The wildest college football coaching cycle — perhaps ever — has reached the hiring phase.

Schools around the Power 4 that fired their coaches in the first two months of the season — or, in Stanford’s case, way back in late March — are targeting candidates and finalizing deals. Interestingly enough, one of the first major coaches to lose his job, Penn State’s James Franklin, was the first noninterim coach to be hired, as he is headed to Virginia Tech.

New hires always come with hope and optimism, grand proclamations and the chance to get programs on the right track. But not all hiring processes are the same. The financial component with jobs is essential — what schools are willing to spend not just on their head coach, but the assistants and support staff and, perhaps most important, the team roster — and certainly resonated for Virginia Tech.

We will be reviewing all the major coaching hires in the 2025-26 cycle, evaluating how each coach fits in the job, their major challenges and what it will take to be successful. We will also assign an initial letter grade for each hire.

Why is this a good fit?

When Franklin was fired and almost immediately announced his intentions to coach in 2026, Virginia Tech emerged as a natural landing spot for the 53-year-old. He has spent most of his career in the mid-Atlantic region, twice serving as a Maryland assistant, leading programs in Vanderbilt and Penn State and even working within the state at James Madison in 1997.

He understands the key recruiting areas extremely well. Franklin ultimately was fired for not winning the biggest games at Penn State, but he still won a lot of them (104) and understands how to build a consistently successful program. Virginia Tech ultimately had to do more of the selling here, and convince a veteran coach that it was financially serious enough to contend in the ACC. Franklin isn’t shy about asking for what he needs, and he wouldn’t take the job if he didn’t feel comfortable that Virginia Tech’s investments are sufficient to compete for ACC championships. — Rittenberg

What will be Franklin’s biggest challenge?

This hire would not have happened without the financial investment Virginia Tech is about to make in football. The Hokies have languished behind their ACC counterparts in nearly every area — from staffing to salaries to NIL — and some of that has to do with an outdated way of thinking. The one through line has been the thought that the Hokies could win the way Frank Beamer won. That is a big reason why they hired Brent Pry, who served as Franklin’s defensive coordinator, as head coach in November 2021. That clearly did not work, as Pry never won more than seven games in a season. Virginia Tech pledged to add $229 million to its overall athletics budget over the next four years — a huge concession that the old model no longer works in this new era of college football.

But Franklin has to get the entire athletic department to believe the old Beamer days truly are over and things must be done his way. That is challenge No. 1. The second challenge is to restore Virginia Tech’s prowess in recruiting its home state. Franklin had success taking players out of Virginia Tech’s backyard and turning them into stars at Penn State. Will he be able to do the same now at Virginia Tech, which has lost an enormous amount of ground to powers outside the state? The high school players being recruited now were toddlers the last time Virginia Tech was a nationally respected program, playing in BCS games. They don’t remember the Hokies being elite. Convincing players to stay in state will be a challenge, but one that Franklin can achieve given his track record. — Andrea Adelson

Grade: A

Virginia Tech’s two post-Frank Beamer hires were a coach who had not led a Power 4 program (Justin Fuente) and a first-time head coach (Brent Pry). In Franklin, Virginia Tech gets a proven winner from the Big Ten and SEC, who knows the region extremely well and will be extremely motivated to compete for league titles and CFP appearances.

Franklin’s big-stage shortcomings are a concern but perhaps not as much for a program like Virginia Tech, which is seeking to become a consistent conference title contender again. — Rittenberg

Virginia Tech is finalizing a deal to make James Franklin the school’s next head coach, sources told ESPN on Monday. The deal is expected to be completed in the near future.

Franklin is the former coach at both Penn State and Vanderbilt, where he went 128-60 over 15 seasons. He brings a resume that includes winning more than 68% of his games, an appearance in the semi-finals of the 2024 College Football Playoff and a Big Ten championship in 2016.

He’ll replace his former defensive coordinator, Brent Pry, who was fired in September after an 0-3 start and a 16-24 record through four seasons.

