl in a Big Ten title-winning season in 2016 and then won the Fiesta Bowl to get to 11-3 to conclude the 2017 season.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
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