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Jay Paterno currently heads Blue Line 409 LLC, which runs ventures in business, television, radio, public speaking, and consults on philanthropy, social media and public relations and marketing.

Since 2020, he has consulted in college sports and notably was one of the nation's first consultants in the new era of name, image and likeness for college student athletes.

In 2022, he co founded Penn State's NIL collective success with Honor to coordinate NIL efforts for all of Penn State's 31 sports teams.

Jay is the best selling author of Paternal Legacy, Enduring Lessons from the Life and Death of My Father.

He followed that up with the 2020 novel Hot Seat a year inside college football's pressure cooker, and in September of 2024 he wrote Blitzed the All Out Pressure of College Football's New Era, the sequel to Hot seat.

Jay spent 22 seasons coaching, including 17 years on the Penn State staff.

In March of 2011 he was named the Big Ten's best quarterbacks coach, while in 2008 he was recognized among the year's best offensive coordinators.

Penn State's 2008 spread HD offense ranked in the top 10 in Big Ten history in yards, points and scoring average.

In 2017, he was elected to Penn State's board of trustees, receiving the highest number of votes among all candidates, and was selected by 77% of all voters.

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Be prepared with a notebook and pen as you listen to this episode with Jay Paterno, member of the Penn State Board of Trustees and author of the book Blitzed the All Out Pressure of College Football's New Era.

Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast.

It's Mike Linzing here without my co host Jason Sunkel tonight, but I am pleased to welcome from the world of football, Jay Paterno.

Jay, welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast.

Good to be here.

Excited to have you on, Jay.

Looking forward to diving into the wild and crazy world that is college athletics today in this new day and age with Nil and the Portal and everything else that's going on.

But want to start by going back to your experiences as a kid growing up as the son of legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno.

What that relationship was like, how that impacted you and your siblings in terms of athletics.

And just tell me what it was like growing up, growing, growing up in a household with a coach as famous as your dad.

Well, it's hard to compare it to anything else because it's the only thing I knew.

But, but, you know, it's, it's like anything else in life.

There were great, there were things that were really positive about it and there were things that had drawbacks.

So, you know, we got to experience a lot of things and have a lot of life experiences vicariously through what was going on at Penn State, certainly.

But at the same time, there were times where he was gone for four and five days.

Back then, guys, coaches weren't traveling around in private planes.

They were in cars recruiting and recruiting.

Matt leaving Sunday night, coming back Thursday night, and then hosting recruits Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then leaving again even for head coaches back then.

So, so, you know, with everything, there were some really good things about it.

But, you know, my mom did an unbelievable job kind of keeping the house together.

My dad, when he was there, you know, which was, you know, it's not like an absentee dad.

And it's not like he was deployed to the Middle east for.

For six months at a time.

So I don't want to sound like a whining, but, I mean, there were.

There were times that he missed things.

But, you know, when he was there, he was.

He was invested, and he was a great father and set just some great examples for all of us, both myself, two brothers and two sisters.

When you think about just your path through athletics and the impact that.

The influence of your dad and even your mom, what was your.

What was your athletic experience like as a kid growing up with a father as famous as your dad?

Well, you know, I remember, you know, playing Little league baseball was the first time we really saw it.

And, you know, my dad would get to like, one or two games out of the, you know, 15 or 20 of them because, you know, just there was, you know, in May, you're recruiting and things like that, so.

But when he'd show up, you know, all of a sudden there'd be this kind of buzz, and people would be running over to him and everything.

So he tried to stay away from it because he didn't want to draw away from us, which was, you know, it.

It bothered him.

You know, like, he would say later on he regretted doing that, but he also knew that he didn't want to become a distraction to not just me, but to the kids on my team and.

And.

And things like that.

So he was always cognizant of that.

But, you know, my mom and dad's attitude towards athletics was, if you want to do it, do it.

If you don't want to do it, don't think you have to do it because you're supposed to or we want you to or whatever.

And I think that's.

You know, I had.

I had four kids that played college lacrosse, and I've taken that attitude with them all along.

It's like, look, this is a one, this is a one, two, not a have to.

And I think that parents.

If there's one advice I would give to parents all the time, it's, you know, if they want to do it, they'll do it.

And my parents were that way with me, and it just happened to be.

That's what I wanted to do.

I wanted to play football, and I wanted to coach football, and I wanted to get into that kind of career for myself.

And that just happened organically.

As you got more serious about the game of football, how much was your dad involved in your career in terms of guiding you, doing things with you on the field?

Trying to make you a better football player, let's say, while you're in middle school, high school.

How much influence is he having sort of on your development as a player?

He stayed completely out of it, which he surprised me because he said, look, your coaches are doing their job.

They're telling you what they want.

I don't want you going in there and say, well, my dad says this and my dad says that because it's not fair to them.

And, and he goes, and probably goes, they might know more about what you need than I do.

But he kind of stayed out of it other than just to say, you know, it's funny because just in talking to parents of kids that are in youth sports and things, you know, because I went to all these, you know, these tournaments on the weekends for lacrosse and you'd hear these parents get into kids faces and whatever and you know, the AAU basketball, when we used to recruit guys that played both football and basketball and you'd hear horror stories, you know, from AAU basketball and you know, they did some research, research in College of Health and Human Development here at Penn State.

And one of the things they asked kids was, what do you want to hear from your parents after they watch you play?

And they said overwhelmingly, the answer was, I really enjoyed watching you play.

Win or lose, didn't matter, competition didn't matter.

Like they wanted to know that you as a parent enjoyed seeing them play.

And they, and they said it's.

That's just a lost art now.

And my parents kind of took that approach with us.

Yeah, it's a difficult one to take.

I mean, I will say that I have kids who've played a variety of different sports, and I say this all the time, that I know what the right thing is to do, which is what you just exactly described.

And yet at the same time, I know how difficult that sometimes can be even for someone like myself or like you, who kind of grew up around it.

You know what that's like.

It still sometimes is hard as a parent to dial it back and say, wow, just wish that they would do X or I think I can help them with why.

And yet to your point, right, Most kids, especially not at the heat of the moment, they always say the car ride home, right, Jay?

That that's the worst time.

That's what kids dread, is they're going to get in the car with mom or they're going to get in the car with dad and they're just going to get critiqued.

And it's, it's not going to go the way as a kid anticipated or hoped that it would.

And so I know in my own life, I've had to really be conscious of.

I've got to dial that desire to give advice and critique and help in my mind to my kids.

I really have to watch and do that.

It sounds like your parents did a.

Did a really good job of modeling that for you, and then you were able to do that with your own kids.

And I'm sure that passing along that legacy is a valuable one that I'm sure your kids certainly have appreciated, and they'll.

They'll probably pass along to theirs as well.

Yeah.

One of the four kids I have that play college, across one still in college, and he plays goalie.

And that is.

Oh, my God, that is.

That is the worst.

It's like you'd be happy if they never got a shot on goal, you know, all right.

You know, they're God.

But.

But at the same token, you don't know how good he's going to be until he faces a lot of, you know, good shots.

So, like, it's.

So I still.

I'm always down by myself.

I don't talk to anybody.

I don't say a word.

And, you know, like you said the car ride home, we were at a tournament in Maryland in high school, and he just.

It was one of those days, you know, where you just sometimes, you know, golfers have a day where they can't keep in the fairway, and goalie has a day in lacrosse where they just can't seem to find it.

And he got in the car, and I didn't say a word.

He said, you're not going to say anything?

I said, no.

I said, we're going to go home and pretend this week it never happened, if you're okay with that.

He goes, yes, I'm okay with that.

Dan.

It's so funny when.

When you talk about just going and watching the games and standing off in the corner.

I always do that.

That's what I. I want to sit away from people.

I don't want to hear commentary.

I don't want.

I just want to be alone by my thoughts.

And then, of course, my wife, a lot of times wants to sit by friends or other parents.

I'm like, do we really have to.

You know, it depends on which one of us is guiding the seating chart as to who gets to make the decision about who sits.

Who sits where.

And I'll tell you another funny story, Jay, that when I was a kid, or this is oh, this was probably like five, six years ago that I was talking to my dad and I said, you know, I really like going and watching my kids play, his grandkids play.

And my dad said, yeah.

