A little more than six years ago, James Franklin and Ryan Silverfield sat at the same table, eyeing something both men very much wanted to pull out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
For Silverfield, taking home the Cotton Bowl Trophy would have been a big sign that he’d arrived in his first game as a college head coach. Mike Norvell had just left for Florida State and it was up to his former offensive coordinator to keep the flame burning for No. 17 Memphis after the program’s first 12-win season.
Franklin, on the other hand, had already been around the block plenty of times as the head man at both Vanderbilt and Penn State.