On Thursday, Pat Fitzgerald was history's least-embattled 1-11 college football coach preparing for the final season in the recognizable Big Ten. Three days later, the university where he was so entrenched that it seemed like he would coach until he died and then get stuffed like Jeremy Bentham so that his ghoulish death mask could be trotted out to intimidate a referee after a particularly egregious pass interference call fired him amid a maelstrom of grotesque hazing allegations, secretive reports, and incompetent flailing from the highest reaches of the university bureaucracy; the result was a preening coach, program, and university that tediously sold itself as a model for doing things The Right Way imploding over tawdry, Shrek-related humping incidents.
Allegedly, According to Reports, Etc.
The trajectory of the scandal was bizarre. After the season, Northwestern announced an investigation into allegations of hazing in the football program. Last Friday, the university issued a press release saying that the investigation by an independent law firm found hazing in the program but could find no evidence that the coaching staff knew anything but also that they were suspending Pat Fitzgerald for two weeks. The entire thing raised more questions than it answered: if there was no evidence that Fitzgerald knew anything why suspend him? And if the administration felt he was implicated enough in the hazing to be suspended, why would a token two weeks during a completely dead period in the college football calendar suffice? It seems clear that the administrators at the top reaches of the university had hoped the vague report summary, suspension, and the general shroud of national indifference over anything having to do with Northwestern football would be enough to make the allegations go away and allow Fitzgerald to return and pursue that elusive win on the continent of North America that had eluded him for nearly two years.
The plan immediately backfired. Student journalists at the Daily Northwestern published the puerile details of the hazing rituals from former players along with new claims from those players that Fitzgerald and program staff knew about and tacitly encouraged them. The timing of the suspension during a completely dead period whether intentional or coincidental meant that the Northwestern hazing story filled a vacuum of college football news and brought attention to the scandal and more scrutiny than I have ever seen associated with Northwestern football to which the administration seemed to have no answer other than to occasionally release Official Comments dripping with flop sweat while more allegations about hazing and racism in the program kept piling up through the Daily, a group of players describing themselves as the "entire team" released a statement of support for Fitzgerald, and also at the same time unrelated reports surfaced about the baseball coach who has apparently been acting like the red-assed baseball version of a Mad Max warlord.
It is hard to imagine a more flailing and incompetent response from the administration. University president Michael Schill still argues that the official investigation found no evidence that Fitzgerald knew anything about the hazing in the very press release where he fired him. Athletic Director Derrick Gragg, who was hired quickly because the guy they originally hired was accused of reacting rudely and indifferently to a lawsuit about sexual harassment in the cheerleading program, seems to be running a toxic department with a Lord of the Flies football team and a baseball coach who was too much of a belligerent hardass for the literal United States Army. Fitzgerald maintains that the official report backs up his claims that he did not know that the hazing was taking place and seems poised to sue Northwestern. It is hard to imagine the situation will not get uglier.
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Pat Fitzgerald had found a successful formula at Northwestern: under him and with defensive coach Mike Hankwitz, the Wildcats had mastered a brand of unwatchable, punt-based toilet football that allowed them to win enough games in a mediocre, gerrymandered division to regularly go to bowl games, defeat its downtrodden Hat Rival, and generally serve as a normal mid-tier Power Five team. This was all anyone wanted. Fitzgerald's job was to keep Northwestern football from the abyss, the logical place where a small private school that intentionally hamstrings itself in recruiting, has no fans, and plays very close to the capital of Big Ten post-graduate migration which ensures that it is overwhelmed by people cheering from the opponent in nearly every game in its tiny, rotting, tarp-adorned stadium should be.
Fitzgerald took the Northwestern job suddenly and amidst tragedy at the age of 31, and cultivated a wholesome camp counselor image as he exhorted the team with elaborate fist pumps and posed in square-jawed coaching faces on the sidelines. He became more and more entwined with the program until Northwestern football had two mascots: the person in the fuzzy wildcat suit capering on the sidelines and the burly, rectangular-haired guy bellowing "go 'cats" and bloviating the same Our Young Men speech unceasingly for seventeen consecutive years. His emergence of the face of the program and of Northwestern athletics was lucrative for him and for the program as he, former athletic director Jim Phillips, and Northwestern mega-donor Pat Ryan led efforts to lavish the sports teams with fancy new facilities including an Ozymandian lakeside practice facility, a major renovation to the basketball and volleyball arena, and a proposed $800 million football stadium that has stalled in fights with the Evanston City Council and now has a tougher sell as the House that Fitz Built.