He goes, I really loved watching you play back when.

When you were playing a long time ago.

Said, but in all honesty, he goes, it was stressful.

And once you weren't playing anymore, then we could just kind of go back to watching basketball games or watching a football game on TV or whatever and just watch the game.

And yeah, you might want a particular team to win, but you're not as invested as.

As it is as you are when it's your own kid.

And I definitely have found that as much as I enjoy watching my kids play, there is a level of stress that I think people underestimate as a parent, watching your own kid, there's obviously joy in it, but there's a lot of stress in it, as you said, where.

And your kids, the goalie and balls are flying by him into the net.

There's a part of you that just feels for them, and you feel that stress that they're.

Maybe they don't even feel it because they're out there performing.

It's just kind of like being a coach in some ways.

Right.

The athletes are the ones out on the field, and as a coach, you only have so much control.

As a parent, you only have so much control, you have to cede that control to your kids.

Yeah.

And that's not easy to do.

No doubt.

All right, so talk about when you knew you wanted to be a coach.

Was that something that because of your dad, that even while you're playing, as you're going through the process of trying to be the best football player that you can be, did you always have in the back of your mind and know that coaching was a profession that you wanted to end up in, or was that something that maybe you went the other way?

You're like, oh, that was what my dad did.

I don't want to follow in his footsteps.

I don't know if there's a path, sort of a guide path that you followed.

I always knew I always had the itch to coach.

There's no question about it.

And, you know, I would never sit and watch a game without think.

Even when I was in, you know, middle school, high school, you know, it was always if.

And back then, it was film.

So if I heard my dad's projector going in his office at home, I was always, you know, scurrying in there to See what he was watching.

And you know, the screens back then were about this big.

They reflected off of me mirror to the screen.

It was black and white and then of that little clicker.

And if I heard that, I would go running and.

And when I was a kid, I.

When I was little, I would just kind of sit in the floor because it was, you know, and play with my toys and stuff.

But then as I got older, I started to sit in the chair where I could watch what was going on.

And I.

And as I got a little older, I started to ask questions.

And so I always kind of had that itch.

There were other things I thought about doing over time, you know, things, anything from law school to going to TV or writing or whatever.

And some of that's come to fruition now.

But I mean, that was always the first love.

And once as I get.

Once I got older and started to understand what college coaching was really about, it became something I really want to be a part of because it was a chance to.

Not everybody sees the game day and the excitement and the give and take and the play calling and that stuff is great.

It's awesome.

It's an adrenaline rush like nothing else in the world.

But what really matters and what really is satisfying is when you see those guys come in right out of high school, they're hot shots, they think they've got all the answers and within two or three weeks they realize they don't have any of the answers.

And then over time, they get to the point where they have all the answers again.

It's kind of fun to watch that process.

And you know, there are guys that I coached over the years that, you know, became better people because their experience at Penn State or wherever else I was coaching, James Madison, UConn, UVA, whatever it was, that was very, very rewarding.

And that ultimately is what it's all about.

And I think that's really the thing that I think we're starting to lose in college sports, big time college sports, particularly men's basketball and football.

And I think that's unfortunate because those are the things and I think the people that maintain that in their programs are the ones that ultimately are going to have the enduring long time, long term success.

I think you look at a guy like Ryan Day at Ohio State is doing that, Marcus Freeman's doing that.

I think Lanning's doing it.

And I'm just going to name.

I'm probably going to forget, but when you look at basketball, Tom Izzo certainly is doing that.

I think Last year, they overachieved in everybody's mind.

But I think part of it's because he's building something that kids, they.

They're committed to.

And I think that was what really drew me to coaching was ultimately, that's why I wanted to stay in.

It was because of that part of it.

Did you understand that before you actually became a coach?

Was that something that was clear through your interactions with your dad and your conversations with him?

Did you clearly understand that before you actually got into the profession?

Or was that something that you learned slowly over time as you got into it?

I had some sense of it because there were, you know, there were.

When I was on the team, there were kids in the team that came from disadvantaged backgrounds and things.

And, you know, I was able to, as a teammate, you know, be part of their changing their lives a little bit, you know, by befriending them and things like that.

And so I learned some of that.

But it wasn't until you're a coach where you have a kid walk into your office and they've got a real problem at home and you've got to help them weave through it, or.

I had a kid I recruited at Penn State, and, you know, I got a call from his mom, and this is back before everybody had cell phones.

So the mom called me, and it was, you know, his brother had been in an accident and lost both of his legs below the knees.

And I had to go tell him and, you know, get him, you know, find him on campus and pull him in and tell him, or he had a, you know, a player who.

If somebody, you know, a parent died or whatever it was, and you have to get him out of class and get him home, those kind of things.

And.

And you're that.

You're that person.

You're that front person.

Until you go through that, you don't really realize how.

How important that role is.

And I think that's something you learned after you.

After I got into it, yeah.

I mean, I think that until you're really in the job, you can.

You can envision it, right?

You can think about it.

You can kind of understand that it's an important piece of it.

But until you really get into those relationships and understand how important you are and how important that coach's role is in an athlete's life, you don't.

You don't know 100 for sure.

And I think, as you said a minute ago, that's one of the things that when I talk to coaches here on the podcast, Jay, what I hear from them is that typically, if you go back through the history of college sports, in most cases, right athlete gets recruited, whether you're football, basketball, whatever, and the majority of those athletes end up staying at the same place for four years.

And so you have, as a coach, four years to be able to build that relationship with your players and to be able to have the kind of impact like what you were just describing.

And I think what coaches are struggling with now, just again from their conversations with me, is in a lot of cases now, you have a much shorter window to be able to have that same sort of impact that you described.

And so coaches are trying to wrestle with and figure out how can I still impact kids in the same way that I did before, but do it over a much shorter time period?

And they're trying to figure that out.

So I don't know if that's a conversation that you've had with any of the people in the football world in terms of just again, building those relationships and trying to have the impact on those people in their program, not just as players on the field, but being able to actually impact their lives as human beings.

So what have your conversations in that area sounded like, and what are you hearing in terms of that from football coaches?

Well, it's, there's a lot of frustration.

There's no question about it, because you're getting, you put a lot of effort to recruit a kid.

They get there all of a sudden now, you know, you're.

And this is football.

I mean, the women's volleyball coach here at Penn State is a close friend and she's even, you know, they're even dealing with agents in recruiting, you know, and that's been going on for two years where the kid comes on the recruit visit and it's like, I really like it, but you got to talk to my agent.

We got negotiations.

And so from the right off, the right off the bat, there is a level of distrust that everybody, football coaches are dealing with, and certainly at a very high, much more high profile level than maybe women's volleyball, for example, but that even that sport's growing now.

But you're starting out with a business relationship in what is supposed to be an education relationship.

And that's very difficult to do.

And I think what coaches are struggling with is, I want to be honest with kids.

This is what we're about, this is what we stand for.

But if I, you know, if I take that stance and maybe I'm too honest with them, they may not like what they hear and Leave.

And I think some of the coaches that are have a better foundation and maybe feel they're a little safer and have more job security can take that approach.

The guys that know, hey, I might be on the hot seat and I better win this year or else I got to maybe fudge some things and get some guys in here and win short term so that I can develop what I am.

I think the most important thing to, if you want to endure, is to know who you are, have that core set of values and say, let.

Let, you know, lay that out in the recruiting process.

I think one of the things that, you know, we just hired Matt Campbell at Penn State to be the head football coach, and one of the things he said that is very, very encouraging is I'm interested in developing people over time.

I'm interested in, you know, I want to get kids.

You know, certainly I'm paraphrasing the quote, but I'm pretty much right on in terms of what he said.

In terms of, you know, if it's only financial, that's the only reason you're here.

This probably isn't the place for you.

And that's kind of the approach we had when I coached to Penn State, and certainly my dad for 46 years, we had a big time running back in the state of Pennsylvania.

And everybody said, you got to recruit.

And the kid came up on his visit and he said, Joe said, look, you know what we're about.

You know what?

And he goes, and Joe said, look, I'm not here to give you some used car sales pitch.

And the kid says, well, I want the sales pitch.

