Has D.E.I. Backfired for Penn State Football?

It has been insinuated by more than one disgruntled Penn State Alum that James Franklin was a D.E.I. hire whom the University hoped would win a college football national championship thereby establishing the university as the first major college program to win that honor with a coach who was a person of color.

While most seasoned observers of college football would never deny that Franklin was one of the best in the business when it came to recruitment, few would, of late, go on the record as saying he could take Penn State all the way to a national championship and more than one alum or parent of a Penn State student has intimated to me that they thought he was a bust and nothing more than a D.E.I. hire that Penn State stayed with for far too long. Even the dean of college football analyst’s, the venerable Paul Finebaum, has made this very observation publicly saying on his show this season, that Franklin, DEI aside and unaddressed, would never take Penn State to a national championship. An analysis of ESPN’s record of the Nittany Lions over the past decade shows only one year when Penn State competed in the post season run up to the national championship and in that case, not even making it to final, championship game.

Why did Penn State University stick with Franklin for so long when it was more than obvious that he couldn’t close the deal when it came to getting to and winning a national championship in the hyper competitive world of college football? Was it a commitment to D.E.I. over all else or was it due to an overall lack of suitable replacement candidates? Anyone who follows college football or even the pros will tell you that there are plenty of seasoned coaches and assistants of color from which to choose from when it comes to staffing the ranks of the coaching staff. So why did Penn State stick with Franklin for so long in the face of subpar performance on the gridiron?

Perhaps it was a matter of playing the odds, figuring that this great recruiter would eventually beat the odds by putting together a team that was unbeatable, even in the face of the undeniable assent of Southern colleges as the powerhouses of college football that they became over the past two decades. Perhaps even the dons of Penn State’s academic and administrative leadership bought into the flimsy perennial hype that Penn State was a powerhouse football power on par with Ohio State, Michigan, Alabama, Georgia or L.S.U. when in fact it wasn’t.

Conceptually, diversity, equity and inclusion as a means of achieving fairness in and of itself is something that is hard to argue against. However, as I see it the commitment to D.E.I. can work to be a double-edged sword. D.E.I. can bring you personnel that clearly enhance your program where the exclusion of certain groups, especially at the management level, particularly in sports, can cost an organization in the long run by stymieing innovation and progress toward a given goal, in this case a national championship. At the same time, a commitment to D.E.I. for its own sake to the point that it impedes progress toward a goal beyond diversity for diversity’s sake can produce institutional atrophy. Now, sadly or mercifully, depending on your perspective, the Franklin era at Penn State has come to an inauspicious end. However, as most seasoned sports observers and commentators will admit, either publicly or privately, there’s little to be gained at this point in a season in dismissing a head coach and the impact within the locker room will most likely be anything but positive.

Oh, well as the old saying in sports goes: “There’s always next year.”

Steven J. Gulitti

NYC 12 October 2025