STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – It's 6:15 a.m. and I'm walking into the Penn State football offices on an April morning during the meat of spring practice. As I walk into the head coach's suite, I pass a wall with portrait-style pictures of every head coach the program has had since 1930. It's a six-picture display.

On this morning, I'm sitting down with James Franklin, the last face in that small montage. As I walk into the office, rap music blasts from speakers on his desk, out onto his balcony. As we sit down, Franklin turns the volume down on the music, but not so much that we can't have a soundtrack to our conversation. Drake starts us off.

Young but I'm making millions to work the night shift

The Lasch Football Building houses the Penn State coaches' offices. It was a building constructed under Joe Paterno back in 1998. When Franklin arrived in 2014, one of his first orders of business was updating it. The bones of the building are the same and other than a new hydrotherapy room, an expanded equipment room and an in-house nutrition center, not much has changed functionally. There is still work to be done, but from the signage to the graphical presentations, to the space age locker room, the building pops like it's brand new.

The same can be said for the entire program.

Aside from the facility facelift, Franklin successfully revived a flailing offense with a new offensive coordinator in Joe Moorhead and his high-flying spread system. He's got the program recruiting with the best of the best, currently ranked No. 3 nationally. He won a Big Ten Championship and led Penn State to its first 10-win season since 2009.

But before making those tweaks to one of college football's most established and static programs, Franklin had to make some tweaks to his own approach.

My life in Nashville has coincided with the tenures of nine Vanderbilt coaches. None generated the kind of impact Franklin was able to. He accomplished things on West End that haven't been done in the modern history of Commodores football. The back-to-back nine win seasons were remarkable, the three straight bowl appearances were unprecedented but perhaps most impressive of all was that Franklin's energetic, in-your-face persona brought Vanderbilt a level of local and even national notoriety that it hadn't had since the early 1900s.

"I think it was strategic and it was intentional especially at Vanderbilt," Franklin says. "It was like we were going to demand people's respect and we were going to fight for it around every corner. I don't know if that's something we planned to do but it was obvious that that was something that needed to be done. To be honest with you it probably identified the whole program.”

Penn State is experiencing a different iteration of Franklin. He's the same coach and person at his core but like the Lasch Building where we sit, he's updated to fit his environment.

“Here it's just a different animal,” Franklin says. “This is a place that's the complete opposite in terms of history, in terms of tradition, in terms of facility, in terms of support. I'm not a guy that can ever not be me. I have to be me. I think to be honest with you anybody that wants to be successful has to stay true to who they are.

“But I do think that all these schools and all these campuses are sophisticated and they're specific. Although you can take a model and a plan from school X and bring it to school Z. it still has to be tweaked to that specific place."

Unlike at Vanderbilt where he was the face of the program, Franklin has let Beaver Stadium take center stage in Happy Valley. In Nashville, Franklin could turn to the athletic director and two primary boosters to get things done. At Penn State, there's a vast network to streamline. Even his rhetoric has had to undergo some conditioning.

“There's so many people and being able to figure out how to get things done within the Penn State model … it's just a different challenge,” Franklin says. “That's probably been one of the things that I had to figure out: how to navigate the campus, how to navigate the community. … Things that maybe I have said in the past — they don't really have an appetite for here. The core values of what I believe in and what we're doing are not changing. But there's subtle intricacies that you're going to have to understand and navigate."

Drake continues.

I feel like they wanna see me learn the hard way, But you know I always handle that one my way.

"You know, when Billy got the job they were still on VHS tapes," Franklin says early in our conversation.

Billy is Bill O'Brien, current Houston Texans head coach and Franklin's predecessor in State College. In a digital college football age full of iPads, instantly available cut-ups and on-demand film study, O'Brien ushered Penn State out of the VHS era about a decade later than most.

Franklin coached with O'Brien while the two were together at Maryland. He estimates that the two spoke 10 times before he took the job. Though O'Brien helped soften the transition from an old school coach like Joe Paterno to a decidedly modern coach like Franklin, there was no misconception about the growing pains that he faced, especially given the lingering cloud of NCAA sanctions.

"The challenge here is how do you hold on to the history and traditions and be really respectful of those things because they're so ingrained in who we are but also be able to push people and to push the program into 2017, 2018 and into the present and the current?” he says. “Making it sexy to kids that have grown up in this generation. That's a hard thing to do to try to balance the two and I think we're starting to really find that fine line."