And Joe proceeds to say, well, you have to go to study all four nights a week as a freshman, you have to go to mandatory breakfast every day, Monday through Friday, whether you have class early or not, you got to go to mandatory breakfast.

These, you know, if you skip class, you won't play.

And he's laying out all these rules, and the kid walks out of the room.

And I was recruiting coordinator at the time, and he goes, how'd you think that went?

I go, I don't think that was the sales job he's looking for.

But my dad looked at me and said, if he's the right kid, you know, if he's.

If he.

If this isn't what he wants, we're better off knowing that now, and he's better off knowing that now.

So I think that's kind of.

That's the balancing act.

This is what our program is.

But I got to balance that with what, you know, can I be successful and can.

Well, you know, and I think that's going to be the important challenge for every coach.

Yeah, that's kind of a universal coaching truth when you really think about it.

Right.

It doesn't.

That kind of transcends almost eras in terms of, if I'm a coach, right.

I have to have the standards and principles that my program is built upon.

And maybe those look slightly different today than they might have 10 years ago, but whatever they are, I have to continue to stand on those.

And if a particular kid, from a character standpoint or from a demand standpoint or whatever it may be, if that kid doesn't fit into that, those principles, those standards, then, yeah, it's probably best that we find that out as quickly as possible so we can both go our separate ways.

And I do think that that's something that.

Again, when I think about truths that I've learned here on the podcast, the number of people that have told me that if I'm a head coach, I have to be able to make decisions that I can live with, that I can rest my head on the pillow at night when I go to sleep and know that I made the best decision for my program and for the success of us collectively as a group.

And it's when you start listening to outside influences or.

Or being affected by a demand that a kid or an agent might have, and you start sort of bending yourself to fit that, that's when you start to get into trouble.

And so I think the best coaches, again, we're talking at any level, any sport, they have a way of doing things.

They have a set of standards that they believe in, and they expect the people who are coming into their program to fit into those standards as opposed to vice versa.

We're going to bend the way we are to accommodate this kid just because they have great talent or they're bring something to the table that we need, if that.

If that makes sense.

Yeah, I. I think.

I think the biggest mistake, especially in the college level the coaches make is we have to get this guy.

This guy's the five stories in state.

We got to get this guy.

And, you know, I. I've spent a lot of time with Urban Meyer over the years, and, you know, if you talk to Urban Meyer about how things were in Florida versus how things.

How he ran his program, Ohio State, very, very different because he, you know, he felt like in Florida, and he would tell you this, he was sitting there, the pressure to recruit certain kids and to get certain kids from Boosters, if you don't sign this kid, you know, whereas at Ohio State, he took a different approach.

And there are some kids that I know that they walked away from that were high profile recruits that never went to Ohio State because.

And those kids went to other schools and never beat them because he just knew what his program was about.

And part of that, that's exactly how, you know, you know, my dad used to say, look, if we got to sell our soul to win some games, then I'm going to get out of the business, because I don't want to do that.

And I think that's.

But there are so many players out there that are good enough to win with and good enough to win championships with.

They're more than we think.

And the right.

You know, anybody.

I say this all the time, and it's a leadership lesson.

You know, I'm working on a book on leadership, and one of the chapters is about building rosters versus building teams.

Anybody can build a roster, and you're seeing that in the NIL era.

You can throw all the money around you want, you can build an unbelievable roster, but can you mold that into a team that genuinely cares about each other and will compete with each, compete for each other and trust each other?

And that's really what it comes down to.

Well, along those lines, we are seeing in the world of college football probably one of the most incredible and improbable stories as we head into.

We're sitting here prior to the national championship game being played, but what Coach Signetti has done at Indiana, a program that basically has been and also ran for almost the entirety of its existence, and now to have turned it into a complete juggernaut in such a short time, speaks to what you just talked about, right?

Is there are lots of different ways that you can build a roster, but clearly what he's done is build a team.

So from what you know and what you've seen and from people that you've talked to, what has been the key to that turnaround and, and maybe apply that sort of again, to.

When thinking about this as a basketball podcast, what are some things that, if I'm a coach, listening, whether I'm a high school coach, I'm a, I'm a college coach, what can I take away from what Signetti has done to.

To turn that program around that I could apply in my, in my own coaching situation?

I think, number one, he has, I think everybody can see this.

He has supreme confidence in what he's doing.

He's prepared.

He knows that he, when it comes down to it on game day, he's not.

No one's going to out coach him in terms of.

Because they're more prepared than he is.

I think that's number one.

Number two.

Well, I think when he went into Indiana he has a group of coaches around him.

I think he brought seven guys from his JMU staff.

So immediately they hit the ground running where they knew each other, they know how they run practices, how they, you know, we're going to spend X amount of time on these drills and X amount of time on these drills and this is how we approach things in September and October, November, January, all year round.

So I think that helped.

He also brought in a number of guys with him from James Madison who were not only talented football players, but they also then became kind of almost like translators, you know, like he's coming and speaking in different languages.

Some of these guys, when you establish new program and he's got 15, 20 guys, he's got seven coaches and 50 to 20 players that can say well this is why we do this and this is why we do that.

Oh yeah, you know, when he gets yelling, don't you know there's all kinds of things like that where I think that helped.

But he has established what he does and he's confident in what he does and it has succeeded everywhere he's been.

So I think that's been the biggest key is when you come in.

I think one of the most interesting things he did was he got introduced to the basketball game and he says and I know Purdue sucks and everybody cheers.

But then he said, but so do Ohio State and Michigan who were the standard bearers in that program.

And everybody around the country went wow, this guy, you know, and.

But it was a signal to the people in that community and to the guys he was coaching.

We, we fear no one.

And I think that's really been the attitude that he's had.

And you know, before the season, you know, you look at the preseason polls, Indiana I think was 21st in the AP poll, 20th or 21st.

Given what they had coming back, if they were an SEC team, they would have been top seven coming out of a playoff year and getting a really good transfer.

Nobody done knew Windows was going to be as good as he was, but he was a good, really good quarterback at Cal, so they got a good transfer port quarterback.

So if he's an ace SEC brand name program, he's probably preseason seven or eight, but he's 21st because they're Indiana and he got those guys to understand it doesn't matter what it says in front of your shirt, okay?

Don't get fooled by all that stuff.

And they took that to heart.

And even, even games where they, you know, they came to our place and barely beat us.

But when it came down to it, the last drive, his players knew what they needed to do.

They made the plays they had to make and they were missing three or four really good starters and they went down the field and won the game.

And I said, that team is going to be really, really hard to kill.

I mean, they just.

And it all comes from his attitude and his leadership, I think, has been what's really set that set it apart.

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I love the idea that you shared there and I think it's one that is tremendously underrated when I think about great coaches.

And that's the combination of confidence and preparedness.

And I think if you have those two things, they go hand in hand.

Right?

If you're, if you're prepared, you're much more likely to be confident.

But I know that and I can speak to this just in my own experiences where there are times where I feel like, hey, I've really got a handle on what I'm going to do in this.

Just boiling it down to like just a practice.

So I'm running a, a youth basketball practice and there's days where I had a busy day and I'm throwing together the practice plan two minutes before I walk in the door.

And what's my level of confidence in that practice plan?

It's not super high because I haven't put a lot of thought into it.

I haven't put a lot of effort into it.

Conversely, on days when I've got it all planned out, I know exactly what I want to teach, I know exactly how I want to teach it, I know what I'm going to do.

I go in there prepared, and my team has a much better practice.

And again, that's taking a much bigger concept and taking it down to a smaller level.

But I do think that when you talk about a coach being ultra prepared, right, and knowing exactly what they want to do, how they want to do it, what do we want to do on offense, what do we want to do on defense?

And obviously, then there's.

You can break it down as far as you want to get it broken down to.

When you have confidence in what you're doing, you have confidence in what your staff knows and can teach it, because, again, as you said, they've been with you.

All of a sudden, that confidence and that ability to be prepared starts to trickle down to the players, and then that leads to the next thing, which is the belief, right?

So the coach has the confidence, but then the players have to believe in that coach.

And one of the ways that you build that belief in my mind is you have every answer to a question that a player might ask, like, hey, on this play, this is what happened?

What should I have done?

Or what should I have been looking for?

And if you're prepared, you know those answers.

