Franco awarded 300th win

Wins as co-coach at BG count towards career record

Although John Franco recorded landmark victories No. 100 and 200 at Tyrone, you’d be hard-pressed to recall the precise games and dates when they happened.

That was very much by design. Never one for touting personal achievements, Franco himself didn’t do much to celebrate the wins. As just single games in seasons where his teams had lofty goals, they weren’t that important, and he never really saw the point in it.

But, even the stoic Franco had to admit reaching 300 career wins would have been a nice milestone to reach. However, his retirement from Tyrone in January put that goal in serious jeopardy.

A recent calculation adjustment changed that, and placed Franco among the highest-winning coaches in the commonwealth.

“It was always a goal of mine, but it was one of those ones I was uncomfortable to talk about because you’re always trying to get team, team, team,” Franco said. “I guess in a way that’s a team goal, but I was always uncomfortable talking about it.”

When he stepped down, Franco had logged 291 total victories, 230 of which came at Tyrone. That meant he was essentially one good season away from achieving something few coaches in Pennsylvania have achieved.

The Pennsylvania Football News lists just 23 coaches who have hit the 300 career wins mark.

An adjustment made to account for Franco’s time as a co-head coach at Bishop Guilfoyle was enough to push him past the magic number and into the elite grouping of PA coaches.

Franco was an assistant at his high school alma mater in the mid-1980s before becoming the head coach at Altoona, but during the 1985 season he was officially recognized and paid as a co-head coach with Tom Irwin. That season, the Marauders went 11-2 and won the District 6 2A championship.

With that in mind, John’s wife Sue and his brother Scott, who is a sports writer at the Altoona Mirror, began to do some research. Ultimately, a discussion with Rob Irwin, who heads up the Central PA Football Coaches Association (CPFCA), indicated that the PIAA keeps no official record of coaching wins and losses, so there is no official policy on how to count co-head coaching victories. Instead, those decisions are left up to local coaching associations and other keepers of records, like coaching associations and media outlets.

The most comprehensive list of PA coaching wins is curated by the Pennsylvania Football News.

Longtime high school football reporter Billy Splain, who took over the Football News in 2018, said he does, in fact, count co-couching wins towards career records, and and he confirmed Friday he would count the wins from BG towards Franco’s record.

That carries heavy weight considering his site’s list is the list of record, frequently footnoted elsewhere when coaching records are cited. He has been compiling coaching records since 2000.

The wins push Franco’s career record to 302-153-2.

“When I started coaching years ago, and I saw a couple guys around the state get to 300, I honestly thought, ‘There’s no way I’m ever going to get to do that,” Franco said. “I remember hitting 200 when I was at Tyrone the first time, and I thought, ‘This is pretty neat.’ There’s a good goal for you (300 wins), but it’s also a personal goal.”

Franco said Tom Irwin encouraged him to take on the role of a co-head coach in the 80s because he knew Franco had aspirations of being a singular head coach one day, and it was his experience at BG that helped him land the job at Altoona in 1986.

There, Franco won 40 games and captured a 4A District 6 title in 1988, but after losing in the 4A title game in 1992 and 1993 he was fired. Though he planned to take a year off, boosters from Tyrone approached him about applying for the head coaching job in Tyrone, which had been held by Tom Miller.

The position was opened up at the end of the 1993 season when Tyrone finished 5-5, which was a significant improvement over previous seasons. From 1989 through the early part of 1993, the Eagles were mired in a string of losing that saw the team go 4-38 and drop 19 consecutive games at one point.

Franco’s first team in 1994 duplicated the 5-5 finish, but by the following season he had the horses and an established culture of expectations. That group went 12-2 and won the District 6 2A championship, ultimately advancing to the PIAA final four.

A year later in 1996, the Eagles repeated as District 6 champions and lost in the PIAA championship game to Mount Carmel. Another District title followed in 1997, and by 1999 Franco had Tyrone back in the state championship, again facing Mount Carmel. This time, the Golden Eagles outlasted the Red Tornadoes, winning 13-6 to claim the first PIAA football crown in Blair County history.

By 2011, Franco had set the record for coaching wins at Tyrone and played in the PIAA championship three times. His teams from 2004 through 2008 established the school record for consecutive regular season wins at 35.

He departed Tyrone following the 2011 season to return to Altoona and made appearances at St. Joseph’s Academy and Penn Cambria before returning to coach in the borough in 2019. Over the last seven seasons, he guided Tyrone to the District 6 championship game twice.

In the end, Franco accumulated 230 wins at Tyrone to go along with eight District 6 championships. He is the program’s all-time leader in wins, seasons coached (25), 10-wn seasons (14), and unbeaten regular seasons (7). As recently as 2023, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Central Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Football Foundation College Football Hall of Fame.

When he was initially brought on at Tyrone, the April 13, 1994 edition of the Daily Herald in Tyrone actually listed a 50-20-1 record at BG as part of Franco’s record, but Franco said most of those wins came before be was being paid as a co-head coach. His official time as a paid co-coach, he said, started in 1985.