Quicken Loans Inc. chief executive officer Bill Emerson went from a walk-on with Pennsylvania State University’s football team to part of Coach Joe Paterno’s 1982 championship squad, and then a captain two years later.
Emerson last year led Quicken, the mortgage lender owned by billionaire Dan Gilbert that was the 34th largest in 2006 as the U.S. housing boom ended, to near the very top of an industry that’s reaping the rewards of a refinancing boom engineered by the Federal Reserve and President Barack Obama.
