James Franklin said that he was not looking to take recruits from any particular school, but he just wanted to target prospects that he had already built relationships with. And the Hokies coach probably wasn't lying.
Just because many of them were committed to Penn State? Well, that's just the way these things work out sometimes. The fact that Franklin was able to convince many of those former Nittany Lions commits to follow him to another school where he had no hired staff outside himself, says more about those relationships than him specifically targeting the school that fired him in mid-October.