Getting the band back together: James Franklin, Brent Pry and Virginia Tech's strange do-over

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- The air conditioning in James Franklin's office had quit, so a few industrial fans did the work. They pushed the warm June air around the room while Franklin talked, his voice rising over the hum in the large room and the intermittent hammering above his head, on the roof, where crews worked, drilling and pounding away on an unknown project even the coach couldn't explain. To his left, the panoramic window revealed another crew using heavy equipment to erect a new scoreboard at Lane Stadium.

Noise. Heat. Construction. A program in transition. It's a fair picture of the job at Virginia Tech.

Down the hall, in an office he did not previously occupy, sits the man the Hokies fired to make room for Franklin's rebuild. Brent Pry was the head coach here for four seasons -- fired after an 0-3 start last season that dropped him to 16-24 overall. Now he is Franklin's defensive coordinator.

"I should have built something in the contract where I could use the head coach's facility," Pry said, laughing. "Now I'm down here with the common folk."

A head coach was fired, and months later, rehired as a coordinator at the same school. There is no clear precedent for it in major college football. It wasn't like Pry sat still after he was fired. He went looking for jobs, considering several opportunities at larger programs, until this truly unique opportunity became reality at his alma mater alongside his closest friend in the coaching industry.

"There wasn't something exactly like this," he said. "It was my wife and I working through it."

The call came faster than he expected. Penn State fired Franklin on Oct. 12 following a three-game losing streak at the midpoint of a season that started with a No. 2 ranking and dreams of winning a national championship. A 12-year marriage ended with a messy breakup, but Franklin didn't need long to gather himself for a rebound. Within days, he was on the phone with Pry, two friends with more in common than just being two recently fired head coaches. They've known each other since Pry's father, Jim, coached Franklin as a player at East Stroudsburg University in the early 1990s. Pry spent a decade with Franklin as his co-defensive coordinator at Vanderbilt and defensive coordinator at Penn State before Virginia Tech came calling in 2022.

"It was probably not even a week into his firing that he called and said, we want to get the band back together," Pry said. "That's James, to want to get right back on the horse."

They talked every couple of days, sharing notes on the record number of jobs opening across the country. Pry says he had three opportunities, all in the SEC, as a head coach and two coordinator jobs. Meanwhile, Virginia Tech was already hot on Franklin's tail, and he was seriously weighing the pros and cons of replacing his friend at a program that was busy working behind the scenes to raise money and improve infrastructure for the next head coach. Then Virginia Tech got more serious, and Franklin, characteristically, didn't ease into it. He phoned Pry and asked him who he should hire as defensive coordinator. Then he asked Pry if he'd like the job. Pry's answer surprised him.

"He was like, you know, I'd be interested," Franklin said. Pry was still living in Blacksburg, after all, and his wife and two kids planned to stay here for at least another year, regardless of his job prospects. Pry never stopped being a Virginia Tech guy.

What made it easy for Pry to say yes wasn't necessarily the friendship with Franklin. It was the town.

When Virginia Tech fired Pry in September, Blacksburg High School called his wife to check on the family, particularly how his two straight-A daughters were handling the noise in the school's hallways. "They reached out to my wife multiple times after we got let go," Pry said. "'If there are any problems, if there are any issues, please call us. We want to be there for your girls.'"

The family never felt uncomfortable. The daughters kept going to school, the parents continued their dinner trips downtown at PK's Bar & Grill. "People were unbelievable. They were super, super supportive."

Franklin, recently declared persona non grata at Penn State, noticed the love and it moved him.

"The people in the community were really good to his wife and kids, and that's not always the case," he said. "This community just treating Brent and his family fairly and showing some grace, and it allowed us to get one of the best defensive coordinators in college football."

Everyone was on board. Athletics director Whit Babcock, who fired him just months earlier, even visited his home and offered support. "I hope you're seriously considering staying," he told him.

The hard part was the contract. Pry was owed a buyout whether he worked or not, but they worked through the details in about a week: a $1.5 million salary and $1.86 million annually in buyout money. Then came the reality: swallowing his pride, burying his ego and walking back through the front door.

"The first team meeting I bring him to, the room gave him a standing ovation," Franklin said. "And I think that right away kind of set him at ease."

