Jay Paterno is no stranger to debate. Growing up, dinners at his family's house on McKee St. usually ended in some sort of friendly argument.

The family could debate anything, and it was not uncommon for the encyclopedia to make an appearance at the table.

"My dad would take a side of an issue, even if he didn't agree with it, just to create a bit of an argument, and we'd just go and go and go," Jay recalls.

His father, of course, is Penn State head coach Joe Paterno, the man that has also been Jay's boss for the past 12 years.

As quarterback coach for the Nittany Lions, the 38-year old Jay now spends more time with his father than he did as a young child.

In recent years, Jay has been the subject of debates among Penn State supporters. Is he qualified for the job? Do Zack Mills, Michael Robinson or Anthony Morelli know what they're doing out there? Is he only coaching at Penn State because of his father?

There are backers on each side of the arguments, but sometimes the debates -- especially when conducted on faceless message boards and via e-mail -- aren't so friendly.

While some may feel it's a curse and a disadvantage for Jay to work under his father, the second youngest Paterno child couldn't be happier.

In the interest of professionalism, Jay calls his father "Joe" or "Coach." The transition was not difficult since Jay played under the elder Paterno as a backup quarterback from 1986-1989, and never referred to him as "Dad" in that capacity.

As a player, Jay lettered his senior year and collected time on the field in mop-up duty. Playing was not his passion, though.

He knew early on that he wanted to pursue a career in coaching, and it was no surprise when Jay told his parents he planned to enter the profession.

"My dad said, 'I hope you know what you're getting into because my career is the exception. To go to one place and be there your whole life is the exception.' He said that if this was what I wanted to do, then they'd support me," Jay remembered.

After his time as an undergraduate at Penn State, Jay remained with the program through the spring of 1990 as a graduate assistant. A few months later, he left to take over a similar position at the University of Virginia, living outside of State College for the first time in his life.

Growing up as a Paterno meant having family friends that were a bit more influential and interesting than the acquaintances most families have.

And so Jay spent his time at Virginia serving under head coach George Welsh, a friend of the Paternos from back when he was an assistant at Penn State from 1964-72.

Having the Welshs there in Charlottesville made the transition to living away from home a bit smoother.

"[All the children got] homesick at points," said Sue Paterno, Jay's mother and Joe's wife. "But for Jay, he always had Aunt and Uncle Welsh, which is what the kids grew up calling them."

Calling Charlottesville a similar place to State College, Jay caught smalltime acts like the Dave Matthews Band (which had not yet caught on nationally) in the college town's bars. On a trip to the Sugar Bowl, he even became acquainted with his future wife, the former Kelley Kolankiewicz.

Jay recalls his time at Virginia quite fondly, but opted to move on to a better position at Connecticut, where he worked with the tight ends before jumping to James Madison as quarterback coach for the 1994 season.

Then, in early 1995, the phone call came inviting him to join Penn State's staff as the tight end coach. For Jay, a man with more connections to Penn State than most, the opportunity was too good to pass up.

"Where you go to school is always going to leave a big mark on you, it's always going to be home to you," Jay said. "It's really a double whammy for me because I grew up here and went to my first game in 1973 when I was four, and Cappeletti won the Heisman with Penn State going 12-0. I was hooked, and the chance to come back was almost something too good to be true."

Sue said it was the assistants that pushed Joe toward bringing his son back as a coach. Joe didn't want to recommend his own son, and asserted at the time that such a move was the worst thing he could do for Jay.

Even so, the offer was extended, and Jay returned home, forsaking another position at Memphis.

"Jay said the one thing he always wanted to do was come back and coach with his dad," Sue said.

His homecoming wasn't all joy and smiles, though, as the younger Paterno was soon warned of what it would be like to be the coach's son.

Kenny Jackson, a receiver for Penn State from 1980-83 and the team's receivers coach from 1993-2000, gave the new coach some advice.

"Just so you understand," Jackson offered to Jay. "When Joe's mad at the staff he's going to use you and pick on you and make a point with you, even if you're totally innocent."

Jackson, an African American, likened Jay to an affirmative action hire, explaining that outsiders would think he got the job because of how he was born.

For the first few years with the program, Jay recalled that his father would sometimes go out of his way to be tougher on him than the other coaches.

"I was mature enough to understand it initially, which is good," Jay said. "But I knew growing up that he always expected a little more out of us -- and not because our last name was Paterno, but because we were his kids."