And the more your players see that you have those answers when they're looking for them and more, you can give them the why, especially in today's world.

I just think it just.

It causes.

It causes everybody to start to gel and come together in such a way that all of a sudden, everyone's looking around going, hey, we got everything we need here.

We got all the answers in our coaching staff and in ourselves as we continue to build that confidence.

I think that's just what's happened with Indiana.

I mean, the.

Obviously, there's a baseline level of talent that you have to have, but, man, you just see it.

You see it on their sideline, you see it in Signetti's face, you see it in his words.

It's.

It's really been just an incredible turnaround that I don't think anybody could have ever seen coming.

No, and I think.

I think that's.

You know, people underestimate.

You know, everybody talks about Iverson when he said practice, we're talking about practice.

And I have friends of mine that are 76ers fans and they talk about Iverson.

And no disrespect, because Iverson's unbelievable basketball player, but I said, how many titles did he win?

I said, you never heard Michael Jordan belittle how important practice was.

There's a guy who prepared in practice, and that's why he won six titles.

And, you know, to me, you know, I love LeBron.

I saw him in ninth grade because he was a great football player.

But I'll take Michael Jordan over him any, any day, simply because when it came time to, to be the killer, be killed, that guy always, always was ready to kill somebody.

But, I mean, look, you know, LeBron, I take him tomorrow.

But at the end of the day, you know that Michael Jordan, every story you heard, you hear about him.

Everything you know about him.

And even in the, the whole last dance, you know that the, what I call, documentary where he, at the end, he's like, you know, I know I was hard on people, but I never asked anybody to do something I wouldn't do myself.

Yep.

And that always stuck with me.

And, you know, and the same should be said of coaches.

Coaches should be willing to not ask players to do things they themselves won't do in terms of commitment and preparedness.

And, and if you're not confident, you know this, if you're even the slightest bit not confident, players will smell it.

You guys can smell it.

They know it.

And, and they, and they will react accordingly.

There's no question about that.

I think that it's certainly an underrated aspect of leadership, right.

Is that you have to be able to set that example.

You have to demonstrate your commitment.

If you want your guys to be in the weight room at 6am well, guess what, you better be there at 6am Just like they are going there and being a part of it.

And I think it, it's something that I think a lot of young coaches sometimes forget that, hey, you've got to make that same commitment that you're asking your players.

I often have the conversation of, we ask our players to get better in the off season, but then as coaches, what do we do to get better in the off season?

Are we studying film?

Are we trying to read more leadership books?

What.

What are we doing to try to grow ourselves as leaders?

And I think that's a really important piece of, of being a great coach at whatever sport, whatever level that we're talking about.

And then to go back to your point about Jordan, I just think that the word that I always use with people, when you watch Michael Jordan, it always Just felt like it was inevitable.

Like you might get him in a game, in a series, or you might, he might lose here or there, but the guy was just going to keep coming and keep coming and keep coming.

And just the mental toughness that he had and which can't.

Again, goes back to right.

Like you talked about the effort that he put forth in practice and how hard he worked during times where the lights were off so that when the lights were on, he was ready and he was able to come after you in such a way that just, again, there's, there's nobody ever in the history of the game that's had his combination of physical tools and skill and mental toughness.

Those three things, to me, just set him apart all time as the greatest basketball player.

I don't even think it's remotely close when you just start factoring in those three pieces.

And then anybody, anybody who argues, anybody who argues, LeBron.

And again, don't get me wrong, LeBron was here in Cleveland.

I love LeBron, he's a great player.

But if you watch both of those guys play, if you were around, if you were around for Michael Jordan and you could watch him and, and have watched him live in the moment, there's just, to me, there's just no, there's no, there's no comparison.

But that's, that's a, that's an, that's an argument that is people, people love to have.

And I just say if you, if you saw both of them and you think LeBron is the better player, I don't know what to tell you.

You're.

You're wrong.

As I guess I'm drafting first, I'm.

Taking Jordan, and if I'm drafting second, I'm taking LeBron, and I'm happy as hell.

And drafting third, I'll take, I'll take Bill Russell.

But yeah, you know, I'll tell you a funny story about, about, about Michael Jordan because I, I've gotten to know Phil Knight over the years.

He's a family friend.

And so the year they were, the, The Bulls were playing Portland in the NBA Finals, obviously.

Beaverton, Oregon, Nike's headquarters is 20 minutes from downtown Portland, whatever it is, and they have a campus there.

And it's an unbelievable setup.

They have offices, but they have all these basketball gyms and fields, and they have IM leagues and everything.

It's almost like going to college.

I'm like, this is like fantasy camp for grownups.

So anyway, so the night before, their plan, I don't know if it was game Six or whatever it was, they're in Portland.

And Jordan, all these North Carolina guys, Sam Perkins, his teammates, guys that were in the NBA at the time are all up there.

So they go and they go over to Nike's headquarters.

Jordan, this is the guy that's in the NBA Finals.

And they get shoes and stuff, whatever they're going to place and pick up basketball.

And they pull two Nike employees.

Like anybody here any good at basketball.

So two Nike employees run with these guys.

They play for hours.

And these are NBA players.

Jordan, this is the night before an NBA Finals game because he loved the game so much.

And they said it was so intense, it was unbelievable.

And they're like, this guy's out of his mind.

He could get hurt.

Next night, goes out, scores a boatload of points.

You know, they win the game.

And it was like, there's a guy just had an unbelievable passion for the game, unbelievable passion for competition, and it meant the world to him.

Well, I, I always think about that love for the game clause that he had put in his contract that he could.

They could never stop him from going playing pickup games wherever he wanted to go.

And, and where.

Wherever and whenever he wanted to play pickup basketball, he was allowed to play pickup basketball just as a part of his contract.

They couldn't.

They couldn't prevent him.

And yeah, he just, I mean, a very, very unique, again, individual.

Just from a standpoint of, like I said, I don't think there's anybody who's had his combination of skill level gifts and just mental toughness beyond, like, there's.

You can point to games that he lost and, yeah, his team.

His team lost.

But I. I defy you to find me the game where Jordan had 12 points and shot two for, you know, two for 20, and his team and his team lost.

Like, he, when they lost, he.

He still, he still, he still was there.

So.

Anyway, we could.

We could talk.

Michael, I think, you know, when you.

Look at it, you talk about Jordan.

I think the.

One of the lessons about whether it's Jordan or Tom Brady, those guys, most of the guys you see that have risen to that level, it wasn't easy for him.

And I think that's the, you know, I think that's the thing that in the transfer portal age, we're losing with kids.

It's like.

And it's mostly, well, if you go somewhere else, you'll play right away.

I'm like, I'll root for Arch Manning right now, next year unless he plays Penn State.

Because I love the message he has sent.

I'll go sit for two years.

I'll learn, I'll get better.

I don't have to go to the.

You know, the quarterback in Oregon this year came and sat behind Dylan Gabriel for a year until he get his time.

So I think, you know, I think you learn from adversity.

I think.

I think we try as parents to try and prevent adversity.

You know, there's a friend, a guy used to go to Bill Kenny, had a thing on his desk.

You say, you know, prepare the child for the path.

Don't prepare the path for the child.

I think that's.

That's important.

I think the transfer portal, we're seeing more of the.

Let's bulldoze the path.

Yeah, there's no doubt about that.

I think that it is definitely a downside of the portal when you think about just the lessons that you try to instill in your own kids.

Right.

Of not everything's always going to go exactly the way you want to.

It's not always going to be easy.

It's not going to be perfect.

Sometimes there's something that you have to struggle through and you think about yourself as an adult.

Right.

It's always that old saying of anything worth having is worth struggling through to be able to get right the goals that are the goals that everybody wants.

Everybody wants them, but nobody wants to do the work in order to get there.

And so doing the work is ultimately what gives you the satisfaction of having achieved that goal.

And in a lot of ways, again, I think the portal is taking that away.

And we're starting to see that trickle down, too, even to the high school level.

And I think, unfortunately, for the last probably 10 years, it's been a part of AAU basketball, where you're on this team and it's not going well, and then you're jumping to that team.

And we see it with high school basketball now more than ever.

I think probably high school football is the same way where you got these kids that have played at three or four high schools and then they get to college and yeah, it's.