Franklin’s arrival in Blacksburg will give the Hokies their most accomplished coach since Hall of Famer Frank Beamer, who retired in 2015 after 29 seasons at the school. Since that time, Tech has endured the underwhelming tenures of Justin Fuente and Pry as the school struggled to assimilate to modern college football.

After firing Pry, Tech’s Board of Visitors passed a plan to add $229 million to the athletics budget over the next four years. The move was to help make Tech a more attractive job and attract a candidate that could revive the school’s lagging football fortunes.

In Franklin, they get an established coach whose availability on the open market wasn’t even considered a possibility at the start of the 2025 season. Penn State began the season ranked No. 2 in the country.

Franklin’s teams endured three-straight losses to open the season, including a double-overtime loss to No. 6 Oregon when they were ranked No. 3 in September.

After losses to UCLA and Northwestern, Penn State fired Franklin. They were originally on the hook for $49 million for his contract, but that number is subject to off-set and should end up being significantly less pending the terms of his Virginia Tech contract.

Franklin came to Penn State in 2014 in the throes of NCAA sanctions from the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal. He pushed the program through a dark period and led them to the Rose Bowl and Big Ten title in 2016.

Franklin’s tenure was ultimately defined by general success that never manifested itself at the very highest levels of winning, as he finished 4-21 at Penn State against AP Top 10 opponents. Over his 12 seasons there, he led Penn State to six seasons of double-digit victories, including three-straight from 2022 to 2024.

Virginia Tech hasn’t won double-digit games since Fuente’s first season in 2016. From 2004 to 2011, Tech won double-digit games each season under Beamer.

Franklin brings strong ties to the I-95 corridor, including the talent-rich DMV area. Along with recruiting that area heavily at Penn State, Franklin coached two stints at Maryland as an assistant and one year at James Madison.

STILLWATER, Okla. — The stands inside Boone Pickens Stadium are brimming with the usual unusual characters. Naturally, the fans in Section 2 NO-SHIRTY 1 are already shirtless. The most popular bananas on campus are here, too. The Kool-Aid Man, of course, is sitting just a few rows over.

This is the scene 40 minutes before Oklahoma State‘s Week 12 visit from Kansas State. Amid the most forlorn season in the Cowboys’ modern football history, the Stillwater faithful is coping as best it can this fall, uncovering new methods to mine slivers of joy out of its football misery.

“It’s Oklahoma State, man,” student Alex Jackson, shirtless, tells ESPN. “We’re loyal and true.”

“Loyal and true” is the school’s guiding motto; three words that have closed the second-to-last stanza of Oklahoma State’s alma mater since 1957. Seldom, if ever, has that maxim been tested more — from a purely on-field standpoint, at least — than in 2025 with the 1-9 Cowboys slowly, but surely crashing toward their worst finish of the 21st century, even worse than last year’s 3-9 finish.

Oklahoma State dropped its final nine games and snapped its 18-year bowl appearance streak in 2024. After an uninspiring 1-2 start this fall, the program fired Mike Gundy, the winningest coach in school history, three games into his 21st season in charge.

It hasn’t gotten better since. After Saturday’s 14-6 loss to Kansas State, the Cowboys have been outscored 268-101 in seven games under interim coach Doug Meacham. They haven’t won a Big 12 game since the final week of the 2023 regular season, a drought of 723 days and counting.

Yet Oklahoma State fans haven’t folded. A reported crowd of 46,340 showed up for the Cowboys’ 18th straight FBS loss over the weekend, energized more by the organic movement that sprouted in the bleachers of Boone Pickens Stadium last month than anything on the field.

It started when one shirtless fan — an Oklahoma City-area banker named Trent Eaton — turned into hundreds waving T-shirts over their heads in the section of seats now known as “2 NO-SHIRTY 1” during a 39-17 loss to Houston. A week later, 100-plus students filled Section 124 wearing matching banana costumes; Pete’s Peelers became one of the few bright spots of a 32-point homecoming defeat when they formed a conga line as Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places,” one of Payne County’s most sacred anthems, blared from the stadium speakers.