But growing up as a son of the most famous head coach in the northeast has its perks as well as drawbacks.

The Paternos have lived in the same home since Jay was 10 months old. Before putting an addition onto the house, Joe's den was right off the kitchen, close enough for his curious son to hear the projector going at all hours of the day and night.

"I would go in and at 4, 5 years old I'd be on the ground playing with cars or whatever I had, and I began watching the film and kind of asking questions," said Jay. "I was always asking questions.

"Most sons at an early age kind of idolize what their fathers do, and that may be why I started to get into it."

Never having seen a Penn State game from the sidelines until he was a player, Jay watched the Lions from section SK (just to the press box side of the current student section) during the autumns of his childhood.

As a coach's son, it was great when the team won. But as he moved into sixth and seventh grade and got older, when Penn State lost, other children at school approached him and relayed what their fathers said about the team.

"It just comes with the territory," Jay says.

What also came with the territory was exposure to the dangers of living in the spotlight.

In 1976, when Pittsburgh was 10-0 with dreams of a national title heading into its game against Penn State, Jay remembers his mother being very upset in the weeks leading up to the rivalry contest.

Though his parents said nothing of this to him or the other children at the time, Joe, the family and quarterback Chuck Fusina received death threats in the weeks leading up to the game.

For a few years in the 1970's, the same voice began calling Paterno's home and office shortly after Halloween and continued until just after the Pitt game. The police and FBI were involved in the investigation and protection efforts, but the caller was never found.

The fear of the unknown caller was so profound in the Paterno household that when David, the family's oldest son, had a serious trampoline accident at school in 1977, Sue asked Joe if "that man" was responsible. Joe assured her that it was just an accident.

"He made our lives miserable," Sue said. "He knew too much about our family."

Instead of going to the games in Pittsburgh in 1976 and 1977, one year the children stayed with Sue's parents in Latrobe, and another year a private investigator was hired to watch them as they sat viewing the game on television.

"We met an uncle we'd never met before," Jay said, referring to the man who guarded the children during the game, who they were told was one of their many uncles.

While the family remained out of harm's way, Joe went about business as usual on the sidelines.

At halftime, with the game tied at seven, the phone rang in the Penn State locker room. The caller said, "Tell Joe don't come out for the second half."

Paterno did come out for the second half -- albeit surrounded by state troopers who stipulated that he could not pace, so that there would be a constant wall of protection behind him -- as Penn State fell 24-7 to the eventual national champions.

After the game, the voice called Paterno's home and said he was lucky that time.

Jay was only told about this incident when he was in college, more than a decade after the fact.

But experiences like that make Jay a bit more protective of his own four children, all under age seven.

Late nights at the office are common for a football coach, and nobody knows that better than Jay, who has seen it from the dual perspectives of a son and now as a father.

"I'll be sitting in the office and looking at a tape for the third time and I'll ask myself if I'll really get anything out of this if I watch it a third time," Jay explained. "Is it that valuable that I shouldn't be home and maybe read a bedtime story to the kids?"

The elder Paterno is on him -- and any other coaches with children -- to get his work done, go home and see his kids. According to Jay, his father often urges the assistants to keep in mind what's most important.

It's only fitting, then, that the morning of Nov. 4, sitting in a hotel room in Madison, Wis. before Penn State's game against the Badgers, Jay and Joe discussed parenting and kept in mind what was most important. Jay talked about a book he was reading on the civil war in Chechnya, and how awful it must be as a parent to have a child taken away in the middle of the night.

Joe took this as an opportunity to impart some wisdom onto his son.

"He looks at me and he says, 'Jay, you've got to hold onto every second you've got because life is so precious,'" Jay said. "Three hours later he got run into and scared the heck out of all of us."

As a child, Jay remembers thinking his father didn't spend enough time with the family. It was never worse than in the early 1980s, when Paterno doubled as football coach and athletic director, a period Jay remembers vividly because of his father's constant absence.

Sue finally told her husband he had to stop with the dual-roles because Joe didn't have enough time for family.

"When you're a kid you never think it's enough. Now that I spend a lot of time with my father I sometimes think it was too much," Jay said, letting his guard down a bit and referring to Joe as his father and then as "dad."

"For everything you get in life there's a trade-off. Sometimes I'll feel bad about not being able to spend enough time with my kids, and sometimes I'll feel bad that my dad wasn't around maybe as much as I would have liked. But then there are fathers going off to Iraq for a year, and they're not going to see their kids at all for a whole year, so it could be worse."