It's not surprising that they end up at two or three or four different schools over the course of their career as they're chasing who knows what.

And then again, we don't know who.

Who's giving them advice.

Right.

Is it.

Is it their parent?

Is it their club team coach?

Is it their.

Their, you know, their.

Their position coach from high school?

Is it.

Is it their agent?

And who knows, Talk a little bit about the agent piece of it, because this is something that I find fascinating, that I don't know a ton of about.

But obviously if you're an agent at the professional level, you have to be sanctioned by the NBA or Major League Baseball or the NFL to be able to represent players, which I'm assuming gives you at least a bare minimum of qualifications that you have to have in order to be able to represent players.

But on the college landscape today, those guidelines or those parameters aren't in place.

So what's it like out there in terms of agents?

And you even talked about on the, on the volleyball side that you got women's volleyball players coming with agents.

So what, what does the agent landscape look like and from, from people that you've talked to and what you've seen?

Well, there's no governance.

I think, I think the biggest mistake right now in college athletics is that right now the NCAA conference commissioners, presidents, athletic directors, coaches, I'm on the board of trustees of Penn State.

So I'm trying to spur some of these conversations with trustees and regents at other schools right now about trying to get some sort of at our level because we have the fiduciary responsibility to universities.

So if this all craters, we're the ones that are going to have to sort through the rubble to figure out where we are fiscally.

So we are having some conversations about there needs to be a overarching governance right now.

You know, if a kid signs a contract with a school and then turns around three days later someone signed with another one, who do you turn that into?

The NCAA's not going to touch it.

So there's been this complete lack of anything controlling college athletics.

So when you talk about the agent side, there's no collective bargaining, there's no players union that's saying this agent certified, that agent certified.

Because certainly, as you mentioned, the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball, those agents all have to be certified.

They have to file contracts with the union.

So people all know what they're charging certain people, all these kind of things.

So there's a, there's a transparency, there's an awareness that is not in college sports right now.

And there's no barrier to entry to being an agent.

I could be an agent.

There was a big time college football player down in my neighborhood.

I could go and say, I'm going to be your agent and I'm gonna charge X amount.

And just to show you how some of this agent stuff has gone, you know, the, a lot of these agents in the early first couple days of nil now if you're a high profile player, you've got CAA or you've got somebody coming in and you, you're, you're with a high profile agent who's established as an NFL agent, that's different.

But for a lot of other guys, they're not getting that guy.

And, and what these guys have been doing because it's nil money, not revenue sharing money.

They're saying I'm a marketing agent, which means I charge you 20% or 15% if I'm your, if I'm your, you know, contract employment contract agent.

Now you're talking 3, 4%.

So some of them made sign these deals where they were marketing agents even though it was pay to play and we can call it nil all we want.

Now with revenue sharing, that's changed some, but still that's all.

It's a very, very murky world.

And as such a lot of people getting taken advantage of early on in this process and like at some point the adults in the room have to stand up and say it's time we put together a proposal for what college athletics should look like with some things that will start to get this all regulated to protect the players as well as the schools.

Until we do that, we're putting kids at risk.

Do you think that the NCAA is reluctant to stand up to some of the things that have gone on that most people would agree are not in the best interest of really anyone in the game, at least not the long term interest.

Right.

It might be in my short term interest to sign a $30,000 deal with some unscrupulous agent, whatever.

But as far as long term health of college athletics, do you think it's because the NCAA is afraid, and maybe rightfully so, that any time that they get sued in court that they're probably going to lose the lawsuit?

Do you think that that's probably the main reason why they're not willing at this point to step in and sort of regulate what's going on?

I think that's part of it.

I think it's really two pronged.

Number one, it's everything we have in place now is because of a lawsuit and it's only a matter of time till the next lawsuit changes.

Like right now we have the house settlement renancier.

That's essentially, we don't call it a labor market, but let's be honest, it's a labor market.

That's what regulates the labor market right now.

That's why there's a revenue share cap.

It's Only a matter of time until the next big player.

Their family says, well, wait a minute, I don't want to be subject to your salary cap.

I wasn't part of the house settlement.

I'm going to sue and they're going to win.

I mean, it's very clear that's going to happen.

So that's part of it.

The other part of his football is driving this bus in a lot of ways because that's where the biggest, biggest money right now is in football.

And so that's driving conference real.

Why are UCLA and USC in Oregon and Washington?

The Big Ten football.

They need the football money.

And it's unfortunate because it destroyed an incredible athletic league and basketball league in the Pac 12.

I mean, just those.

I mean, God rest his soul, Bill Walton.

I mean, you know, I love listening to that guy.

I'd stay up to listen to that guy called Pac 12 games because A, it was kind of exciting to see ucl.

But anyway, but you know, it's drive.

It's driving all this stuff.

So the commissioners of the Big Ten in the SEC are holding everybody else hostage.

And I say that as a trustee of a member of a Big Ten school, not to be critical, but that's their job, is to get as much money as they can for their member institutions to give them a competitive advantage over the ACC or over the Big 12 or over whoever else it may be, or the SEC, if we can get more money.

And so between the lawsuits and the power that those conference commissioners wield right now, the NCAA is really kind of powerless to do anything.

And I think that's why, you know, it's going to take governing boards and universities to say, wait a minute, we got to find a better path on this.

And then I think we're trying to put the car before the horse.

We're saying Congress, there's a lot of talk about Congress needs to pass some laws.

Well, we really should be telling them what we need.

And when I say that, I said we should be sitting down, not just with coaches, athletic directors, players should be there.

I mean, look, we're gonna need collective bargain at some point.

I hate to say it, I'm an old school guy, but let's just call it what it is.

And you know, We've got a 12 team playoff in college football.

And so everyone, oh, let's go to 16, let's go to 24.

Well, maybe players don't want to play six more games, you know, because they don't want to get hurt.

I mean, everybody would, you Know, all the fans want to see the March Madness expanded.

I mean, I do too, because we're always on the outside.

I want expanded so that every school gets in.

So, you know, but I mean, that's not good for the players.

It's not good for the game.

And you know, coaches aren't the ones that they're taking the shots or getting hurt and bruised and beaten and battered and, you know, the players have to be part of the solution as well.

When you look out five years, and I guess I think of it in terms of looking back five years and not in any way, shape or form being able to imagine that when the original.

Right.

Ed o' Bannon lawsuit comes in and he's really trying to get money for what was at that time, name, image, likeness, which has sort of been perverted, for lack of a better way of saying it from what the original intent of that was.

But you go back five years and certainly nobody could have projected sitting here where we are today with the way that college athletics looks.

So if we look out another five years, how do you think this thing shakes out or how do you hope it shakes out?

What do you think it eventually is going to look like?

I know you mentioned collective bargaining.

I think clearly that's probably going to be a part of it.

But what are, what are some of the key tenets that you think we're going to be standing on five years from now?

Well, you said what I hope.

What I hope would be like we, we maintain this academic part of it.

I really hope we do, because otherwise it's not college sports.

We're just, we're AAA football or AAA basketball, whatever it is.

But I think, I think what, what's coming is certainly there's gonna have to be acknowledgement of reality.

I mean, you can sit here and say, we're an amateur, we're not an amateur athletics thing endeavor anymore.

We as universities are running sports, you know, professional sports franchises on our campuses.

There's just no two ways about it.

So we may as well be honest about what we are.

So to that, to that extent, we're going to have to acknowledge that we have employees.

I think we're going to need.

I would like to see a two track approach on this thing where, kid, you recruit out of high school, you say, look, we can do this one of two ways.

If you want to sign a four year contract and you want to pursue a legitimate degree, we're going to give you room, board, books and tuition.

We'll also give you some revenue share we'll give you some nil money, but you're going to sign a four year contract with if, if there are things you want, reasons you want transfer, then we have a conversation where we have to mutually agree to what that looks like.

And now if I'm a parent and I got a four year deal, my kids college is paid for and they can't cut my kid after a year or two, I'm going to take that deal every time.

Or you say to someone, look, let's be honest about what you, you just want to be at 2 or 3.

One year in basketball, three years in football.

Okay, well let's talk about what that looks like.

And if you're not really interested in school, why are we wasting a professor's time with you taking up class?

