Imagine being a college football coach.

A college football coach in charge of a Power 5 school. You get there, and you know the school isn’t historically great, but you improve upon its recruiting classes over the years and you start bringing in better players.

Cool, right?

Then you switch jobs to an even bigger Power 5 school and upgrade their recruiting classes over the years. People say that you and your coaching staff are great recruiters.

Awesome, no?

Not according to Penn State coach James Franklin. During his weekly radio show, here’s what he had to say about being called a good recruiter:

“It’s interesting — all the way back to my time at Vanderbilt and when I first came to Penn State — kind of the story was that we were good recruiters,” Franklin said. “And to be honest with you, I think that’s a little bit of a slight, and kind of bothers me sometimes.

“At Vanderbilt, we recruited at a higher level than they’d ever recruited before,” he added. “But who did we really beat? Were we beating Alabama for recruits? Probably not.”

Franklin has a point. Just because he got Vanderbilt a couple of better recruiting classes didn’t mean he was beating out the elite teams for recruits. And, what about player development?

Is his success just tied to how he does better than the average collegiate coach in a high school student-athlete’s home?

“Coming to Penn State, we were able to have some pretty good recruiting classes — top 25 classes — our first couple of years,” Franklin said. “But not what we’ve done the last couple years. And we were able to win a Big Ten championship a few years back with really not the recruits or the recruiting rankings of the teams we were playing with.”

What does Franklin believe he truly does best?

“I actually think that’s the thing we do the best, we develop our players,” he said. “And now when you combine the development with also starting to recruit at a little higher level, I think we have a really good recipe for success and building and moving forward.”

There you go. If you’re truly a good coach, it’s not about just bringing in better players to your program. You have to coach them up to play as a team and get the best out of them in order to better utilize their talents.

So far at Penn State, Franklin has done one heck of a job at doing just that.