The longevity of Fitzgerald amid the constant churn of college coaches eventually made him one of the Big Ten's elder statesmen by his early 40s. Every year there would the attendant upheaval and rumors and message board flight tracking as goateed men named Chip and Buddy shuttled among college coaching gigs and then at Big Ten media days there would be Pat Fitzgerald and Kirk Ferentz dug in like Egyptian obelisks overseeing the entire thing and then annually playing the worst football game anyone has ever seen. Fitzgerald seemed to enjoy this status and began a new phase of Andy Rooney-style pontification against cell phones, the run-pass option ("the purest form of communism"), and an ESPN personality whose reference to Northwestern's team as a bunch of "Rece Davises" he took as an unutterable football insult.
Fitzgerald sold himself and the program sold him as ambassadors of the NCAA student-athlete model. This attitude meant a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting about graduation rates and recruiting restrictions, but it also meant accepting NCAA rules designed solely to prevent players from earning any money for their considerable efforts as some sort of ideal instead of a racket. It is no surprise that when some members of the team led a drive to create a new sort of players' union, the university stepped in to stop it-- the school, because a university will attempt to stop a unionization effort by anyone in its ranks reflexively like a jellyfish lashing out with a tentacle at any external stimulus, and Fitzgerald because he is management. Fitzgerald's pitch to the players against the union was that the team was like a family and the players could go to him with any of their concerns. The allegations of the abusive culture within the program have made this argument in retrospect even more odious.
The total control that Fitzgerald sought created his downfall. It is very difficult for Fitzgerald to have spent nearly twenty years proclaiming that he is Northwestern football and Northwestern football is him and then claim that he had absolutely no idea that bizarre, organized nudity rituals were happening under his nose for a decade passed from class to class and written about on whiteboards in the facility. Either he is a maniac whose football culture comes from a fraternity house in the Hellraiser cinematic universe who should not be allowed to be in charge of anything or he is an oblivious fraud who should not be allowed to be in charge of anything.
It did not help his case that whatever strategies Fitzgerald used to keep the Wildcats comfortably competitive were beginning to falter. The team record plummeted to 1-11, a level of futility not seen since the 1980s. Fitzgerald failed to win more than three games in three of the last four years. The defense has fallen apart since Hankwitz retired and the offense, reliably putrid during the Fitzgerald years to the point where it seems like it is part of a perverse blasphemy against the passing game, has reached new levels of blight.
Beyond the games themselves, it appears as though Fitzgerald had not solved or even deigned to acknowledge the massive shifts in the landscape of college sports since he took over in 2006. It seemed to me that Pat Fitzgerald, a man who even by the stoneheaded standards of college football coaches came across as one of the most stubborn people to scream beet-red into an air traffic controller headset, both had no idea how to adapt his formula for winning into the rapidly-changing, increasingly professionalized world of college sports in the 2020s and no desire to try. Instead, he seemed content to perform his jut-jawed monologues about Student Athletics while the program retreated to its 1980s nadir.
The trajectory of the program made it seem like Northwestern was going to have to decide what football would look like after Fitzgerald within the next few years. In that scenario, the school would be firing a university legend and faced an unknown world of trying to lure someone to a program where they have to use a silent snap count during Big Ten home games.
Now that reality has arrived except Fitzgerald is exiled in disgrace and vowing legal action, there are less than two months before the season, the entire athletic department is under a shroud of scandal to the point where I would not be surprised if there was a report that a fencing coach had forced team members into organized banditry against spice caravans traveling on the Green Bay Trail, many football players seem disgruntled and likely to leave at the nearest opportunity, and the entire university bureaucracy has been operating like an Armando Ianucci ensemble as they issue panicked press releases and zoom in from various vacation hotspots.
Meanwhile the football team is going to apparently try to have a season. New defensive coordinator David Braun, a December hire whose brief tenure is enough to give him plausible deniability, has been named interim coach. The administration will continue to scramble to cover its ass, likely by hiring more administrators and establishing various protocols, and likely firing a few more people like the asshole baseball coach and the athletic director, and they will hopefully put a sticky note somewhere that says that the next time they want to invest all of the power and resources of a major college football program in a single person because that person claims to do things the right way they should probably figure out what that person means by the right way because it might not be normal.
This might be a good time to ask once again whether Northwestern needs to have a semi-professional football team attached to it, but the enormous quantities of money that the television networks throw at the university has already answered the question. The university, it seems, will wait and hope enough people can watch this football team without thinking about what the former players have told the Daily about their experiences on the team and hope that Northwestern can comfortably retreat back into its bland anonymity in the college football landscape while the checks still clear.