Why are we wasting tuition dollars?

Let's create an apprenticeship program like we would for any other.

Engineers come and they study engineering, people go to trade schools and study trade.

Let's create a NBA or an NFL apprenticeship program where we're going to teach them financial literacy, we're going to teach them public relations, we're going to teach them all these things that kids, you see guys in the NFL and guys in the NBA are failing at.

Let's give them those tools.

Now if they come through and they're not good enough, well, you chose that path.

So you know, that's not on us, that's on you.

But you know, but I think you're going to need contracts that protect the player as well as protect the school.

Because what you're seeing now is, you know, coaches are cutting kids, you know, and you're seeing thousands of kids go in the portal and not all of them are getting picked up.

And so I think there's an imbalance there.

But I think we're going to have to have kind of a dual track and I think we're going to have to have reimagine some of the things we do in the way we bring kids in.

I mean the guys that are coming to your school as grad transfers and football, they're not.

They never see the inside of a classroom.

They sign up for six credits online, that's it.

And then they go to the building and they're pros.

I mean, so let's stop pretending that we're something we're not.

And look, I say that as a guy who has been altruistic is love the amateur model and what it can do for young people.

But I'm also a realist and I also understand, you know, if St. John's goes to play Michigan State in basketball and those players walk off the court right before the game, I know Patino and I know Tom Izzo.

I'm not gonna sit down and watch them play Cornhole.

If the players walk off the field and no one's going to televise it, Gus Johnson could probably make that interesting.

But I mean, you know, no one's going to sit around and pay the kind of money they paying for those media rights to watch those guys play Cornhole.

So I mean, the reality is, is I understand why the Big Ten gets a $1.1 billion media rights contract annually.

1.1 billion.

It's because those players are out there putting it on the line.

So I'm just being realistic about where we are.

It kills me, but it's realistic.

We gotta be realist realistic about where we are.

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How difficult is that conversation going to be to move it to a place where university presidents, boards of trustees are able to come to that reality that you've come to where, hey, the model that we might have dreamed of or that was a part of what we were doing 15, 20 years ago, which wasn't perfect, but clearly there was a lot more.

Student athletes had to be students for the most part at most universities.

How do you get people who again have presumably spent their entire life in education and have gone into the field and have risen to that point in their profession to accept that to track?

Hey, yeah, we got some student athletes over here, but over here we have, yeah, we're kind of educating them towards what they say is going to be their career.

But we all know the reality when kids come out of high school and we talked about a little earlier, who are they getting advice from?

Who's telling them that hey, you're going to be an NFL player or you're going to be an NBA player.

We know that the odds of you making it even if you're playing football at Penn State, right?

So you're coming out of high school, you're.

You're the best of the best.

If you're getting an opportunity to play football at Penn State, of.

Of a typical roster, how many of those guys in a given year are going and playing in the NFL?

The.

The number is pretty small.

And so I would bet that when kids come out of high school, you're going to have those two tracks, and they're going to be relatively even, even though the odds of everybody making it.

So how.

What do the conversations look like and how do you get to people who have been in education?

How difficult is it going to be for them to accept that two track?

Because I think you're right.

I just don't know how we get there.

Yeah, I've been on the board of trustees for Penn State now almost nine years.

So five, six years ago, when California started talking about nil, we had a.

We had a conversation in the board meeting.

The president university got up and said, you know, it's just going to be, you know, a local car dealer puts a guy on the billboard, and I'm sitting there going, you guys have no idea where this is going.

You have no idea where it's going.

And I was one of the guys.

You know, four or five years ago, Penn State didn't have a collective.

And I got together with another trustee and a handful of other people and said, let's put together collective.

Now, as trustees, we couldn't put money into it.

We could set it up, put it in motion, and then we had to walk away from control.

So we did that.

But we knew then that there were two types of nil.

There was what we called synthetic, and I was real nil.

There's Caitlin Clark and State Farm says, you know what, we want her commercial because we think there's a return on investment and she's got a national profile.

And then you had other, you know, other collectives that were giving kids $50,000 to tweet two hours a month, and, you know, essentially making 1500amonth, you know, 1200, whatever number is an hour, which.

And.

And in the book blitz, there's a point where the head coach says, let me get this straight.

You set up a collective to pay our players to promote the collective, to raise money, to pay our players to promote the collective to raise.

Is that money laundering?

And they're like, oh, that's an ugly word.

You know, but I mean, so we got to that point.

So I was talking about that five, six years ago simply because I know how coaches are.

We spend all of Our life looking for loopholes.

That's it.

They're playing this defense.

How do I get around it?

They put up these recruiting rules.

It doesn't say I can't do this, so let's do that.

So I knew that those things were happening four years ago when we were, when we were renewing our football coaches contract.

I sent an email to the, to the chair of our board and I said, look, are we putting anything in there in the event that revenue sharing comes?

Because the Alston case had just been settled and Justice Kavanaugh went on to say that the business model was flatly would be illegal than anywhere else in America.

And I said, we're going to get revenue sharing.

And they thought I was out of my mind.

So, you know, these conversations, you know, it moves at a snail's pace.

I think the pace with which it's moving now, they've all got whiplash.

I'm not shocked by it only because I know that, you know, every case is going to go the athlete's way.

The media has taken the side of the athletes all.

Nobody is sitting around talking about how hard it is.

And we're at a point now where even at a school like Penn State, we're in the top 10 in athletic department revenues in the country.

We were at a break even level before revenue sharing kicked in.

Even.

We were right at some years we'd lose 200 grand on.

We're talking 210, $12 million in revenues.

Some years we'd make a million, some years we'd lose a million something.

But we were right on the razor's edge every year.

And now you talk about 20.5 in revenue sharing.

Where does that come from?

So the conversation can be very difficult in terms of we may have to start reconfiguring coaches salaries to be.

Because if we got to pay players, that money's got to come from somewhere.

The size of staffs, look at the bench, look at the benches.

On basketball, there's more guys working for those players on the bench than there are players.

And it's the same thing with football.

You look at, you know, football staff, football staffing.

Now, you know, my last year in coaching at Penn state, we had 30 guys, roughly 30 people working with our team.

They're 90.

Some of these schools had 90 guys working for them now in football and growing.

And so at some point all this AI and all this analytics and stuff was supposed to make it easier.

Yet we keep adding people.

So if all this stuff is being done, we should need less people than more people.

But the answer for every coach and every athletic director is more people.

Oh, we've got to do this.

So we need more people.

I mean, a video department of one school went, you know, for football 15 years ago.

You're looking at three guys to video practice, and all three of them had to go up in high lifts.

It's one thing you don't have in basketball is you're not outside in the high lift, 70ft in the air filming practice.

But that's all done now with drones and cameras that are on poles.

So you look at some of these video departments, they've got 12, 15 guys.

What are they all doing?

So we're going to have to have really hard conversations to manage the budgets of athletics.

When you look at what's going on, you have schools that have instituted involuntary student activity fees for the student population at large, whether they care about athletics or not.

That money's being funneled the athletic department to prop these things up.

So we have to have really hard conversations about this.

And I'm more than happy.

And I engage them on a regular basis, not just with people at our school, but people at other schools.

And it's coming.

I mean, it's going to have to happen.

What do you hear from boosters and alumni who previously might make donations to an athletic department or a specific program and say, hey, this money is earmarked for new turf in the practice facility, or we want to help fund the uniforms next year or whatever.

And now, like, I'll hear from guys that played it Kent, or I played basketball.

And there's the collective, like you talked about.

And just, you know, again, schools are always asking for donations.

And a lot of guys I talk to, they're like, you know, before when I gave money, I knew where it was going and it was something tangible that I could see.

Maybe it was paying for players books for the year, whatever it was.

Now it feels like you're just paying a kid's salary who.

You don't know if that kid is even going to contribute anything on the quarter, on the field.

And so I don't know if you're hearing any of that in your role from boosters and alumni or where that stands sort of in the.

The relationship between the players, the university, the alumni.

How is that interplay happening as you, as you see it in the landscape today.

Oh, well, donor fatigue is real.

I mean, it is.

You keep going back the same guys every year and saying, you got to help us fund our payroll, fund our payroll, fund our payroll the, you know, the coach Kenny Dillingham at Arizona State made a statement back in December about, you know, there's gotta be somebody in this community can Write me a 20, write a $20 million check.

