College Football’s Identity Crisis: NIL, Leadership, and Loyalty with Jay Paterno

0:00The landscape of college sports just shifted, and today we're diving into the playbook of one of the industry's most respected voices. Join me, Ryan Alford, as I sit down with Jay Paterno to deconstruct the NIL era, the high-stakes pressure of modern coaching, and the critical mental health hurdles facing today's student-athletes. From the insights in his book Blitzed to the unfiltered truth about gambling and transparency, this conversation is a masterclass in leadership for the new frontier of the game. What passes for leadership these days is I say it goes. I call it leadership by title. The president of a university, and if I tell you to do this, you've got to do this, or I'm the athletic director, or I'm the head football coach, and if I tell you to do this, you've got to do it because I have that title.

0:44That does not endure, and that's not successful. And ultimately, the people that you're in charge of, if they don't buy in and you don't have credibility, you can't lead them anywhere. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now We're always talking about how you get right in today's business world How you keep up with everything that's happening And of course, it's all about now So, hey, you gotta know this name We got a name, it's got its legacy in football, coaching, leadership at all It's Jay Paterno What's up, Jay?

1:34Not much. How you doing? Hey, man, I'm good. If I get to have somebody out and talk business and football and college sports and all that stuff, it is a good day.

1:46We're going to talk with Jay about his perspective on MIL, its impact on the game. Talk to me about what you've been up to. I'm on the board of trustees at Penn State, which has given me a really, really good perspective on the business side, not just of football, but just how that fits into the entire universities. I think more coaches should not necessarily become trustees, but verse themselves in the bigger picture. And that's one thing Joe was always great about. He understood the big picture of Penn State. I do a TV show called Nittany Game Week that goes 20 weeks, one of 13 stations in five states that covers Penn State football.

2:17Written three books, do consulting in NIL, a little bit of everything now. I wake up in the morning and say, what do I got to do today? What role do I play? I appreciate what you're doing with keeping lessons and things learned and leadership. We may talk about it, but it seems like it's in short supply. What passes for leadership these days is I say it goes. I call it leadership by title. The president of a university, and if I tell you to do this, you've got to do this, or I'm the athletic director, or I'm the head football coach, and if I tell you you've got to do this, you've got to do it because I have that title.

2:46That does not endure, and that's not successful. And ultimately, the people that you're in charge of, if they don't buy in, and you don't have credibility, you can't lead them anywhere. And that's one of the things I think comes through in all the books I've written, is that whether it was my dad writing about my dad, or the fictional coach in the two books I wrote. They're novels, but they're based on real stories. They're based on what's really going on in college football. You see that that coach has the same struggles or how do I handle this or how do I communicate? And I was really fortunate.

3:13I forget how many years ago it was now, but there was a group outside of Philly called Telios Leadership. And that's one of the things they talk about is building cultures, building organizations. And guys I know that are still in coaching and people I know that are in leadership positions, I still talk to them about some of the things that I got out of that. And if I was back in coaching, I'd be a much better football coach now than I was then. Some people would say I wasn't much of one then anyway, so it's not a very high bar. But no, we had a lot of success. But an understanding of what it takes to lead is no questions in short supply.

3:43When you think about leaders and even great coaches, I often wonder like this, I always have this nature versus nurture thing. They just born to be a coach, born to be a leader. Or can it be taught? I know everything can be taught. You've worked with some of the best, your father included. How much of his nature versus, I don't, learned behavior? I don't think any leader, I don't think there's any really great leaders that don't learn it. I think you have to have life experiences. There's some people have an innate charisma and innate ability where people will want to be around them. But there's also an element that only takes you so far.

4:15Because sooner or later, when things are great and you've got that charisma, people will follow you anywhere. But when things aren't going well, that's when you really find out. And that's when communication really becomes something that you've got to learn. And that's something that, as you said, it's definitely nurtured. I spent my whole life, no matter who I was around, whether it was in football, whether it was in politics, whether it was in business, I'm fortunate. I have a little bit of a Forrest Gump type life where I've been around presidents of the United States. I've been around CEOs of major, major corporations.