Pry was surprised how easy it was to adjust to his new role, walking by his old, large office every day, sliding back into the mode of an assistant coach, tucked away in a side room, breaking down film instead of handling paperwork and the 100-plus personalities in the locker room that come with the job as the CEO of a football program.

"Honestly, it didn't take long to slide back into DC mode," he said. "If I'd known that it would be this comfortable this quickly, I probably would have called [plays] myself last year."

Pry paused.

"Hindsight's 20-20. You didn't want to jack things up, and now that I'm back in it, I'm like, I could have done it."

Ego? Those who know Pry don't see it. The man is a football coach, a down-to-earth man who loves a nightcap and the company of players and coaches.

"You can't let your ego get in the way of doing the right thing," Pry said. "It was the right thing for me, my wife, my kids."

The reunion is the flashy, heartwarming part of Virginia Tech's story. The challenging, less romantic story is everything else around it.

The harder part

Franklin took over a program that hasn't won more than seven games since 2019. They finished 3-9 last fall, the program's worst record since 1992. He is blunt about how the program fell on hard times, and careful to point the cause somewhere other than the men who sat in his chair. The program has mostly struggled since the end of the Frank Beamer era, a 29-year career that ended in 2015 with 23 consecutive bowl games.

"Towards the end of that regime, they didn't stay up with major college athletics, and specifically football -- what was changing, facilities, the investment, technology, just falling behind, really, in all of those areas," Franklin said.

Virginia Tech's slide from national power to rebuild

Virginia Tech era	Seasons	Record	Win pct.	Avg. wins/year	10-win seasons	Final AP Top 25s
BCS era	1998-2013	156-53	.746	9.8	11	13
Early CFP era	2014-17	33-20	.623	8.3	1	2
Transfer portal era	2018-20	19-18	.514	6.3	0	0
NIL era	2021-25	25-37	.403	5.0	0	0

The job Franklin inherited is not the Virginia Tech of old. The Hokies averaged nearly 10 wins per year in the BCS era; since NIL began, they have averaged five.

The fix is money. Virginia Tech's "Invest to Win" plan will pump $229 million into athletics over the next four years, and the department raised a record $56 million last year. The big news around here is what's happening since Franklin arrived in November: a $20 million gift two weeks into his tenure and a $75 million donation announced last week. The fans and boosters have stepped up, fueled by the excitement of a coach who led Penn State to the College Football Playoff semifinals less than two years ago. "It was originally supposed to be $50 million," Franklin said of the recent gift. "It ended up being $75 million."

Pry says that momentum has carried over to the recruiting trail. The Hokies' 2027 class ranks 10th nationally as of Monday afternoon, and that's not to just be chalked up to a wonky summertime algorithm. In this new era of recruiting, schools are trying to be mostly done by the end of June.

The recruiting success is just months removed from Franklin raiding Penn State's talent bank: 12 transfers and 11 former commitments. He reaches for a comparison, avoiding the en vogue blueprints utilized elsewhere to replicate Indiana's overnight turnaround under Curt Cignetti. He compares it to another Big East power of yesteryear: Miami, the program that advanced to the national championship against the Hoosiers last season, and the year before had momentarily lost to Tech on a Hail Mary that was originally ruled a touchdown but was overturned, allowing top-10 Miami a 38-34 win.

"A couple years later they're in the national championship. That one's closer to us to see than Indiana or Texas Tech." The money, he tells families on the recruiting trail, "is going to make a gigantic impact on the program."

Brian Dohn, a longtime recruiting analyst for 247Sports, agrees: "This is only the beginning of Franklin's vision. He is armed with the funds to compete in the revenue sharing/NIL world, and a staff with ties across the region. It is the type of recruiting that takes away the 'Can he?' build a playoff contender and replaces it with 'how long?' before it is one."

Yes, changes are happening, but with growth also comes growing pains.

Virginia Tech president Tim Sands announced in April he's stepping down. Babcock, who hired Franklin and Pry -- and rehired Pry -- retires June 30. Franklin's corporate structure is suddenly a vacuum.

"I get the job, the AD retires, the president retires, the rector gets removed by the governor," he said. "Not ideal."

Franklin is "very" involved helping find replacements, he said.

"I'll be happy when the AD position is hired and named and is on campus, because I need a partner -- someone that I can trust," he said. "That will allow me to be the best version of me."

