Special feature

Slideshow: A look at Paterno's legendary career Take a look back at legendary Penn State coach Joe Paterno through the years. NBCSports.com

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By Steve Greenberg

updated 10:52 p.m. ET Feb. 10, 2010

Joe Paterno would like to walk again — the 25 or so weekly miles he was accustomed to before leg and hip injuries slowed him the past few years. He'd like to feel no pain, no weariness, as he pushes hard down the path that plunges straight into the park outside his State College home; as he pulls off his shirt and tramps through the sand near his and wife Sue's second home at the Jersey Shore.

But what the 83-year-old Penn State coaching legend would really like to do is run again — to charge onto the football field with the vim and vigor of a man decades younger, which is how Paterno still feels on the inside. "I can still run," he said on a January morning in his office, a couple of weeks after the Nittany Lions' victory over LSU in the Capital One Bowl, "but I'm a little nervous about it because every game's on television. One stumble …"

It wouldn't be his first — there was a time, after consecutive losing seasons in 2003 and '04, when many a critic decided Penn State had fallen and Paterno was too old to get them back up. And it probably won't be his last. But if sports fans know anything, it's that this unbreakable rock of a man in thick-rimmed glasses, rolled-up pants and white socks will coach at one school, and one school only, until the final hour of his career.

In one of the craziest and most controversial offseasons to date in the college football coaching world, Paterno — 60 years a coach at Penn State, 44 leading the program — spoke about the state of the game and his profession, and his ever-burning desire to keep moving forward.

The following are excerpts and outtakes from that interview, which appears in the issue of Sporting News magazine that is on newsstands now.

SN: What's at the heart of the message you try to communicate to recruits and their parents?

Paterno: It's a great opportunity for a kid. Get a good education, understand what football can do for them, a sense of loyalty, commitment, how as a group you can get some things done — good things. But, most of all, they better go to class.

SN: Do many recruits choose their schools for the wrong reasons?

Paterno: Some of them, sure. Look at the (academic) opportunities on campus, and if they're interested in the kind of football that we play, come and find out a little bit about us. They've got to be comfortable in the environment that we create, academically as well as being part of the whole university community. I think kids ought to come to college to come to college, and play football as an extracurricular activity. And when it goes beyond that, where the football becomes more important than the whole educational experience, they're picking the wrong spot. And I tell them that.

SN: Is there much loyalty left in the coaching business?

Paterno: We've got to be careful we don't judge a whole profession by a couple of things that happened (with major-college coaches) recently. I think of Bobby Bowden. He went (34) years at Florida State — where was the loyalty to him? It's a two-way street. … The thing with Bowden bothers me because he's a great guy and a great coach — he did a great job at Florida State — but a couple years ago they hire a guy (Jimbo Fisher) who's going to be the heir apparent. Those kinds of things bother me. I think there's more to college, hopefully, than all of that.

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