4:42I've been around even just people that were phenomenal leaders in their communities. But I was smart enough to take notes and always listen to what I could get from them, always trying to steal stuff. I learned it from my dad. My dad, as much success as he had as a coach, he was the same way, always making notes. And Nike would take them on these coaching trips every year. He'd be there with all these other coaches, most of whom were much younger than he was. But he would pick their brains, and they didn't even know it. He'd go back to his room and make all these notes. He'd come back and say, well, Bob Stoops has this approach, or this guy has that approach, or Pete Carroll's doing this.

5:14So he would have all these notes from these guys. I think that's critical if you're going to be a leader anymore. I was a firm believer that the players should be paid. You've got 15-year-old influencers that make money, but somehow college football players are not allowed to do that because their education gets paid for. It's great. There's that tradeoff. A proponent of them being able to benefit from their name, image, likeness. I was not a proponent of the wild, wild west that we've gotten into with seemingly no rules and anything goes. Talk to me, Jay, where we're at, your opinions, your beliefs, et cetera.

5:46The reality is NIL started because essentially lawsuits started to happen. And then California passed a law basically saying you can't restrict that. So all the lawsuits unfolded. And nobody at the NCAA, nobody at the college football level, nobody at the Big Ten, the SEC, or anybody took any kind of leadership on this thing. And we've just been getting jolted by every latest ruling by a judge. So the minute you think the system is set, a judge says, oh, you can't prevent them from doing this. And all of a sudden, now that changes the rules. Hey, Caitlin Clark at Iowa, State Farm and Nike think there's a return on their investment by using her in a commercial.

6:20Or we've got a football poster that has my image on it for Penn State, and there's corporations on there. I should be getting money for that. That's legitimate NIL. What we went to very quickly is we invented these things called collectives. And I was one of the guys that founded Penn State's first collective with other people's money because I had four kids in college at the time. So there was no extra money for me. But the collective suddenly became pay to play. Blitz where the head coach says, explain to me how this collective works. Well, we pay the players to promote the collective to raise money to pay the players to promote the collective to pay the players because that's money laundering.

6:52Now, the collective we started was the idea was nonprofits would take players or athletes from Penn State and they can't pay them to make appearances. But the collective would pay them to go make an appearance at a food bank or promote events or things like that. So there was a legitimate element to it, but it very quickly became pay to play. And now we've gotten to where because of revenue sharing now, some of that is tapered off. But you are seeing universities now take if they have a deal with Coke or Nike or whatever, they're siphoning off some of that sponsorship money and putting it into its collective and giving it to their players to promote those products.

7:26So it's gotten to be where it's more legitimate, but there's still room for abuse. No question. Branding and benefiting from your name, image, likeness and being paid for that versus just being paid to play the game. That's two very different things. You could be a superstar in the NFL, but not necessarily have any brand deals. They're unrelated. Well, I mean, even with some of the things that were going on collectives, and this is a true story, there was one collective that was giving every senior on the one football team$50 ,000 a year, and they were required to do two hours a month tweeting.

7:54Two hours a month, that's 48 hours. So it's over$1 ,000. It was probably around$1 ,200-something bucks an hour. And the players were actually complaining about it. If you want to make$1 ,200 and change an hour, you better go to med school or law school, and you're not going to make that for a while after that. or go to the NFL, but it's gotten a point where it's definitely, there's supposed to be a market now of fair market value. But again, it's going to take a while to get the data to figure out what fair market value is. My biggest issue with all of it, Jay, is NFL, you know, everybody's salary.

8:22People speculate, oh, I think you got two mil. We have no perspective to judge the value. Yeah, exactly. They all claim they're making more than they do. I mean, no question. Exactly. If you get paid to do something, it's professional, you know. We're still in that, like the parents with the sex talk, they don't want to have the talk. They don't want to own up to the fact that it's going on. We're still in that. Well, let's not talk about it. Let's not say they're employees. Let's say they're not really employees. We'll make them 1099 economy type stuff rather than saying they're employees. And what comes with that?

