James Franklin speaks on Drew Allar’s return to Penn State in 2025

One of the bigger quarterback dominoes to fall ahead of the 2025 NFL Draft and college football season was Penn State Drew Allar decides to return to school. And it’s a move by the head coach James Franklin is totally excited about it.

While there are inevitable knock-on consequences, getting a quarterback who seemingly blossomed in the final months of the season back for another year of college should be a blessing for Penn State. Therefore, Franklin and Co. are looking forward to spending more time with Allar and exploiting even more potential.

“Drew was phenomenal once again,” Franklin said. “Mom and Dad were phenomenal. Had a lot of conversations. Had a lot of conversations. Obviously he’s doing a lot of really good things, he’s continuing to develop, he’s getting better, he’s playing great and he’s leading and I think there’s a lot of excitement because I think they and we think there’s still a lot There is room for growth and development. And we want to be a part of that, and I think they trust us to do that, and obviously there’s been a lot of conversations with NFL GMs and scouts to be able to provide our players with NFL reports and information on where and how they’re at Their strengths and weaknesses and how do we use that information, make a decision, and then once the season is over, spend time addressing the things that people see as weaknesses.”

Allar is in his third season at Penn State and second as a full-time starter. In the last two seasons he made 26 appearances. He took a big step forward in 2024, completing 69.1% of his passes for 2,894 yards and 21 touchdowns with seven interceptions. In 2023, he completed 59.9% of his passes but threw 25 touchdowns.

The rub for Penn State seems to be that Allar’s return appears to have spurred the backup quarterback Beau Pribula just before hosting the Nittany Lions enter the NCAA transfer portal SMU in the College Football Playoff.

Franklin addressed this entire ordeal when discussing Allar’s return on Tuesday, December 17th. But on Wednesday, a few days before he played SMU, Franklin said he was done dealing with that particular topic for now.

“Obviously Drew’s announcement that he’s coming back is great and we couldn’t be more excited about it. And as you can imagine, that also played a role in the decision,” Franklin said about Pribula’s transfer. “So again you’re asking a great question, but it’s difficult because I would like to give both issues and both people the respect and appreciation they deserve. But literally it could have been the entire press conference talking about these two issues.”