And not to be critical, because he's right, but that's not a one off.

You need that 20 million every year.

And that's what nobody's realizing.

And I think one of the things that's a real possibility on the horizon is the guy that keeps Writing you $2 million checks or 3 million dollar checks, that's not getting donors to pay to cover your payroll is not a business model.

That.

And so there's going to need to be a recalculation and calibration of what the business model in college athletics looks like.

And until we do that, you're going to have donors that go, you're back again, you know, enough, you know, and, and the kind of people that can write those checks, they didn't get to have that kind of money because they just gave money away, right?

And you're gonna, you're gonna look at them, start to look at this differently and say, it's already happened.

You have guys that are saying, well, I want to look at film, I want to see film with this guy.

Because I think I know what I'm looking at, even though they don't.

Most of the time it's already happened.

You have situations now where you're going to have start to say, you know, I kid everybody about, you know, cfp, all these acronyms, nil, ni, cfp, all these different things.

I said, you better get used to hearing roi, I said, because people are going to see, want to see a return on investment.

So if I pay a million bucks to, to get you a wide out or to get you a pass rusher, and that guy isn't as good as you, you said he was.

I've been shooting my mouth off up in the suites during the game about, I paid for that guy and that's my guy and the guy's not any good.

And now I look like a jackass.

Or they say return on investment.

Like, hey, if I'm going to give you $20 million a year, I want a piece, I want some private equity now.

And, and you're seeing the University of Utah do that.

The Big Ten tried to negotiate a private equity deal that would cover all the schools.

So those conversations are going all over the place because we've got to get to a point where we have some sort of fiscal discipline and sustainability over time and that's what donors now are starting to complain about.

Like, you keep hitting me up and this money's just going into some bottomless pit that every year you're siphoning away.

You want me to write a check for 10 grand every year to support my school.

And I know where it's going.

It's going to pay for some kid, some spoiled kid who, you know, when I played.

And former players are the toughest to get because they're like, well, you know, why should I be paying them to play?

Yeah, it's tough.

I mean, it really is when you start looking at paying someone's salary and it doesn't feel the same way as it does when again, you're buying something or paying for something tangible that you see the value to that program year after year.

And to your point, it's, it's a one off, right versus a salary.

You got to come back with that every year, whether it's for the same kid or it's, hey, that kid left and now we got to pay this new kid.

And, and it's obviously different levels too.

When you're talking about at a Penn State level and then you start talking about a mid major or you, you know, you're talking about a, you know, a team that's not in the power five, it becomes a totally different animal where you don't have maybe the same access to that size donors and then you're competing within your league to, hey, this school's got this budget and that's why they can get player X and we can't.

And if we just had $30,000 more, then that would allow us to be in the same ballpark as these other teams in terms of recruiting and then that would allow us to win.

It's just, it just feels like a never ending cycle where at some point, I think your ROI comment, Jay, is 100% on point because at some point people got to look around and go, well, where's our money going and what is it doing not only for the university, what's it doing for us?

It used to feel like you were doing good, right?

If you were donating to your school or donating to your athletic department.

And now it feels more like you're just kind of contributing to this wild west that we have in college athletics, which doesn't feel the same as contributing to the library, let's put it that way.

No, I mean, it's, you're dealing with, you're dealing with the, you know, the, the guy that just keeps coming back to you to borrow money.

And it's like, you know, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry.

And like you said that the ROI thing is it's real and it's, you know, I spent some time with people politically because I've done some things politically over time.

And it's no different than when you go out and try and get people to contribute to a political campaign.

They want to see a pathway to victory because it's not because they like you.

It's because if you win, you can do something for them if you're in political office.

And it's no different with this.

Now you get the point where, you know, coaches are going to get fired because they can't raise money, because donors can say, well, he's been your X number of years.

He can't beat this team, or whatever it may be.

So why would I give money knowing that we're just going to continue to be frustrated and it's just.

Or it's going to be, you know, if I give us money, I want to be sitting in the national championship game or I want my team at the Final Four every year.

And if not, then I'm going to stop giving you money.

And they'll get.

It'll go beyond wins and losses and championships.

It's going to be, I'm giving you X amount.

I'm giving you 7 million a year to help cover your payroll.

I need something else.

I need some other kind of return investment.

I think that's where private equity's probably going to happen.

Again, it's not something I want to see, but until we get our business model and house five fiscal houses in order, like I said, I'm in Penn State.

We're not, you know, we're top 10 in revenues.

We are feeling the crunch.

All right, let's drop down to a more personal level for this question.

When you think about your time as a coach in a locker room and how, I don't know if difficult is the right word, but just the challenge of putting together a team, getting guys like we talked about earlier, to be on the same page, to all be rowing the boat in the same direction, and now you not only have the challenge of just doing that with, in the case of a football team, 95 individuals, but now you also have this money, this salary, this piece of, hey, this guy's getting this amount of money.

My teammate's making this or this guy's making more than me, and I'm out producing him.

And not only am I ahead of him on the depth chart.

But we got all these.

How do you envision or can you even kind of put yourself into that kind of locker room and what the challenges must be like to try to deal with it?

I always think, again, I. I look at it through the lens of my experience, both as a coach and I haven't coached on the collegiate level, but just as a high school coach and then also my time as a player, as a college athlete.

And I know the dynamics of a locker room and how challenging those were when you didn't have the money piece of it involved.

I can't even imagine how challenging it is with the money part of it being so prevalent now.

So how do you kind of envision if you could throw yourself back into the locker room?

How do you manage that?

Or how do coaches today try to manage that?

Well, I think.

I think what you got to do is you got to almost like they.

There's.

When I coached for Joe, he had a blue line, and when you cross that blue line into practice, you were supposed to be 100% focused in that because you couldn't do anything about a test you failed or a girlfriend issue, whatever it may be.

And he told us to put those lines everywhere in our lives.

So when we cross into a classroom, whatever it was, I think what has to happen is you have to essentially construct that same idea when you walk in the locker room, okay.

And when you walk in the football building, the money stuff has got to be out there.

You got to come in here and you can't gripe about this guy getting more money.

If you want to have that conversation, you want to gripe, you handle that away from the building.

You know, theoretical building.

Obviously, you're a coach's office is in the same building often, but you get the point.

When you get into football stuff, it's got to be only football.

If you don't think you're getting paid or whatever, come complain to me.

But don't complain the locker room.

Don't make it about this.

I know when the nil stuff first started, before this is before Oregon was in the Big ten because of relationships I had with.

With Phil Knight and some people out there.

We were comparing notes as to how they were handling nil stuff with their collectives as we were building ours and they were building theirs.

And one of the things that.

One of the conversations was Mario Cristobal was in Oregon at the time, and they were going to have to get more money for a quarterback they were recruiting than a really, really Good starting offensive tackle they had.

And Mario Cristobal was rightfully like, why is this guy getting more money than this guy who's my starting left tackle?

And it was like, because this quarterback can command more money because there are more people bidding on him.

So even coaches have to get their head around certain things.

And I think one of the things that's happening at the college level is they're creating a gm.

They're creating some of these positions so that the professionalization and the money part can be taken away from the head coach.

And now the coach can just say, look, you got a problem, Go over there.

And I think that's the best way to handle it.

You got a problem, go over there.

Now, that requires the coach to have somebody in that position that they trust beyond everything.

I mean, it's got to be somebody that can.

It can't be your best buddy because you trust him.

It's got to be not only a guy you trust, but a person.

I shouldn't say guy, because there are probably a lot of women out there, a lot smarter with this stuff than men ever will be.

But it's got to be a person that you trust and is beyond competent.

They gotta be really good because they're.

They're almost as important right now as anybody you got, because you have a salary cap, because you have nil.

Deal.

So I think that's the way you gotta handle it.

You gotta try.

You gotta learn to separate and compartmentalize those two things.

Cause if you don't, and that's in your locker room, it's gonna be a problem.

And I know, going back, guys and guys, I know the coach in the sec, when there were bags getting thrown around and bags of cash, the kids would brag about how much cash they got.

Next thing you know, the kids complain to the coach about, hey, this guy got X amount of dollars.