The party in Section 231 raged on Saturday afternoon. The Peelers were back and received a visit from university president Jim Hess. Around them all, as the Cowboys rolled to their eighth loss in a row, were pockets of other costumed students, including a group of nearly a dozen women sporting Oklahoma State apparel and searing bright orange bobs.

“We decided we needed to create something for the girls,” said OSU student Lexsey McLemore, who picked out the wigs with a friend, Ava Smith, specifically for Saturday’s game.

Oklahoma State is far from the only major college football program “going through it” this fall. Preseason national title favorites such as Clemson, LSU and Penn State have stumbled. Across the country, there are properly irritated prestige fan bases at Auburn, Arkansas, Florida and Florida State. Gundy is one of 11 FBS coaches fired since the start of the 2025 regular season.

But in Stillwater, the home fans have responded with creativity, drawing delight and meaning from a series of moments made possible only by the woeful season unfolding in front of them.

“The morale is pretty low right now, obviously,” said Joel Sherman, a junior engineering student and one of the founding members of Pete’s Peelers. “But this season has given us the opportunity to do everything we’ve done. I think if Oklahoma State was actually in contention for the Big 12, we’re probably not doing this.”

“Not even if we were in the running to make a bowl game,” said fellow banana Tyler Blake, another costumed engineer.

THE MORNING OF Oct. 11 marked a historic sliding doors moment. If Eaton’s wife, Michelle, hadn’t answered the call, would a national movement have ever been reborn in Stillwater?

Eaton’s sister, Callista Bradford, is an Oklahoma State season-ticket holder. She also has a history of riling up fans in Stillwater. As a student, Bradford, 32, was part of the Paddle People, a student group that creates noise by smacking wooden paddles against the wall padding that surrounds the field at Boone Pickens Stadium.

Bradford initially planned to attend Oklahoma State’s Week 7 visit from Houston with her husband. When he backed out at the last minute, Bradford called Eaton with a late invite.

Eaton didn’t pick up. His wife, eventually, did, and Bradford picked Eaton up from his house 15 minutes later. The T-shirt he would later swing above his head in notoriety was waiting in the car.

“I was going to wear my orange, Whataburger, free giveaway T-shirt,” Eaton, a University of Miami grad, said. “But my brother-in-law told me that I couldn’t wear that, so [there was] an OSU shirt for me in the back seat.”

Bradford’s seats in the lower bowl of Boone Pickens Stadium are situated diagonally across from Section 231 in the stadium’s upper deck. From there, she and her brother watched Cowboys running back Rodney Fields Jr. turn a double pass into a 63-yard touchdown on the game’s opening possession, delivering the kind of jolt that has lately been all-too-rare at Oklahoma State.

But the Cowboys only mustered another three first downs before halftime. They trailed Houston 27-10 two minutes into the second half. With the program’s latest fall 2025 rout officially underway, Bradford and Eaton could see the home crowd beginning to file out of the stadium.

So Bradford pointed to an empty block of seats in Section 231, and offered up a sibling dare.

“We saw this completely empty section across from us,” Eaton recalled. “My sister goes, ‘I’ll give you 10 bucks if you go over there and take your shirt off.’ I said ‘Why not?’ The rest is history.”

It was a nervous walk to Section 231. Bradford recorded every step of her brother’s climb to the upper deck and made sure that the friends in the section around her paid attention, too.

When Eaton finally popped his shirt off and hoisted it above his head, Section 1 erupted.

“There was nothing to cheer for on the field at the time,” Bradford said. “So the people in the sections around us didn’t know why we were cheering. But slowly, everyone figured it out.”

Eaton wasn’t waving alone for very long before Luke Schneberger, an OSU student, approached him with a question: Could he join in? Soon, two became four, then six, then 10. After the stadium jumbotron flashed a shot of the expanding cluster of T-shirt-waving men, more fans raced over to join the party in Section 231, eventually overflowing into surrounding sections. In the final minutes of the game, a message flashed across the jumbotron: “New World Record (Probably) Most Shirtless Guys In A Section.”

