I can't believe I have to do this, but I feel the need to defend James Franklin today. I never in a million years thought I would find myself writing this. And F fake news ESPN for making me do this. But I will come to James Franklins defense over the coverage he has gotten over the last two days.

First I want to defend his play call. As I said in the skully this morning, I don't see anything wrong with the call. McSorley only completed 50% of his passes on saturday night which included a handful of jump balls. So throwing the ball just does not come with good enough odds to put the game on it. Which leaves running the ball. McSorley had a great game on the ground, but in 4th and 5, the entire defense is looking for him to run. Sanders is the best athlete they have, so giving him the ball is never a bad idea. Furthermore, based on the defensive play Ohio State ran, it didn't matter if Sanders had the ball or if McSorley had it. Both would have been tackled in the backfield. Long story short, I think they chose the best of the list of bad options.

Second, I want to defend his post game press conference because the ESPN narrative and what he actually said are two completely different things. According to ESPN, he took no responsibility for the loss and blamed the loss on the players not going to class. I've heard this narrative repeated multiple times over the last couple days. And this is not what he said at all. He did take the blame for the loss. He said multiple times that it was entirely on him. He praised his players and his coaches for making Penn State "a great program". Then he gave Ohio State credit for being an elite program, which is the step above great. And he spoke about what it will take for his program to go from great to elite. And thats where the stuff about going to class and taking notes comes in. Anybody that watched the full video of his press conference would see that. And while I don't really like the guy, I thought he made some good points and thought it was actually a really good speech. And he's right, the difference between great and elite is all in the little things. A lot of programs have players that can do the big things right. What separates those from the truly elite programs is the elite programs do all the little things right too. I don't know why this is a hard concept for the media to grast and it frustrates me to see his comments taken so wildly out of context and presented to mean something completely different than what he intended. I get that coaches going off the deep end make for good headlines, but thats not what happened in this instance.