8:52Well, benefits come with it and collective bargaining comes with it and all those things that have to come to make it like the NFL. That has to come. I can't tell how many head coaches or ADs or university presidents or people I've talked to will tell you we certainly we want collective bargaining because it settles the whole market down. But none of them want to say that publicly. They think that once you say that, then I get the fact that they're reluctant to do that, but somebody's got to come forward and do it. And then you get the transparency that you're talking about, and you're getting the upfront stuff, as well as you'll then have the ability to kind of regulate the agents that are involved and give the players some protection when you have that like the NFLPA does.

9:26Yeah, and all this moving around year to year, you've got to have some contracts or something. It's just not good. Two things can be true. I can believe you should be paid for your name, image, and likeness. I might even believe you should be paid to get to play. But I can also believe there should be some limitations and some loyalty to the contract. If you're not going to be loyal to the school, then at least be loyal to a contract. It's just not good for college football, I don't think, to have these one-year deals, essentially. That's one of the reasons schools want collective bargaining. And at the end of the day, it'll protect the players and the schools.

9:56Because right now, I can sign a kid to a one-year deal, and if he's not good enough, I just run him off. Say, hey, we're not signing you, and see you later, and go to the portal. and nobody talks about all the guys in the portal that don't get picked up. Everybody assumes everybody gets a home and makes lots of money when they go to the portal. That's just not the case. Those contracts, they'll protect the school because, again, the school's investing money in these guys. It's coaching, training, food, all that kind of stuff. And ideally, you want to settle it down so that they can actually progress towards some kind of degree because at the end of the day, there's this whole education component nobody talks about anymore.

10:28It sounds cliche, but most of these guys, and they're like a commercial, they go on to be something besides a pro athlete. No, at 95 % of them are higher than that. Even if they make money in college, it's not going to be forever. That's not the lawsuit that's going on right now. I forget what school it is. That might be Vanderbilt or somebody. There's a basketball player who knows he's not going to go to the NBA and knows what he can make in Europe, but is making more to play at the school. And he's saying, well, how come I'm only limited to five or six years? Because this is a chance for me to make the most money possible of all my options as a player.

11:00You can't kick me out. So I think that lawsuit is coming. And, you know, that'll be an interesting result in that one, because if you can make a million bucks playing college basketball, but you can only make 500 grand in Europe, I'm going to stay in grad school forever and make a million bucks until they kick me out. It brings up a lot of questions, Jay, because for me, sometimes if you mess with the ingredients too much, your cake no longer tastes good. Part of me goes, oh, that'd be awesome if we could keep some of our favorite guys a couple years longer. But then I'm like, but does it stay the game that it is today?

11:30And I'm not talking about just the nostalgia. I'm talking about there's something about the ingredients of college football and the limited window that all these ingredients work together to bring fandom and interest and desire and all that. That if you mess with that too much, does it mess with it? There's a real danger of that right now. I hear more and more fans. And look, I'm 57 years old. So I'm old, but I'm not that old. But I hear more and more people my age and younger, 10, 12 years younger, that are saying, you know what? yeah I watch I root for my team but it's not the game that I love it's not that and when push comes to shove I'm not going to a bowl game if 12 guys going to opt out I mean Penn State's playing Clemson and five of their guys on defense that are really really good players are opting out and you say okay well is it really Penn State versus Clemson and you know Penn State's got guys opting out on their defense and offense so it's not even a continuation of the season that was be careful what you ask for because when it becomes the CFL it wasn't very popular no question And if we start motioning guys like they do and put 12 guys in the field down, I'm definitely quitting.

