James Franklin’s arrogance always outstripped his accomplishments. That’s why Penn State fired him.

James Franklin once told a radio show, “I’ve been saying it for a long time: I will not hire an assistant coach until I’ve seen his wife. If she looks the part, and she’s a D-I recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That’s part of the deal.”

Two years later, Penn State hired him anyway.

They knew what they were getting.

Franklin always reminded me of good old Freddie Mitchell, early Jeffrey Lurie, and continual Joel Embiid.

His arrogance always outstripped his accomplishments.

There was some winning, true, and Penn State is 3-3 this season, and so they could be worse. But there also were buckets of bluster and loads of disrespect, and now, in the middle of a season, after back-to-back huge upsets and three losses in a row, and after years of grumbling from a massive fan base, he’s been fired.

On consecutive weekends, Franklin lost at UCLA, which was 0-4 at the time; then, on Saturday, he lost to Northwestern, on Homecoming Weekend, and got booed off the Beaver Stadium field. Asked afterward if he still wanted to coach at Penn State, then asked if he thought it best for him if he remained, Franklin, with typical conceit, avoided answering both questions.

He knew the end was coming. He knew he’d reap what he’d sown.

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Some college football and basketball coaches have the good sense to sow their fields with a few acts of decency and goodwill, so when hard times come, and they always will, they will have bounty in reserve to survive disappointment and failure. From yesteryear, Nittany Lions legend Joe Paterno comes to mind. Today, Kansas basketball’s Bill Self is that guy.

In his 12 years in Happy Valley, Franklin sowed nothing but nettles. Well, nettles, and a $48 million buyout. His dismissal went beyond the bad losses and the playoff exclusions.

Last year, after losing to visiting Ohio State in November, Franklin was caught on tape challenging a heckler postgame.

This was typical.

In 2018, he had to be restrained from attacking a Penn State student who questioned his play-calling. In 2017, he called a last-minute timeout to ice the Georgia State kicker in a 56-0 win. After Pitt upset the mighty Nits in 2016, Penn State won in 2017, and Franklin said, “For their win last year, it was like winning the Super Bowl. For us this year, it was like beating Akron,” thereby insulting both Pitt and Akron.

It is his brand. Penn State knew what it was getting.

» READ MORE: ‘It was time’: Penn State players and fans react to James Franklin’s firing

Franklin first advertised his sexism in a 2012 interview with a Nashville radio station when he was a rising coaching star at Vanderbilt. This was years before the #metoo movement, but even back when Eli Manning was winning Super Bowls, that was a shocking dose of misogyny.

Some of the folks who’d known him as a quarterback at Neshaminy High and East Stroudsburg University — then as an assistant at 10 spots along the way, as well as NFL internships that included the Eagles — some of those folks cringed.

Some of the folks who’d known him in those days — including some of my NFL contacts, as well as some of his high school and college classmates — those folks were not surprised in the least. That, they said, was just the tip of the iceberg.

Granted, no sport has ever featured the worst of mankind like big-time college football, which is why I avoid covering it and why I pointedly don’t cover Penn State. Franklin was not the worst of the worst. He also recruited like Uncle Sam in wartime, and he beat most of the patsies, and he brought Penn State to the brink, but, as his firing attests, he never reached the summit.

And there always seemed to be that one, careless loss.

There was the Week 2 upset to Pitt in 2016; the midseason loss to Illinois in 2021; the 2017 home loss to Ohio State, where they blew a 15-point fourth-quarter lead; and then, back-to-back collapses against vastly inferior opponents.

How vastly?

According to Franklin, before this season:

“This is the best combined personnel that I think we’ve had at Penn State.”

Well, maybe, except for the head coach.

Franklin leaves Penn State with a 4-10 record against top-10 teams, a 6-6 record in bowl games and one appearance in the College Football Playoffs, winning two games last year before losing to Notre Dame, whose program and coach he’d manage to insult, to his face, the day before the game, in which Penn State blew 10-point and seven-point leads. From 2015-19, Franklin coached teams that featured either Saquon Barkley, the NFL’s best running back or Micah Parsons, the NFL’s best edge rusher. Those teams lost three of five bowl games.

Such promise. Such arrogance. Such disappointment.

Philly has seen this sort of thing before. Mitchell. Lurie. Embiid.

“FredEx,” you might recall, was the Eagles receiver who garnered that nickname after catching a pass in the playoffs to convert a 4th-and-26. He also once said, “I’d just like to thank my hands for being so great.” The Eagles drafted Mitchell in the first round in 2001. He was out of football four years later.

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Before Mitchell’s third season, Lurie, the Eagles’ owner, said, “When I’m talking to other owners or other GMs in the league, we’re kind of the gold standard.” Lurie was referencing the Eagles’ groundbreaking front-office policies and salary-cap manipulation, but for an owner of a historically moribund franchise whose team had won just one conference title in its existence, the claim seemed outrageous. The “Gold Standard” Eagles won just six playoff games in the next 14 seasons. (Lurie has since been to four Super Bowls and has won two).

And, of course, “The Process.”

Before he’d played one minute in the NBA, Embiid, who missed his first two seasons to injury, hijacked that catchphrase for the Sixers’ foolhardy strategy of losing for several years in a row to compile assets from which to build a dynasty. Embiid, notorious for his self-aggrandizement, Twitter feuds, and general bullying, is the only vestige of that disastrous plan.

“The Process” has never even reached the Eastern Conference final, Embiid has played about half the games for which he’s been paid, and the team is on its third coach in seven years and its fifth president/GM of Embiid’s 12 seasons.

Mitchell never got it, but Lurie learned. Joel might, too. Franklin’s only 53. He’ll coach again.

Let’s see if he can change his act.