Manny Diaz did not last long on the college football coaching free agent market. The former Miami Hurricanes head coach was hired as the new Penn State defensive coordinator Dec. 11, replacing the outgoing Brent Pry, who took the head job at Virginia Tech.
The opportunity was there for the taking and Diaz said he was bought into the vision with the Nittany Lions. He credited head coach James Franklin for selling him.
“Yeah, boy, last week was a whirlwind,” Diaz said during an in-house interview on PSU’s National Signing Day streaming show, via Lions247. “The days, they all seem to run together.” Diaz added that the opportunity to coach at Penn State was difficult to pass up.
“To coach defense at Penn State, to coach linebackers at Penn State, that’s uncommon,” Diaz said. “People work in this profession their entire lives, and wish they had the chance to coach here and especially to coach defense and linebackers.
And the more we spoke and (I heard) what (Franklin’s) vision was, and how he operated and the values that he was about, I think we found that we were aligned. There was already an alignment defensively, and it sort of ticked all the boxes.”
