James Franklin addresses Drew Allar, who is returning to Penn State in 2025

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

While there are inevitable consequences, it should be a boon for Penn State to get back a quarterback who appears to have blossomed in the last few months of the season for another year in college. Therefore, Franklin and Co. excited to get more time with Allar and the chance to tap into even more potential.

“Again, Drew has been phenomenal,” Franklin said. “Mom and dad have been phenomenal. Had a ton of conversations. Had a ton of conversations. Obviously he’s doing a ton of really good things and he’s developing and he’s getting better and he’s playing great and he’s leading and I think there’s a lot of excitement because I think they think and we think there’s still a lot of room for growth and development. And we want to be a part of it and I think they have trust us in that, and obviously it’s been a ton of conversations with NFL GMs and scouts to be able to give NFL reports and information to our players about where they are and what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are, and how do we take that information, make a decision and then, when the season is over, spend time attacking the things that people view as weaknesses.”

Allar is in his third season at Penn State and the second full-time starter. In the past two seasons, he has made 26 starts. He took a big step forward in 2024, completing 69.1% of his passes for 2894 yards and 21 touchdowns with seven interceptions. In 2023, he completed 59.9% of his passes, but threw for 25 touchdowns.

The catch, it seems, for Penn State is that Allar’s return appears to have spurred the backup quarterback Beau Pribula to enter the NCAA Transfer Portal shortly before the Nittany Lions host SMU in the College Football Playoff.

That whole ordeal is something Franklin addressed when discussing Allar’s return on Tuesday, Dec. 17. But on Wednesday, days before playing SMU, Franklin said he was done addressing that specific topic for now.

“Obviously, Drew announcing that he’s coming back is great and we couldn’t be more excited about that. And then, as you can imagine, that played into the decision as well,” Franklin said of the Pribula transfer .” Then again, you ask a good question, but it’s hard because I would love to give both subjects and both people the respect and appreciation they deserve. But literally, this could have been the entire press conference where we talked about these two topics.”