In many ways fans won't really know how good a coach James Franklin is until Penn State is good enough for his decisions and coaching to make a difference beyond simply putting the team in position to not get blown out each and every week. That'll happen when his coaching can be the difference between Big Ten titles and being a few plays away.

Like Gadowsky, keeping things afloat wasn't what Franklin was hired to do.

He was hired to win.

That kind of objective, especially one that comes on the tail end of what Penn State has been through takes time. It, like all good things, is the result of a process and the kind of work that moves mountains over years not during bye weeks. Franklin may not be here to save Penn State football for someone else, but he can't get from Point A to Point B without his own bits of reconstructive surgery.

Even so, as Penn State hobbled through this season there is a small frustration tucked away within Franklin, someone who reads everything and knows that fans are unhappy that their four million dollar man couldn't snap his fingers and make everything okay. Franklin found himself stuck between trying to educate everyone on the program's issues while trying to coach a team and convince his players that they can win each and every week.

It's a dance that requires equal parts honesty and the somewhat obligatory blind optimism that makes a team believe that you believe in them no matter who you're playing.

Standing on the indoor practice fields only days prior to Penn State's loss to Michigan State, Franklin smiled as he was asked about any frustration he feels. Even a supremely confident man can be irked by the incessant criticism that things aren't getting better fast enough.

"Do I get frustrated at times?," Franklin said. "Yeah. That's natural. I understand it, that's part of it. One of our greatest strengths is our alumni and our fan base. When times are tough those same fanatical fans, they're frustrated. And I understand that. I've said this before, we all stick together in this community like we have and we keep pulling the rope in the same direction and take that negative energy and funnel it into positive energy all together, the sky is the limit for us."

"But I also understand that what we've done in the past at other places, that doesn't matter here. People want to see it with their own eyes, they want to experience it themselves. But us as a staff, we've been through this before. We'll get that credibility with the fans and the community over time."

Early in his tenure Franklin said it may take nearly three years to get familiar with the town, the community and what the program had and what it could do. That time will be spent getting ready, getting settled and getting prepared.

That's really the key to it all. Time. Penn State was never going to change in a heartbeat. Two decades of occasional relevance wasn't going to suddenly change and neither was a team whose limitations have been repeated so many times that they may as well read as a footnote on the broadcast of every game.

What might read as an apologist poem for Franklin is hardly anything but. Penn State's season can be viewed through two very different lenses. Either Franklin and his staff are failures, unprepared and unequipped to win at a major college football program -- or -- this season is simply the opening phase of a process predicated on the belief that winning at a school that hasn't done a lot of it in recent years simply takes time.

That success isn't always as simple as the loss on the board and the stats of a 19-year old quarterback who will probably never live up to his own unreasonable hype.

"It is the wins. It is the statistics. It is watching the guys improve their foot work and their fundamentals." Franklin said. "It is watching the staff work together and be creative and bounce ideas off each other and challenge one another. It is recruiting. It is selling out the game against Temple and showing everybody in this country that we're headed in the right direction and we have an unrivaled fan base. It's all of those things.

"That's kind of what I'm looking at. That's why I wake up every morning, do a backhand spring out of bed and am excited about what we're doing. That's why I can come into the press conference after the game and have my chest up and my chin up because I know where we're going and I know what we're doing. It may not be as obvious to people on the scoreboard. It may not be as obvious to people in the statistics. But I see. I see the foundation being laid. I see the attitudes. I see the hard work that's going in. I get the academic report every morning.

"Did all 125 guys go to class and were they there on time and were they prepared? Coach Galt's staff comes up and talks about how hard they're working at this point in the season. And we lift harder during the season than they have in the past. And how are they approaching that? It's talking to our training staff and how the guys' energy is when they're getting their ankles taped and getting ready for practice. It's all those little things. So would we all love for it, like I said after the game, for us to go out and win the game 173 to ‑10 and would everybody be excited about that? Yeah. But it doesn't work like that. So to me, I think the point you're making is a good one.

"It's not just the stats, it's everything that goes into it that I am fortunate enough to see. Because my linebacker coach is focused on his world of linebackers. The offensive coordinator is just focused on offense and so on and so forth. So what I get to do is hear information from all those people, as well as look at it all and feel very comfortable with kind of where we're going and what we're doing and how we're doing it, and the type of people we're doing it with."

It may turn out in the end that Franklin isn't the man to move Penn State football in the direction it wants to go.

But by the most reasonable estimations the only thing that will answer that question is time.

Lots of it.