Jay believes his father might be so adamant about the assistants spending time with their children because Joe thinks he didn't spend enough evenings with his family when the kids were growing up.

Sue said Joe made as much time for his family as possible during the season, always coming home for dinner and then returning to the office later at night. Dinners -- and the debates -- were some of the only times the children got to see their father in autumn.

Again for Jay Paterno, the debate rages. Stay and analyze more game film, or go home and say goodnight to the kids?

"It's always in the back of my mind, and there's always a part of me that thinks about that," Jay said. "It's a constant battle, and you've got to take advantage of all the time you can to spend with your family."

Jay only began spending a bulk of his time with his father once he became part of the Penn State football program as a player. After games, the two would exit the Beaver Stadium locker room and walk back to the family's house. Since Jay returned as a coach, the two get a ride to about where the old Creamery stands, and then walk home from there.

On those walks back, beneath the oak and maple trees that arch over the street, the father and son have a chance to wind down from the adrenaline rush that is coaching. It's one of those rare times when Joe and Jay can speak to each other as father and son.

Jay describes the emotional high of coaching a football game as being "almost narcotic," and says the walk home helps to bring coaches down from that state. For Jay, though, the walk also provides an ideal learning environment in which Joe seizes the role of esteemed lecturer.

"I usually keep my mouth shut on those walks home because he's going to say something you'll remember," Jay says. "Some of the best advice he's ever given me in my life has been on those walks home."

In 1999, when Kelley was pregnant with twins (the couple's first children), the soon-to-be father received the best advice he can recall.

"[Joe] said, 'You know, Jay, one thing you're going to find out is that when you have kids, your happiness is defined by your least happy child.' "

Jay thought it over for a minute as neither father nor son said anything, and then asked what he meant.

Joe replied that when a father puts so much love and commitment into his kids, he wants them to be happy. You can't be happy, Joe said, knowing that one of them is unhappy -- it's impossible.

"And he said that's what changes about your life when you have children," Jay recalled. "I've never forgotten it, and as I've had my kids, it couldn't have turned out to be more true.

"There are certain things he says over a period of time that stay with you, but that's the one that stands out the most. It wasn't as a coach to an employee, it was as a father to a son. As his son, it clicked even more why if things weren't right and I wasn't happy or if I got into trouble, why it disappointed him so much. It really clicked on a lot of levels."

With the injuries Joe sustained at Wisconsin, the two were unable to walk home together following the final two home games of the season.

Instead, Jay took the opportunity to walk back to his childhood home with a new companion -- his own six-year old son.

"It's already started with the next generation now," said Sue.

Jay hopes the tradition of walking home with his father will return next fall, after Joe has had ample time to recover.

His critics -- and there are many -- hope the quarterback coach will be walking elsewhere next autumn.

Seldom does a day go by where a joke at Jay's expense isn't made on the internet message boards. It's even more rare when a poster defends him.

Some liken him to Fredo Corleone, the bumbling, two-timing son of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

A popular thread this time of year talks about coaching vacancies at other schools, and how Penn State fans wish their quarterback coach could move up the ladder and find an offensive coordinator job elsewhere.

The gripes about Jay are numerous, but the most prevalent are that he is unqualified for the job and that he fails to develop talent. Others complain about the playcalling. Still, there is the feeling among others that Jay's time spent as recruiting coordinator coincided perfectly with the program's fall from grace in the first half of this decade.

Many point to nepotism as the reason for Jay's hiring in the first place, and ask if the university has a policy against such hiring practices.

"They gave Jay the job because Jay deserved to have the job," said Jackson, the former Penn State standout and assistant. "Everybody looks at him and thinks he got the job because of his last name. His father can never come out and say Jay did a great job -- he can't win, it might infuriate other coaches. He really can't say anything."

Jackson, a family friend, feels this might be the toughest possible job in college football for the younger Paterno to handle, given his last name and lofty expectations.

"Working there, I knew [the standards to which Jay was held] weren't fair," Jackson added. "I saw it. He goes home with it, he can't leave it."

As for the second point of criticism, detractors look at Zack Mills' numbers from 2001 and 2002, compare them to the declining statistics in 2003-04, and conclude that something must have gone awry in the quarterback's development.

In the summer of 2005, Jay received a daily barrage of emails calling him foolish for starting Michael Robinson at quarterback.

Robinson wound up being named the Big Ten's offensive player of the year and was a Heisman Trophy finalist. In his senior season, Robinson broke Kerry Collins' Penn State total offense mark.