“I thought maybe three or four people would join up and then one of us would get tired and leave and then would just die down,” Eaton said. “Waving that shirt gets really tiring.

“I think more than anything, people didn’t want to miss out on just having some fun. It was the biggest shirtless section of all time. So they were like, what the hell? Why not join it?”

📍Section 2-No Shirty-1, Stillwater, OK pic.twitter.com/k9FfAuUwfe

— Eli Lederman (@ByEliLederman) November 15, 2025

The television broadcast took notice. Social media did, too. Bradford’s phone started blowing up with texts from friends and family before Eaton got back to his original seat. Days later, a Texas-based apparel brand, “Uncle Bekah’s Inappropriate Trucker Hats,” dropped a line of Oklahoma State hats, including one featuring a silhouette of Eaton waving a T-shirt. He got some free merch.

Since then, fans on campuses including North Carolina, North Texas, UCLA, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest and Wisconsin have initiated their own shirtless sections. Another popped up at 3-7 Michigan State Saturday night. Eaton was particularly moved last weekend when a friend sent a clip of Hurricanes fans getting in on the act during a Week 11 win.

There’s dispute over the exact origins of the shirtless section craze. Indiana fans might have a rightful claim dating to an outburst during the Hoosiers’ 38-3 loss to Rutgers in Nov. 2021.

But in 2025, there’s no debate over where the movement reemerged.

“We’re a country school with a little bit of a rowdy side to it.” Bradford said. “Seeing our fans stay rowdy and loyal even though the team isn’t doing what we want them to do, I’m proud of that.”

DANIEL WANN IS a professor of psychology at Murray State. A devoted fan of Kentucky basketball who earned his PhD in social psychology at the University of Kansas, he has spent the past 35 years focused on the psychology of sports fandom.

Wann’s work has covered everything from superstitions to the consequences of excessive fandom to how different game start times affect fan’s moods. But his principle psychological curiosity lies in the simple question of why sports fans care so much and how fandom, above all else, meets many of our basic human needs. To Wann, Oklahoma State is a familiar case study.

“If you live on campus or in the town at Oklahoma State, by being a Cowboys fan, that’s going to help you meet the need to belong,” Wann said. “You don’t even need the team to be successful to be able to feel camaraderie and association with other fans regardless of the outcome. Fandom can still meet that need to belong. It also helps people meet the need for distinctiveness.”

In late September, weeks before Eaton peeled his shirt off in Section 231, Oklahoma State students Cy Barker, Hayden Andrews, Jake Goodman and Joel Sherman gathered in a house off-campus and debated that very concept, in a sense at least.

“We were sitting on a couch and one of us was like, ‘What’s something we could do for homecoming that would just be goofy?'” recalled Andrews, who studies aviation management.

Barker, Andrews, Goodman and Sherman belong to the same campus ministry and attend most Cowboys home games. They stormed the field together when Oklahoma State upset No. 9 Oklahoma in the final annual playing of the Bedlam Rivalry game in Nov. 2023. Since then, they’ve watched the program win just one of its past 18 games against conference opponents.

From their deliberations, overalls were deemed too expensive. Pajama onesies could get hot. Andrews had a banana suit from high school in his closet. Soon, the decision was settled.

The group pulled Tyler Blake, another ministry friend, in on the plan. And in the weeks leading up to Oklahoma State’s Oct. 18 homecoming visit from Cincinnati, they extended invites to members of six other campus ministries to join them.

“The vision was just kind of built around having a handful of dudes in banana suits at the game,” Goodman, a senior business student, said. “We didn’t plan on anything but that. Everything that followed just happened.”

On game day, the Peelers met on campus outside the Edmon Low Library. An initial group of just a few bananas quickly grew to 30 or so. Soon, there were nearly 100 of them. They marched to the stadium before kickoff alternating between church hymns and the Florida State “War Chant.” Like the shirtless fans seven days earlier, the banana-suited crew in Section 124 became the story as Oklahoma State tumbled to a 49-17 defeat.

