While this is ostensibly a blog recapping Northwestern’s briefly engaging and subsequently exasperating loss to Ohio State, in reality, there’s very little about that game that has any bearing on what follows.
Northwestern did a lot of things wrong in its game against Ohio State. Early down playcalling was formulaic at best, the lack of urgency on 4th quarter possessions was tangible, and the 4th and 1 play call that exploded in Mike Bajakian’s face were all notable examples. They also did enough right by building Ryan Field in a part of the country where you can get 50 mph winds and sideways rain that they competed against a superior opponent and, more importantly, embarrassed their obnoxious fanbase for a few hours.
That’s a net win for Pat Fitzgerald insofar as the specific events on the date of November 5th.
Big picture, nothing has changed for Northwestern. It is still staring down the gun sights of a 1-11 season following a 3-9 season last year, with little in the program to suggest that 2023 will be meaningfully improved. The relatively exciting pieces (a top 5 pick at left tackle for the second time in a handful of years, a running back who is, dare we say, every inch as good as Justin Jackson, a freshman QB who has some wiggle) aren’t enough to make a difference in terms of wins and losses.
The program is reeling at best, motionless on the canvas at worst, and just marking time most realistically.
There is no shortage of explanations that can be offered to describe why exactly the team is as hopeless as it is right now. The most common explanation is that the coordinators are both Jared Leto Jokers who are showing how Damaged and Twisted they are by exposing the population of Evanston to the most radioactive brand of ball the world has ever seen. And this is true. They are both horrible. There is enough data at this point to show conclusively that Mike Bajakian is bad at his job and that Jim O’Neil has never once in his life been good at his. Talent concerns aside, the coordinators have shown precisely zero things in their time in Evanston to convince anyone that they should receive a paycheck next week.
An explanation I don’t think is offered enough is simple, straight-up bad luck. Northwestern doesn’t get a lot of superstar recruits, but the hit rate it had on those recruits in the Clayton Thorson Era (which I would argue is the high water mark of Fitzgerald’s tenure), was pretty silly. Northwestern’s best ever recruiting class, 2014, had 4 4-star recruits, 3 of whom ended up being legitimate stars (Thorson, Jackson, and Garrett Dickerson). Aside from Class of 2020 stud Skoronski, virtually none of Northwestern’s big signings have turned out to be anything. Genson Hooper-Price (class of 2019 headliner) does not seem able to turn his NFL frame into a relevant Big Ten receiver. 4-star Devin O’Rourke (class of 2018 headliner) is nothing to speak of. Of the 2021 4-star group, you have Caleb Tiernan (OL), currently a backup with plenty of time to grow into a player, Jordan Mosley (WR), who plays for Mississippi State now, and Mac Uihlein (LB), whose lack of playing time is growing desperately concerning given the visible lack of talent ahead of him.
The debate about whether talent development, talent identification, or talent attraction matters most isn’t a debate I care all that much about. What I do know is that who pans out and who doesn’t is, from a bird’s eye view, random, and that randomness has swung back the other way to hurt Northwestern.
As I write this after another Saturday of being embarrassed on national television, the specific machinations of how we got to this place matters less and less to me. What matters far more is how you fix a program that is as self-evidently busted as Northwestern’s is.
Everyone, including Pat Fitzgerald, knows that changes have to be made to get the program off of the mat. The changes that Pat Fitzgerald feels are necessary will determine whether or not I think he is the man to bring the program back.
The first and most obvious decision is to send Bajakian and O’Neil out of Evanston by stuffing them into a Civil War Era cannon and firing it out over Lake Michigan. But what happens next is every bit as important. Pat Fitzgerald, it seems, believes in a ball-control team that leans on its defense and uses its offense to keep its defense fresh. Is that style of play outdated? It certainly is at the top of the sport, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s outdated in the middle tiers. Has that style of play worked for Northwestern recently? No, if you, like me, believe the 2020 season should be thrown out, it hasn’t worked since 2018, but that isn’t evidence it can’t work again.
What is clear, though, is that Northwestern needs something innovative. You can be innovative and run-heavy. Lance Leipold’s system proves that. Hiring old guys who do boring stuff like Bajakian or nepotism hires like O’Neil is what Fitzgerald has to avoid.
