What Jay Paterno’s bookshelf teaches about NIL, revenue-sharing, and college football’s new era

A bookshelf, among the trinkets and clutter that we have nowhere else put, contains stories and memories; some our own, some passed down from family members or legends, immortalized for the words they wrote or the many written about them.

Sometimes those legends are family. A bookshelf is where Jay Paterno keeps Steve Spurrier’s visor from the 1998 Citrus Bowl, the same place that his father, Joe, once kept it after losing that game, and a friendly wager with his friend that required him to wear it off the field. 

Penn State had national championship aspirations that season and was the No. 1 or 2-ranked team in the country until a Week 11 loss to Michigan and a Week 14 loss to Michigan State.

The Nittany Lions settled for the Citrus Bowl meeting with Florida, which also spent time at No. 1 that year. Paterno and Spurrier, who were close friends, agreed that if Penn State won, Spurrier would wear Paterno’s glasses off the field, and if Florida did, Paterno would have to wear the visor. 

The visor, white with the script “Gators” across the front in blue with orange piping, served as an important mnemonic for Joe and a lesson that still echoes in his son’s head. 

“Going into that game, we had a couple of players that were eligible to play, but had kind of broken some team rules, and Joe left them home,” Paterno, then the tight ends and running backs coach on his father’s staff, recalled in an exclusive interview with Soaring to Glory. “Joe took that visor and always had it inside of his bookshelf at home because it was a reminder that he was willing to potentially risk losing a football game to try to do the right thing for the general health of the program.” 

Paterno still plays a role in overseeing the health of Penn State football, as a member of the Board of Trustees, but his latest endeavor concerns the health of college football writ large. 

Paterno is the author of Blitzed!: The All-Out Pressure of College Football’s New Era. A story that follows fictional Ohio State head coach Ed Hart as he navigates the increased demands and new challenges of the NIL and transfer portal era, based on real stories. Stories about how coaches with bags of cash and a handgun quickly became legitimate financial agreements, and every way in which the job is different from when his father did it for 46 years in Happy Valley. 

How NIL has changed the job of a college football coach

“Recruiting has always been a big deal, but recruiting now is identifying high school talent, identifying talent at other schools that’s entering the transfer portal, but also recruiting your own players to stay on your roster,” Paterno said, echoing a common refrain from frustrated coaches who have either left the sport, or like Chip Kelly and Jeff Hafley, resigned from head coaching jobs to become coordinators either in the college ranks or the NFL. 

However, Paterno, contrary to the message that many college football doomsday preppers began to trumpet when Kelly left UCLA and Hafley left Boston College, doesn’t foresee any mass exodus from college football coaching, or even many other coaches viewing the NFL as a life raft off NIL island. 

“I think as long as we’re paying college coaches the kind of money that we’re paying them right now, head coaches, I think there’s going to be a real incentive for them to stick it out,” Paterno said, tongue planted firmly in cheek. “When you talk about the business model of college football, you have some head coaches at schools making 10 percent of total revenue of the program, not profit, but revenue. That’s hard to find in any business anywhere in the world.” 

And what does that money buy? Well, in many cases, some of the best rule breakers (or evaders if you don’t get caught), in sports. 

“As a coach, your job is constantly to find loopholes. Ohio State has a certain type of defense, I have got to find a hole in that defense, if the NCAA passes a certain rule as it relates to NIL, I have got to find what I can do that’s not forbidden… We’re going to see some very creative stuff because this profession does attract some very creative minds.” 

Creativity is a necessity in the profession, even for a fictional character like Coach Hart leading the Buckeyes. Because even within the pages of Paterno’s college football fantasy, winning is everything. 

“Let’s be realistic about what we’re dealing with here. We’re dealing with a bunch of people for whom winning at all costs carries a significant financial reward,” Paterno acknowledged, addressing the perpetual line-stepping throughout the history of the sport. “We’re not giving coaches big six-figure bonuses if they graduate 85 percent of players.” 

A voice for the players

While he’s taken a coach's perspective throughout the book, if you’re searching for sympathy for the most highly-paid figures in the sport, look elsewhere. Paterno is a vocal advocate of the players and their involvement in solving college football’s most existential issues. 

There aren’t many people involved in modern college football as connected to the sport in its previous form as the son of a man who coached from 1966 until 2011, and Paterno, like many traditionalists, is not a fan of the “implosion of the amatuer model” as he calls it in the description of his book. But that may be the only part of the issue where he and other old-school college football minds find common ground. 

“We need to be realistic about what we're doing here,” Paterno said, referencing the boom in television contracts and revenue generated by the Power Conferences and NCAA’s major events like March Madness. “This is not an extra-curricular activity that guys come to school to play for ‘Dear Old State’ or whatever it may be.

"This has become a business, and when you start talking about coaches making the kind of money that they’re making – I think the one thing I would change is with the revenue-sharing, I think coaches’ salaries should come down and revenue sharing for players in all the sports should come up, but I don’t think that’ll happen anytime soon.” 

Revenue-sharing is the latest monkey wrench thrown into college athletics, part of the House vs. NCAA settlement that went into effect on July 1, 2025. The settlement allows schools to pay athletes directly from a pool of revenue-sharing money that in Year 1 will total about $20.5 million.

It’s the result of three federal antitrust lawsuits that claimed the NCAA was illegally limiting the earning power of college athletes. It also requires the NCAA to pay $2.8 billion in back damages to athletes from 2016 through the time of the settlement, over the next 10 years. 

It’s a step in the right direction, but Paterno and many of its detractors agree that it’s merely a half measure. He believes that college football needs something more… revolutionary. 

“It’s time for a constitutional convention,” Paterno said. Like the visor that loomed large over his right shoulder, a bit of history informing his vision for the future of college football. “The governing bodies of these schools should be part of this process, as should student-athletes. When you look at the College Football Playoff, every year they make changes, and the student-athletes aren’t at the table to say, ‘wait a minute, maybe we don’t want to play four more games or five more games without getting a chunk of the money.” 

Then, like a true former college football coach, Paterno proceeded to find every potential loophole in the current deal; the state laws that can override its validity, the future lawsuit from a new star player who wasn’t represented in these class action suits, who doesn’t want their earning power artificially capped by this agreement, and the old-fashioned bags of cash that could make their triumphant return to the sport to skirt the NIL clearinghouse. 

Then, Paterno addressed the elephant that has wedged itself into every room where the future of college football is discussed. 

“I think collective bargaining has to show up. I think it’s going to happen. They’re going to have to be treated as employees. Let’s be realistic about that,” Paterno said. “You’re giving somebody a 1099 form for $1.5 million to play football at your school, it’s hard to argue that they’re not employees.” 

Paterno’s fictional Coach Hart may not make the same argument, but for someone so entrenched in the history of the sport, Paterno is uniquely pragmatic about its future. Coaches must adapt, and players deserve more power. Most of the powers in college football will resist these necessary changes as long as they can. Instead, maybe they should take a lesson from the Paternos and Spurriers’ famous visor, and sacrifice this game for the long-term health of the sport.