Penn State’s new coach James Franklin was in Philadelphia recently.

BY ROCK HOFFMAN

Football coaches say all the time that it’s a simple game. It usually comes down to who blocks and tackles better but the effort that coaches make to get their team to block and tackle better can be staggering so they’re always looking for ways to help them do what they do better. While Chip Kelly uses Fred Flintstone as an example of who not to follow new Penn State head coach James Franklin has high standards as well.

“I try to steal from everything,” Franklin said while speaking to the media in Philadelphia at the recent Penn State Coaches Caravan. “I read a lot of different books. I had dinner with a highly successful Penn State grad and we really didn’t talk anything about football. We were talking about his business and why and how its been successful. For me it’s unbelievable to have those types of discussions.”

As he tries to “build the Penn State brand,” Franklin will also look to friends and former classmates at East Stroudsburg University. Dan DiZio and Len Lehman are the founding partners of the Philly Pretzel Factory which has well over 100 locations serving Philly soft pretzels.

Lehman graduated in 1994; DiZio and Franklin did so in 1995.

“I followed their success from afar,” Franklin said. “They will be a resource in the future but I haven’t got the chance to spend much time with them and ask a lot of questions because I’ve been gone and they’ve been so busy as well.”

As college football embarks on its first true playoff to determine a national champion, the Big Ten will have to elevate their game. Recently it seems Big Ten teams are more content to win the league and go to the Rose Bowl than compete for and win the national championship. The last Big Ten team to win it all was Ohio State in 2002. The Buckeyes losses in back­-to­-back BCS Championship Games in 2006 and 2007 were the last time a Big Ten squad played in the title game. In 2012, the league champion, Wisconsin, wasn’t even ranked in the final top 25 rankings.

Last year, the league did bounce back with Michigan State going 13­ 1 and earning the third spot in the final rankings.

Acquiring knowledge is one of the things that Franklin hopes will help the Nittany Lions be successful in the new look Big Ten (the league is adding Rutgers and Maryland).

“This is a game where the longer you’re in it the more you realize you don’t know and the more there is to learn,” said Franklin, who compiled a 24­ 15 mark as head coach at Vanderbilt. “We have a woman’s football clinic, it’s an opportunity to talk about the game and I’m going to learn stuff in that.

“You are always learning. We take that approach every off season that we’re going to read a lot, study a lot, watch a lot of tape. We’re going to ask a lot of questions. We’re going to look at other sports. We’re going businesses and organizations. Whatever we can do.”

The quest for knowledge goes from top to bottom within the football program, from Franklin to the assistant coaches to the various support staffs (equipment, training and strength and conditioning).

“We say all the time, ‘are you bring value to the organization,’” said the Neshaminy High School graduate. “It’s not good enough to just do your job, what are you doing more to make the organization better? That what everybody in our building needs to be doing.”

At Vanderbilt, Franklin led the Commodores to three straight bowls games after the school had never been to bowl games in consecutive seasons in its history. In 2012, they were ranked in the season’s final poll for the first time since 1948. Franklin won at a place that doesn’t have a winning tradition and he attributes that in part to his outside the box thinking.

“Just studying tape or drawing up plays, it’s so much more than that,” he said. “I think that’s why we’ve been fairly successful, because we constantly looking not just at the typical things that it takes to be successful but things outside our world that have a connection.”

If Franklin likes a book enough, he’ll buy it for his staff. The two books he gave them last offseason were New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin’s book “Earn the Right to Win: How Success in Any Field Starts with Superior Preparation” and “Leading With the Heart Coach K’s Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life” by Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.

Email Rock Hoffman at Rock@footballstories.com