Wins and losses don't solely lie at the feet of coaches, Franklin explained. "It's easy to point the finger at Justin Fuente, and easy to point the finger at Brent Pry, because you're the head man. But what people don't understand is there are so many things behind the scenes that either allow a coach to be successful or not."

James the builder

Rebuilds are not new to Franklin. He flipped Vanderbilt off the SEC's doormat and turned it into a contender, a nine-win program, and then arrived at Penn State, taking over a program still rebuilding after the messy end to the Joe Paterno era. They won the Big Ten championship in his third season in 2016, and recorded 10 wins or more six times, peaking with a 13-3 season and loss in the national semifinals in 2024.

He's motivated to do it again at Virginia Tech.

"I've always had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder," he said, as a Division II player, Division II coach, with residencies in nine different states or countries in his first nine years. He didn't start his career with a Rolodex full of contacts from a big-time playing career. "Everything we've done we've earned."

The pain from Penn State obviously still lingers. To go from one win away from a national championship berth to being fired in the span of 10 months is unprecedented. "I was going through all the emotions, as you could imagine," he said.

Someday, Penn State will welcome him back to State College with open arms. They'll honor his Big Ten championship team, the run through the CFP, the five top-10 finishes and the 104-45 record over 11-plus seasons. For now, in the early days of the divorce, how he's defined is not for him to say.

"I don't think that's for me to decide," he said, leaving it to "the real football people" who remember what the Penn State program was when he arrived in 2014. "I'm very, very proud and comfortable with what we did there, and that we clearly left it better than we found it."

But what about the criticisms? He absorbs them, recognizes them and doesn't dodge. He turns the conversation to the players he coached in State College, who reached out in droves following his ouster.

"There were a ton of times I had opportunities to leave and stayed because of the players," he said. Early last week, the first big recruit he signed at Vanderbilt, out of Memphis, called about a new job.

"The day I get the Virginia Tech job, I'm now responsible to Virginia Tech," Franklin said, "and I'm also still tied to the players. And that won't ever change."

Franklin does have some regrets, which he hopes to rectify in Blacksburg. He says he drifted too far from the offense at Penn State. "I didn't get into this profession to do half of the things that I do now, right? So getting back to more of my roots I think is a healthier place for me to be too," he said.

His fingerprints will be all over the Hokies' offense, he said. To help him, he reunited with coordinator Ty Howle, who's been with him six years, and quarterbacks coach Danny O'Brien, who Franklin recruited and coached as a player at Maryland in 2010. Thirteen Penn State staffers, including two on-field assistants, joined him in Blacksburg.

Franklin's coaching tree is also a family tree by design, and the staff says so without being asked. Howle remembered a week when his twins and his wife all came down sick, and Franklin and his wife, Fumi, turned up at their house with dinner.

"I remember about an hour before, I'm like, we gotta clean the house," Howle said, "and they're totally not that way."

O'Brien, 17 years removed from playing for Franklin, said the core hasn't moved: "He's a machine. I don't know when he sleeps, but his energy level is always 10 out of 10." Chuck Losey, the strength coach who's followed Franklin since Vanderbilt, said he's never had to walk on eggshells. "I feel reinforced every day when I come into the office."

Franklin shrugs off the praise. That's just how he likes his workplace. "You want people to enjoy coming to work every single day. You also want to create some consistency on your staff."

That's one reason why Pry is back. He needed some time before diving back into the work, so he and his wife took three months in the fall to develop a list of three things they wanted to do, and three things their daughters wanted. They went to the Bahamas for the first time and spent spring break in State College with old Penn State friends. After Pry agreed to return to Tech as Franklin's defensive coordinator, he and Amy flew to Las Vegas, where they renewed their vows at the famous Little White Wedding Chapel.

"That was the last piece of the negotiation with James," Pry said.

They sat in a pink Cadillac. An Elvis impersonator sang "Love Me Tender," and conducted the six-minute ceremony, ending with a rendition of "Viva Las Vegas."

Then he came home, to the place he loved since high school, to a smaller office down the hall, to a program betting hundreds of millions that it can win big like it once did. The new scoreboard will record that history. The fans will bear witness to the rebuild, hoping the Hokies finally have what they need for a return to the glory days.

"It's been done before," Franklin said. "It can happen again."