But competent coaching in the coordinator room isn’t going to be enough. With so much ground given up on the field, being pretty good won’t cut it. Northwestern needs to be excellent over the next 2-4 years if it wants to recover its relevance. It is so far behind the rest of the conference in talent and momentum that reaching anything short of that means the program won’t reach the escape velocity needed to get off Planet Suck.
And for that to happen, there needs to be a serious look taken at something Pat Fitzgerald likes to talk a lot about: The Fundamentals.
Northwestern is not built to compete in football as an institution. It’s not built to compete in most sports. It is too hard for coaches to bring in talent that is good enough at sports and who meet the incredibly restrictive academic requirements. There isn’t a great deal of public facing reporting about how much stricter it is at Northwestern than other schools (even other annoyingly snooty schools like Michigan or Duke), but those who know know that’s true.
This isn’t even taking into consideration how extremely too little, too late Northwestern’s NIL plans are. There were programs who were building NIL infrastructure before it was even legal. Northwestern hired their NIL Guy this year. Northwestern’s recruiting hasn’t really suffered ranking-wise over the past few seasons, but being that late on something that important is something Unserious Programs do.
When your program is cooking, these deficits can be overcome, and when people who push back against this line of thinking point out “well we didn’t need it 5 years ago, the sport isn’t that much different” they’re right.
But Northwestern isn’t cooking. Northwestern, if it’s allowed to go on the route it is on, will look up one day in 2027 and realize that they are the worst revenue sports program in America. You know who has a brighter five-year plan than Northwestern football? Illinois football. KANSAS FOOTBALL. If this program isn’t on life support, it’s because the body has already been transferred to the morgue.
If Northwestern football wants to get off the doormat, it has its blueprint just down the hall with Chris Collins and Northwestern basketball.
This is not a joke, hear me out.
When Chris Collins was hired to replace Bill Carmody, he took over a program whose fundamentals were light years behind the rest of the conference. Before Chris Collins came to Northwestern in 2013, the team wouldn’t even charter private flights to road games. Collins, who came from a program at Duke who knew what high level athletics requires to function and looks like internally and externally, was able to wrest the athletics department into action to support the program at a level that gave it a chance to compete.
While Collins now is clearly out over his skis and ready to get the Bajakian/O’Neil Treatment himself, that work cannot be discounted. That work needed to happen for Northwestern basketball to have a prayer.
It’s what Northwestern football needs now. It’s not flashy $800 million stadiums, or $200 million practice facilities. That’s what programs needed in 2008, before NIL, before the portal, before attracting top talent required market compensation and before retaining them was a recruiting job itself.
Northwestern needs its administration to remove the academic shackles from its athletic programs. It needs an administration who is serious about NIL to bring the program in line with its competitors in the Big Ten.
Northwestern’s administration will not make that gigantic shift in priorities without being pushed. And why would it? It hasn’t had to, and it is still, at the end of the day, a top-tier school with a Big Ten Athletics Department stuck on with sticky-tack. I find it impossible to argue against the value of the Student Athlete Mission that Northwestern believes in. Providing young people an opportunity to pursue their passions at the highest level while receiving a world-class education is a good thing.
Northwestern’s also been happy to cash the checks that come with that mission dying and being replaced with the half-professional system we have now. There is blatant and inherent hypocrisy in an administration that spends $1 billion on shiny football buildings and will soon be sending its volleyball team to Los Angeles for a weekday conference match still believing in the relevance of the Student Athlete Mission. That game is cooked.
It needs to be forced to open its eyes. Pat Fitzgerald could be the one to lead that charge.
Just as Pat Fitzgerald’s limitless job security is a source of frustration for Northwestern fans, it also provides Northwestern its best chance to save itself. Pat Fitzgerald is important enough and likely close enough to Pat Ryan (the T. Boone Pickens of Northwestern), that his voice carries legitimate institutional weight. Even after a 1-11 season, Pat Fitzgerald might well be the most powerful employee of Northwestern University, with an Athletic Director and University President who have both been on the job for less than a year.
Pat Fitzgerald, who believes cell phones are evil and run-pass options are “the purest form of communism, somehow represents Northwestern’s best chance to modernize.
And if he doesn’t want to take that challenge on, Northwestern needs to hire a football coach who will. Everything else is window-dressing. Northwestern can fix the fundamental problem facing its athletic department, or it can shuffle deck chairs on the Titanic that its football program has become and gear up for another 5 years of irrelevance.
That seems like a pretty easy decision to me.