12:31But for Penn State fans, the Penn State Bowl against Clemson is good because that's a drive. You can drive up and back the same day, go to the game. If this bowl game were in Arizona, I'm not sure how many fans would go out there to see a bunch of guys. And we've turned the bowl games into just television content more so than an experience. Talk to me about Blitzed for our listeners. I know it's kind of fictitional in some ways, but talk to me about the premise and everything. It's a novel, so it's fiction, but it's what I call nonfiction fiction. So the stories you're going to read in there that are listed as fictional stories, they're real.

13:01It's really what's going on. It's just it's easier when you're going to write about something like this that is current, that is controversial. It's a lot better to kind of make it a fiction because now lawyers aren't involved because if I write this about somebody, now I'm getting sued. So I took it and made it what I call nonfiction fiction. So it's a novel. So I can be brutally honest. I just change names and change schools. And I make it very clear. I'm not trying to sign this to any one school or not. So I've changed names. So really what college football fans will get out of this book is what's really going on.

13:31The pressures of being a head coach, sitting in there and having to deal with, I have a day, you know, when the season's over where nine kids come in to meet with you one-on-one about transferring or not transferring or finding out from a third party that a kid is going to leave, as well as all the other things that they're dealing with. They're dealing with the NIL part. They're dealing with the business part. They're dealing with these kids when they get in trouble. They're dealing with a kid claims that one of his assistant coaches used a racial slur or that they were harassed. And now a report is written and the board of trustees gets involved.

14:03There's all elements of this thing from trustees all the way down to the players in this book. And then it talks about mental health aspect of it, not just on the players, and which is nobody got prepared these players for the mental health part of the NIL world. Nobody. And I've been consulting in NAL for four years. And that's one of the things we talked about from day one is all of a sudden, Junior is the breadwinner in the family. And if he leaves from the school that he really loves to go somewhere else, there might be more money. And the family's saying, why aren't you moving? And that's stuff they didn't used to have to deal with until they were in the NFL.

14:33Now, all those things are hitting 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds. And the mental health part for the coaches, and I don't want to get too much about what's going on in Michigan, But certainly there is a situation where the pressure and some of the mental part of it were underestimated, maybe not handled correctly. And you look at the player from Dallas Cowboys who killed himself. I mean, these things are very, very real. No one's talking about it. And those do come through in the book. It's like that's the layer that's sort of always swept under the rug. Oh, it's just about money. They just want to do this, all that.

15:02Well, yeah, it is that. But like there is these components that go into the impact that happens. It's deep. There's a point in the book where the head coach is actually goes and starts to talk to someone, not a psychiatrist, but someone who an outside advisor. Life coach isn't the right word, but a leadership person. And that person actually says to the coach, when you go away with your wife to the beach, I want you to put your phone down for two days. Put someone in charge when you leave. And if there's a major, major emergency, they'll know how to get you, but anything else. And he goes berserk, like you want me to do what?

15:35And that's how these coaches are wired. And when the phone rings at 1230 at night, it's not the academic advisor telling you, congratulate, you're having 15 guys make Dean's list. It's something very, very different. And that's the pressure you feel in the college game, because unlike the pros, when they leave the building and the pros, they're grown men. And when in college, when they leave the building, you're still expected to have some influence on them.

16:00Jay, where can everybody learn more about what you're up to, buy the book, all that stuff? My website is jvpaterno.com. My name, J-A-Y, the letter V, paterno.com. I'm on Twitter or X or whatever it is now, at J Paterno, Instagram at JV Paterno. But you can get the book on the website. You can get the book on Amazon or wherever you get books. And keep up with everything I'm doing. Subscribe on the website or follow me on those social media platforms. You got a lot to contribute. You're still doing great things. I appreciate you for coming on. I appreciate you having me. Cool. I really appreciate it, Jay.

16:31Hey, guys, you know where to find us. Ryan is right. We'll have links to Jay's books, his website, and all the ways to stay up to date to what he's doing, all his contributions to football leadership. We appreciate you, and we'll tune in next time on Right About Now. This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanIsRight.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.

17:03Bye.