Meanwhile, seven sections over and a stadium level up, Section 231 was bumping once again.

Eaton wasn’t on hand. But a collection of motivated fans enthusiastically took the baton, delivering a repeat performance of shirt-waving. At one point, that group included Oklahoma State women’s basketball coach Jacie Hoyt, who climbed into the upper deck wearing a T-shirt with the word “shirtless” written across the front. She had ordered it from Amazon that week.

“It was honestly the most fun I’ve had in years,” Hoyt told ESPN. “Those guys were just so fun and funny — truly loyal and true.”

Hoyt’s visit to the “2 NO-SHIRTY 1” crowd came just before halftime. Two hours later, the section became the site for a magical meeting of the minds.

As the Peelers’ conga snaked through the stands in the early minutes of the fourth quarter, their counterparts in the upper deck took notice. Soon, the Peelers themselves were being summoned to Section 231 while Oklahoma State’s shirtless devotees chanted a clear directive: “Take them off.”

Packed into Section 231, Pete’s Peelers, literally, peeled their costumes. Together, the two groups partied out the final minutes of the Cowboys’ second-worst conference loss of the season. “We had as much fun dressing up as bananas to watch a blowout as we did rushing the field when we beat Oklahoma,” Goodman said. “The score didn’t matter. We still had fun.”

FOR A MOMENT, the focus returns to the game. Down 7-6 with just under two minutes left in the third quarter, the Cowboys are driving deep into Kansas State territory. Not since Gundy’s final game, a 19-12 loss to Tulsa on Sept. 19, has Oklahoma State been this close to a win.

Section 231 is bursting with shirtless fans of all ages and, oddly, a fully clothed Batman. The Peelers are shouting below them.

Oklahoma State quarterback Zane Flores drops back to pass from the Wildcats’ 23-yard line. But tight end Carson Su’esu’e whiffs on a block and Kansas State defensive end Ryan Davis engulfs Flores to force a fumble. It’s one of three second-half turnovers within 25 yards of the end zone.

“Well, it’s over now,” says Blake, sliding the tip of his banana costume off his head.

Minutes later the Kool-Aid Man joins the Peelers. They sway together as Garth Brooks sings about friends in low places and chasing his blues away. They’ll be OK.

Like Pete’s Peelers, Eaton was back at Oklahoma State on Saturday for the first time since his October star turn. This time, he kept his shirt on (initially) and watched from the sideline.

Doug Meacham made sure of it.

Oklahoma State’s 60-year-old interim coach is an admirer of Eaton’s. Or at the very least, he’s a genuine appreciator of the juice those fans delivered this fall. “Our guys felt it,” Meacham said after the initial shirtless showing last month. “That was something.”

So Oklahoma State brought Bradford and Eaton back for Saturday’s game with sideline passes.

Meacham met them outside the stadium an hour before kickoff and personally escorted Eaton and Bradford onto the field, where they mingled with two legends of the 2011 Cowboys: Brandon Weeden and Justin Blackmon, the latter of whom joined the program’s ring of honor at halftime.

“I thought [Eaton] was some frat kid — it’s a 30-something-year-old. Hats off to him,” Meacham said of Eaton after Saturday’s loss. “I appreciated his enthusiasm and I wanted to reward them for getting the fans into it. You looked up today and they’re still up there getting after it. It’s pretty cool.”

Eaton and Bradford enjoyed their view from the sidelines. But a return to Boone Pickens Stadium called for a hero’s welcome. After halftime, Eaton climbed back to Section 231.

Despite a scoreless second half, the 2 NO-SHIRTY 1 vibes were high and the bleachers were packed. A child in the section recognized Eaton immediately and shouted his name, prompting a swarm of high-fives, fist bumps and photo requests from the group of shirtless shirt-wavers.

When Eaton finally got his own shirt off, he pulled out his phone for a selfie with the crowd around him. Later, a caption underneath the photo on a family text chain read: “My people.”