After a disastrous end to their 2023 season, the Buckeyes convinced several key NFL eligible players (Henderson, Sawyer, Tuimoloau, Egbuka, Burke, etc.) to return for a title run in 2024. Midway through the season, the Buckeyes lost to the #3 Oregon Ducks on the road, at night, in a one-point game that came down to the final play. Even though it was the proverbial "good loss" (a win for an SEC team), Ryan Day allegedly semi-demoted DC Jim Knowles because he (Day) wasn't happy with the performance of the defense in that game. The Buckeyes would go on to win their next five games (including #3 Penn State and #5 Indiana) before suffering an unfathomable loss to scUM to end the regular season.
After the scUM loss, the players held a team meeting (famous in retrospect, infamous at that time). Very few people inside Buckeye Nation felt that the team would achieve any success in the playoffs (despite the fact that they remained the betting favorites to win it all), and the team meeting was apparently evidence that the wheels had fallen off and the season would end badly (Spoiler: it did not).
Penn State entered the 2025 season in a similar place. After a deep playoff run that should have been one game deeper, the Lions convinced several key players to return for one more shot at the title – Drew Allar, Dani Dennis-Sutton, Nicholas Singleton, Kaytron Allen, Nick Dawkins, Zane Durant, and Zakee Wheatley, with Singleton saying: "The reason why I came back was just how the season ended. Everybody was upset, and most of the players that we came in with as freshmen were coming back to compete for a championship." After Penn State suffered a similar "good loss" to Oregon, most observers believed that this was just a predictable bump on the rough road to the playoffs. But after really bad losses to UCLA and Northwestern in subsequent weeks, the preseason #2/#3 team in the country is completely out of the playoff picture and might not even finish bowl eligible.
For some reason, James Franklin let a minor setback become a season-ending and program-altering event from which Penn State will not soon recover. I've never seen a coach lose a team so quickly, and it is especially baffling because Penn State was still a consensus top-10 team and playoff favorite even after the "good" Oregon loss. There was probably a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about, enough to allow a small crack to turn into a burst dam, and Franklin simply could not (or didn't want to) plug all the holes before the crisis ensued. And that failure cost him his job.
In any event, props to Ryan Day and the senior leadership of the 2024 Buckeyes to overcome the adversity and dissension and finger-pointing that could have ruined that memorable season. It was a great accomplishment and it did not come easy. Just ask James Franklin.