Why don't I get that?

And that create a lot of locker room problems.

Now, they couldn't talk about it because they weren't supposed to be doing it.

So it's still different dynamic now.

Yeah, but that.

That's a really great point, Jay.

I love that idea of sort of the separation, right?

You say, hey, I'm the head football coach.

I'm coaching football.

And if you want to talk about the money side of it, the business side of it, here's my business manager, my finance manager, or my nil director, whatever it is, and that person goes and handles that.

And once you step across that proverbial blue line, like you said, now suddenly we have it separated.

I think that's a great way.

You're probably, I know there's some schools that have already obviously had, you know, people that are, they have whole departments dedicated to being able to figure this stuff out.

And you know, again, the more resources your school has, obviously the more, the easier it is for you to be able to, to put some of those positions in place.

And football, especially at the big revenue schools like a Penn State compared to some of the smaller basketball schools where you have a smaller roster, smaller coaching staff, that stuff's more, more of a challenge to, to be able to do that.

But I do think that that's the direction eventually that we're going to have to head as we start to figure out what this thing looks like, right?

And the map starts to get drawn of, well, we got to handle this and we got to handle this and, and it starts to, again, we narrow down that focus of this is what ultimately the system's going to look like.

And it'll be very, very interesting over the next five years to see how this thing develops and, and hopefully some of the conversations that you talked about that you're able to have as a member of the board of trustees with university presidents and athletic directors and coaches, that those conversations will continue to move us in a direction where we end up with a place where it's beneficial for everybody.

The schools can still continue to educate their student athletes, where the student athletes can protect themselves, earn a little money, which certainly they have earned the right to do over the course of time of college athletics.

And yet it's not just a complete free for all like it, it feels like in some ways that we have, that we have today.

So we can't solve all the problems today, Jay, but I think we did a pretty good job of, of at least figuring a few things out.

But I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit, talk a little about your books and just tell us, you know, just how you got the ideas and again that you're writing kind of a, from a novel point of view, but obviously a lot of truth based in it.

So just, just tell us a little bit about the books and, and where people can get them.

Yeah, well, the, the, the book I have out now is called Blitzed and the, the all out pressure of, of college football's modern current era.

And really what it came down to was this.

I had written a book about my dad 10, 11 years ago, and once I did that, someone said you ought to write about what goes on in college football, because I would sit around, I'd tell guys stories, and I wouldn't tell what schools they were, but I would say, oh, this happened.

That they couldn't believe it.

These are guys that are longtime college football fans, guys I've known forever.

I said, you ought to write a book.

So I started to sit down and write this book.

And then I realized I got to write this.

I can't write this as a.

As a nonfiction book because somebody at this school is going to blow my house up or somebody that school or so.

And lawyers are going to be involved.

So I created a novel.

There was a book called Primary Colors, which was ostensibly written about the Clinton campaign, but it was written as a novel.

And that's kind of the idea I used when I wrote the book Hot Seat.

I sent it to Ohio State because I had recruited that state for 17 years and had a lot of familiarity with that.

You know, I'd gotten to know Trestle really well, Urban Meyer really well.

So I knew a lot of the ins and outs of.

So I said at Ohio State, to get away from me just being a Penn State writer writing about Penn State.

And when that book was done, and it basically took you through a year of this coach who was told, if you don't win this year, you're done.

Like, I can't keep the trustees away anymore.

The president says, you got one year to win.

And it was this constant conflict and a tension between his ethics and what it was going to take to win.

And do I do this?

And do I buy this recruit?

Do I not buy this route?

So it's really.

But they were all based.

It was all real stories, what I called nonfiction fiction.

So I took real stories and put them into this novel.

Well, when that book was done, people started saying, well, what comes next?

And by that point, we were at the landscape and the business model.

The entire model of college football had changed so much that I had already been consulting on nil stuff for a couple years.

So I was familiar with what was going on all over the country, talked to different coaches, talked to people that were talking to people, talk to ads.

So I have, again, a number of things that are real that are happening right now.

And I put them in a book now called Blitz, which takes you through that same coach at Iowa State.

And now it takes you into transfer portal.

The money, the demands, agents, this school versus that school.

Kids just, you know, lying to your face, but also a good chunk of it, of the mental health aspect that no one talks about.

With the nil is these players now have to adult, you know, at 18 years old.

Now they've got to deal with agents, attorneys, accountants, all these things.

They've got family members that are saying, I know you love at this school, but you got to go to this school and make this kind of money and you can make more money.

And they're getting all this kind of pressure and the pressure to go out and be on social media after a tough game and when minute you step out after a tough game on social media, an avalanche of just brutal criticism.

We did not prepare kids for this well enough at all.

And that was one of the things the group I consulted with kept saying to schools like, look, it's great that you want to give them financial literacy and all this stuff.

You better help them prepare for what's coming because they've got to go out and say, oh, after every game I drink Gatorade or whatever it may be.

And people go, well, you sucked, you threw an interception, all that kind of stuff.

So all that comes in as well as the mental health of the coach now, because your coach now was on the clock 24:7 because there, you know, it's unrestricted free agency every year for your entire team.

You know, usc, you're saying, oh, we like to announce that our quarterback re signed with us.

And you just go, what have we come to?

You know, so all that is in this book and it takes a.

Whether you're a college football fan, basketball fan, whatever it may be, it takes you into that world of the pressure that these guys are dealing with now every day, all day.

And there's a point where the coach in this book, his wife and some people finally get him said, look, you need to start talking to somebody.

And it's like the Sopranos where Tony Soprano is talking to him with shrink.

It's not to that point, but.

And the person that his advice says, look, when you and your wife go away, go to the beach for a week in the summer, you need to put someone in charge in the office and turn your phone off for two days.

And he's like, I can't do that.

And it's like, if it's a, if it's a big enough emergency, we'll find you.

Other than that, you know, and like it takes you through all those pressures that these guys have.

So it's really a good inside look at what you know.

If you, if you are a guy that has a kid that's going to play big time college sports, it's important for them to understand what they're getting into.

And that's in the book too.

Yeah, that's a great point.

I think that people outside of the college athletic world have no idea what goes on on the inside.

Both from the perspective of a coach, from the perspective of an athlete.

I always think about coaches and again, their livelihood.

Right.

Depends on 18, 19, 20, 21 year old kids performing at their absolute best.

And I think when any of us who are the age that you and I are, when we look back at ourselves at 18, 19, 20 years old, I'm not sure anybody should have been relying on me, at least for their, for their livelihood, you know, certainly especially.

That money in my pocket.

That's right, exactly.

Like I look back, go, I was 18 and someone's giving me half a million bucks to play football.

Look at it like, that's not a good cop.

That's a bad combination.

It is not.

I was so excited over, I always used to say over winter break we get like 300 bucks for meal money when I was living in the apartment.

And so every year I'd be like, all right, I can live on 150 bucks of this and I could always go out and buy myself a pair of shoes with some of that money.

And I couldn't, I, I could not have been more excited to have gotten that whatever, extra 100.

And it wasn't extra, it was just that I, maybe I skipped a meal every day so I could buy myself a pair of shoes or whatever.

And I think about how excited I was.

I can't even imagine what an 18 or 19 year old kid going through and getting the kind of money that some of the kids are getting.

And obviously not everybody's at the top of the pay scale, but I mean, heck, if I was getting $5,000, that would have seemed unbelievable to me when I was 19 years old.

It would have been, it would have been incredible.

So who knows?

All right, anyway, before we get out, Jay, I want to give you a chance to share.

How can people connect with you?

Find out more about what you're doing, share website, social media, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.

Okay.

Website JV paterno.com J A Y the letter V paterno.com on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it now at J Paterno.

My full name, J A Y Paterno.

Instagram is @JV paterno.j a Y V Paterno.

And all those places and the books you can get them Amazon, you get them on my website as well and wherever you buy books.

So all those things and certainly website you know you can keep track of me.

I'm always got blogs, got videos, got all kinds of stuff, news, that kind of stuff ending I'm doing anything I'm writing is is all on there as well.

Perfect.

Jay, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to join us.

It was a lot of fun talking college athletics with you.

Glad we got a chance to spend some time together.

To everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.

Thanks.

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