Jay Paterno

Jay Paterno is the President of Blue Line 409 LLC, a broad-based practice touching business ventures, writing as well as consulting in politics, leadership, philanthropy, branding, crisis communications and public relations.

Notably Jay has over two decades’ experience as a college football coach at Penn State, the University of Virginia, the University of Connecticut and James Madison University. He was named the Big Ten’s Best Quarterback Coach by Rivals.com in 2011 and was honored among the Nation’s Best Offensive Coordinators by ESPN.com in 2008. In those roles he developed leaders as an educator, coach and adviser to players and other coaches.

As a writer he wrote the Best-Selling book Paterno Legacy, and followed it up in 2020 with the novel Hot Seat: A Year Inside College Football’s Pressure Cooker. He writes for StateCollege.com and his own Pigskin Stew Blog and has written for a number of outlets among them: USA Today, The NCAA News, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Centre Daily Times, The Daily Collegian, The Arab News and has even had his work translated into Chinese for The Epoch Times. He was cited by Sports Illustrated as one of the Top 100 Sports Tweeters in the World in 2011—the only football coach on that list.

In 2012 he delivered a speech honored among “The Most Important Speeches of The Century” by American Rhetoric. In 2008 and 2012 he was a surrogate speaker for the Obama Presidential Campaign and was invited to the White House Community Leaders Forum. In media he has been interviewed on every major news network as both a coach and as a point person in a major crisis management case. He continues to speak on leadership, team building and crisis management to industry and on college campuses and serves as an Alumni-elected member of Penn State University’s Board of Trustees.