When the Anthony Morelli era began in September, it didn't take long for Jay's inbox to fill up again. He tries not to read all emails, but he does open a lot.

In 2000, his first year as quarterback coach, an alleged incident involving then-quarterback Rashard Casey assaulting an off-duty police officer prepared Jay for the types of criticism and hostility that could be directed toward a coach at a major program. The charges turned out to be unsubstantiated.

"The emails I got then, there's nothing anybody can send me now that would even compare to some of those," Jay said. "So that was a good way to break in at that point as quarterback coach."

Jay is pleased with Morelli's progress, and says the quarterback's junior year statistics are better than those of both Todd Blackledge and Kerry Collins.

"What I get about Morelli goes in one ear and out the other because it's not accurate," Jay said. "You can't please all people all the time, and the quickest way to ensure failure is to try pleasing everybody."

Students on Facebook are not much kinder than the fans on message boards. A search of Jay's name yields evidence of student discontent.

Group names range from "Jay Paterno is the source of all PSU football's problems and must be stopped" to "Anthony Morelli drives me to the bottle", which accuses Jay of turning the quarterback "from a diamond into a piece of glass."

He prepares his quarterbacks for the criticism they'll take, and always lets them know he's got their back. Jay tells them that they're all in it together, that there's no you and me, it's all of them.

Jay is literally there for his quarterback as soon as the player steps off the bus at Beaver Stadium. While other assistants ride the blue school busses to the stadium with the team on game days, Jay arrives ahead of time and shakes Morelli's hand before he enters the locker room.

"I'm critical in a way that boosts them up instead of taking them down," Jay said. "That's what coaching's all about -- it's all about relationships and having an impact on people."

Both Mills and Robinson struggled at times in their quarterbacking careers at Penn State, and both showed gratitude to their position coach after hanging up the blue and white for the final time.

Robinson expressed his appreciation via telephone, while Mills wrote Jay a lengthy letter, thanking him for his support through the years.

"I'll have that letter for as long as I live," Jay said. "Nobody can take that away from me."

More than the criticism, it's the losing that wears at Jay. Being unable to get over the hump in 2003 and 2004 might have marked the lowest point for the younger Paterno in his time as a coach at Penn State.

What also bothered him were the shots at Joe, who Jay feels didn't deserve nearly as much criticism as he received when the Lions went 7-16 over two seasons.

But those days are a thing of the past, as Jay believes the down years now will not be as harsh as they were a few years ago.

Still, some would prefer to see Jay at a different place in the near future. That, however, is unlikely.

Jackson says he can't imagine Jay leaving while his father is still coaching. Joe is interested in coaching for the foreseeable future, and Jay makes the case that this is the best place for him and his family -- even if it means passing up potential opportunities to become an offensive coordinator or head coach.

"It's more about family than about what would be best for my career," Jay said. "It doesn't matter how great your career is, if you're unhappy and your family's unhappy, it's not going to make a difference."

As for Joe, his fourth child claims he's not going anywhere anytime soon.

"He's not going to let up," Jay said. "The injury is yet another chance, another challenge. I was kidding around and told him people will count him out after this thing and he'll be back better than ever. He said, 'Don't bet against me. A lot of people have lost a lot of money betting against me.' "

For the 79-year old Paterno, age is more than just a number -- it's a state of mind.

So then it's not too surprising that when asked at a press conference this year about how old Jay turned on a recent birthday, Joe replied that he didn't know.

Jay remembers Joe asking one time, "If nobody told you how old you are, how old would you be?" He understands his father doesn't keep track of age, and is not terribly upset over Joe not knowing.

As a person, Jay is fairly approachable and easy-going, always pointing out the importance of keeping things in perspective. An avid reader (he's read more than 25 books this year), the son of Brown's most famous English major can also write a bit.

He wrote for The Collegian as a columnist in 1990, and is working on two pieces of short fiction, which he hopes to finish when things calm down after the season. Even when not writing his short stories, Jay keeps a journal almost daily, reflecting on events past and present.

Early morning dog walks around his comfortable neighborhood give Jay time to think. What must be emphasized in practice? How will the short stories end? When should the family ski trip to Colorado be booked and taken care of?

Inside and around Jay, the debates never cease.

At night, when it's finally approaching that time to leave the office in hopes of getting home to read to his children, Jay knows from his father to keep in mind what's most important.

And over that, there is relatively little debate.