As Franklin has begun to find that balance, his program is beginning to thrive.

MVP, MVP, oh-nine all the way to sixteen. Even next season looking like a breeze. Lot of y'all ain't built for the league, yeah.

After a 16-14 start to his career at Penn State, Franklin's team has won eight of its last nine games. He returns his starting quarterback in Trace McSorley, a gritty, athletic passer that may be the best quarterback in the Big Ten. He returns a probable first-round pick in running back Saquon Barkley. Either could be in NYC for the Heisman ceremony in December. He returns a defense that is strong up the middle led by linebacker Jason Cabinda and safety Marcus Allen. He also has 17 able bodies on an offensive line that had seven scholarship players when he arrived in 2014.

The roster is as deep and talented as it has been at Penn State in a decade. There's a foundation in place for success beyond last season and beyond even next season. Security is returning to Happy Valley.

If you include the interim tag (Tom Bradley, after Paterno was fired, and Larry Johnson, after O’Brien left for the NFL), the school with five head coaches in 84 years made Franklin its fifth coach in 27 months. There was some stabilizing that needed to take place with his arrival. To accomplish that, there was some trust that needed to be earned.

Jordan Smith has been there all along. The first commitment to Bill O’Brien after the NCAA announced sanctions following the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Smith has experienced the transition of 3 of those 5 coaches and yet stuck it out to be a critical piece of the Penn State secondary as a senior in 2016.

“When you get a new coaching staff, the first thing they try to do is they try to set the culture and what they want to be,” Smith said. “When Coach Franklin first got there he tried to set a standard. He had the standard. He was very hard on the standard. And after that and everybody got the standard, he started lightening up he started smiling more and being very personal.”

"I think what we had [at Vanderbilt], we had buy-in," Franklin says. "It was 100 percent buy-in very early on into what we were doing and it took us a little bit longer to get that here. I think that's the difference between taking over a program that had gone 2-10 two years in a row before we arrived compared to a program that had had some level of success. And then on top of that, one of the things that I think has been a challenge, for players it's always a challenge, is I'm doing it so different than the way Billy did. I'm doing it so different than the way Joe did it. There was so much change in such a short period of time and that's hard."

Smith felt that cultural shift as well.

“I would say that the only thing that you saw a major difference in was the coaching styles and the culture,” Smith said. “Coach O’Brien had a more NFL mindset and everything was all business. He treated us like we were professionals and NFL players already. We pretty much ran the things that we do. We had to be a man and do those type of things. With coach Franklin’s style it was more that he wanted to build a more family environment.”

Even as he began to win over his team, there were doubters from the outside. Two 7-win seasons and a 2-2 start to 2016 placed Franklin on some ‘hot seat’ lists around the country. Fans began to get restless. His personality — some referred to it as a shtick — was characterized as a bad fit for the Big Ten and Penn State.

That all seems pretty comical now.

Franklin has the buy-in. He's got a roster of guys he's recruited and guys he's gone to battle with. After a surprising Big Ten championship run, they're now battle-tested themselves. The entire coaching staff returns from last year’s 10-win season.

“This team is going to be scary,” Smith said. “The reason I say this team is going to be scary is they haven't had to deal with any coaching changes this season. Last season it was coach Moorhead's first year. Last season it was coach [Defensive coordinator Brent Pry]'s first season. They had to deal with the change. This team doesn't have to deal with the change like how me or the other players had to go through. That's why this team is going to be scary. They already know the foundation. They know the culture. All they have to do is enhance their ability.”

As Franklin and Penn State head into its 2017 season, there's a confidence that surrounds the program and with that confidence comes a new challenge for the famously hard-to-please Franklin: managing success and continuing to embrace a blue-collar persona.

“A lot of teams, what our fans and our administration think is, ‘OK, we're here,’” Franklin says. “Well, no, we still have a lot of heavy lifting to do, scratching and clawing to get to where we want to be consistently. We still have a long way to go and you look at the teams that we want to compete with, they've been doing these types of things consistently, winning at this level consistently, recruiting at this level consistently, and we haven’t."

As our conversation ends, Drake has given way to Kanye West.

Screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it. I guess every superhero needs his theme music.