The college football calendar is harsh and unyielding so when Northwestern football spends the past two months mired in an escalating series of shocking, grotesque, and embarrassing scandals that resulted in the most entrenched 1-11 college football coach in the country getting fired, the program has no choice but to limp into Piscataway on Sunday and somehow attempt to play football in order to collect its Big Ten television check. I have no idea what that is going to look like. I don't know how the announcers are going to try to talk around the scandal or somehow elide the putrid details of the hazing incidents or, if they bring it up, then explain why Northwestern is taking the field. I am pretty sure that the entire thing could potentially be such a debacle that it will somehow make television producers yearn for the excitement of a normal Northwestern-Rutgers game.
Here's a brief overview of some things that have happened since Northwestern fired Pat Fitzgerald on July 10: Fitzgerald retained a law firm presumably to sue Northwestern; several former players filed lawsuits against Northwestern, each of which has corroborated previous allegations or brought about new ones about sexual harassment or racism; a reporter decided to read athletic director Derrick Gragg's Leading Leaders The Leadership Way: A Story of Leaders and the Leaders Who Lead Them book and found some vaguely embarrassing Steve Harveyous passages about women being distractions; new coach David Braun talked for fifteen minutes about how he's not talking about anything at Big Ten media days; several coaches and players showed up to the first open practice wearing "Cats Against The World" pro-Fitzgerald t-shirts; Gragg blasted the t-shirts in the media; Northwestern hired Skip "Skip" Holtz as a sort of consigliere for the football program while he insists that he will continue to coach the Birmingham Stallions USFL team.
Holtz coming up with a Two Hat System where he alternates head gear if he is answering questions as a Northwestern assistant or as a Birmingham Stallion
The very stupid t-shirt incident proved that years of apathy has left the university athletic department completely unable to deal with any sort of scrutiny. But more importantly, it highlighted that even though Fitzgerald is gone, the program remains in his image. The ostensible reason that the university fired Fitzgerald was because he was ultimately responsible for the puerile hazing even if its investigation (according to university president Michael Schill-- the university will not publish it and it remains under lock and key) did not uncover a damning piece of hard evidence that proves he knew about it or orchestrated it. But the university stopped there. All of the coaches who had the same responsibility to the players remain in place and, presumably, there are players currently on the roster who participated in the hazing. It was apparently impossible with two months until the season to find someone other than Mike Bajakian to design the most doomed trick plays humanly possible; that is why it was crucial to retain him so that he could show up looking like an out of focus thumb wearing a t-shirt about how the sick media was very unfair to Pat Fitzgerald about Shrek.
Mike Bajakian pictured after the result of 87% of his playcalls
Does anyone else feel completely insane that after reading what seemed for a time like daily updates about fucked up things happening in Northwestern's football program that they're just going to show up and play Rutgers, with uniforms and everything? How does it make sense that after all of the lawsuits and allegations that David Braun is just standing up at the podium and saying he's here to talk about football and then when someone asks him a football question like who will be the starting quarterback he just says that's classified, for football reasons? And how are we supposed to know if Skip Holtz is acting in his capacity as Assistant to the Head Coach of the Northwestern Wildcats and not Head Coach of the Birmingham Stallions?
Northwestern was excited when Skip Holtz said he had experience giving the offense a "Peyton Ramsey" flavor without asking enough questions
For years, I have joked about Northwestern football as a grim proposition mainly because of the gruesome and disgusting brand of football that Pat Fitzgerald preferred to play. In a normal year, the idea of opening the season with Northwestern playing Rutgers would seem decadent or even debased. But it is impossible to even think about what Wildcat football will even look like on the field. The roster is cobbled together from the remains of a one-win season, thinned further by transfers. The fact that the scandal broke in early July is probably the only thing that prevented a mass exodus; Pat Fitzgerald's son is still on the team. It is difficult to believe that a team that is led by a first-time head coach at any level who was unexpectedly thrust into leadership solely because he was slightly less tainted by scandal than his colleagues in a program that has spent the past two months marinating in dysfunction and who apparently requires the counsel of Skip Holtz could possibly be better than last year's team that was merely bad, but it is almost impossible for the team to play worse than they did a year ago. And what is the best case scenario here: a team rallies together and inexplicably wins several upsets with the players proclaiming that they have triumphed over adversity without mentioning that the adversity was the humiliation of their own teammates with rituals that seem to have been imported from 1920s British aristocrat schools?
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Anyone who writes about a college football team as a fan knows that they are on borrowed time until the Bad Thing happens. The rottenness and corruption at the heart of the sport means that it is only a matter of time. The same pervasive lawlessness in college football is on the one hand one of the things that give the sport its energy when boosters are gleefully handing out sacks of cash in front of the NCAA's legion of Bufords T. Justice but when something actually bad happens and it is a result of systemic institutional failure, you would hope there would be someone in charge other than hapless university bureaucrats whose main job is telling rich people they'll put their name on a building and the sports' theoretical governing body that is so oafish and incompetent that it is stunning that actual NCAA officials are allowed to run around in society in suits pretending they are important instead of being outfitted like colorful Swiss Guards that tourists in Indianapolis can gawp at and try to bother by making weird faces at them.
I believe this simple change in NCAA President Charlie Baker's wardrobe best expresses the dignity of his position.
This Northwestern football season is a disaster before ball has even been snapped. It seems unlikely to me that we've seen the worst of the revelations that will come from the numerous lawsuits, and the university's response seems to me to show that its priorities are not with the safety and dignity of athletes but instead the department is laser focused on making sure the football team finds a way to lose to Iowa 8-5 but this time in a billion-dollar facility called Pat Ryan's Northwestern Football Stadium and Robot World.
There is no amount of football that they can play that will make Northwestern's season about anything other than the hazing scandal and the firing of Pat Fitzgerald. And I admit that I am somewhat at a loss on how to write about it, even if my way of "covering the team" traditionally involves writing three run-on sentences about football, making a few sophomoric jokes about the opposing coaches and then throwing in a 3,000 word review about books on eighteenth-century shipwrecks or whatever. It makes no sense to ignore what has happened in favor of trying to pretend that I am going to break down some All 22 linebacker coverage. At the same time, I cannot imagine it will be fun to write or for the 35 people who consume this blog to read ten to eleven posts that are about Northwestern football but feature several throat-clearing paragraphs about how it's bad.
This will certainly and unfortunately be an extremely interesting football season, and I will try to write about it in a way where I feel like I have something to say about it without feeling disgusting. For example, I have not yet determined the specific ways that David Braun is deranged. I will also be monitoring Skip Holtz's allegiance to the Birmingham Stallions. But perhaps most importantly, it will be fascinating to see how this season plays out while continuing to learn about the various ways that Northwestern's athletic department appears to be deeply fucked up.
There is one thing I can tell you about a season-opening Northwestern-Rutgers game though and that as a pure football spectacle it will absolutely suck shit.
Which books about 18th century shipwrecks do you reccomend?
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