That Which Must Be Done Eventually Should Be Done Immediately

On Mike Bajakian Beating The Allegations

Golgotha, Ilya Repin

There is nothing more frustrating to me than when people reach the right conclusion by taking the wrong decision tree to get there.

I have grown to have open disdain for anyone and anything who judges the quality of a decision by its outcome rather than its process. It is entirely too easy, in a world where there are more variables at play in any task than anyone can count, to throw out the thinking that went behind a plan and focus solely on the bottom line. It is linear thinking, and it is for dummies, and it will never not frustrate me.

Rewarding that kind of bad thinking is almost always a mistake. As such, my gut reaction to any hypothesis reached solely by judging the result is to say that it sucks. I will stick to that position up until the point where that position is completely untenable. Even then, I will not move off my opinion without a great deal of hesitancy bordering on obstinance.

As such, it is with great shame, great misgivings, and unyielding frustration that I admit the following: the world’s most annoying Northwestern fans on the internet are right. Pat Fitzgerald is cooked. He’s got to go.

We will begin with The News that dropped ever-so-annoyingly on a Tuesday afternoon. Northwestern fired (or whatever friendly synonym the athletic department is choosing to use) defensive coordinator, Jim O’Neil, wide receivers coach, Dennis Springer, and, most confusingly, defensive line coach Marty Long.

We will begin with the position coaches. This blog does not presume to have elite Ball Knowing credentials, but Springer has been on Northwestern fans’ hit lists for years, and deservedly so. Northwestern receivers the past decade have been bad-to-horrible, with the one notable exception being Stephon Robinson Jr, a grad transfer from Kansas who came to Northwestern as a fully-developed product. Asking that Springer find employment elsewhere is overdue.

Long is a tough one. The defensive line was mediocre this season, sure, but on balance, Long’s done his job fairly well, and the top defensive prospect for the NFL draft on this year’s team is a defensive lineman, for whatever that’s worth. The front 4 were certainly better than the second level behind them. If you want to be charitable to the decision, you could say that there is backroom stuff we don’t know about that makes Long expendable. If you want to be conspiratorial, Long graduated college in the 80’s, is most likely reaching the end of his coaching career, and letting him go as a sacrificial lamb could be an aesthetics play.

Jim O’Neil, on the other hand, is as clear-cut a case of “oh yeah this guy needs to get fired” as you can get.

Earlier this season on this newsletter, I suggested that those who wanted to place the blame for the defense being stinky at O’Neil’s feet did not know ball, so I feel as though I owe a full breakdown of my thoughts on the matter.

Jim O’Neil is a bad defensive coordinator and always has been. Upon learning that Northwestern hired the worst defensive coordinator the NFL has seen in some time, my feelings were “well this is probably not going to work.” There are scheme design issues that have been litigated elsewhere, and I do not care enough to argue or regurgitate them, but the evidence is pretty clear that O’Neil is not a serious ball coach.

My point of contention, a point of contention I still hold, is that the talent on the roster can’t be coached into a competent unit. If Northwestern’s next defensive coordinator is moderately successful, I expect the defense to still be firmly in the bottom half of defenses in the country. The horses are not in the stable and firing Jim O’Neil does not solve that problem.

But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to defend the defensive coordinator of a team that lost 11 games in a row and gave up 30+ points to Iowa (IOWA?!!!???). Sorry, boss. The bell tolls for thee. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

But the name that was most deserving of being launched out of Evanston in a trebuchet, somehow, dodged the firing squad.

There isn’t an argument that can be made for keeping Mike Bajakian. The man has been Northwestern’s offensive coordinator for three years, has gotten worse every season, and was never even especially competent to begin with. He backed into a year or two of fine production in Boston College and was ridden out of Knoxville on a rail before coming to Evanston. He is supposed to be good at run design, and yet the team is incapable of running the football despite having an NFL running back. He is nominally in charge of the quarterback room yet has not landed a single quarterback recruit who has any chance of being a top-half-of-the-Big-Ten starter. It is not clear to me what Mike Bajakian does, and even less clear what he is supposed to do. The idea that Brendan Sullivan’s freshman season showed enough promise to earn Bajakian another year should be taken as a personal attack by any Northwestern fan. Sullivan’s better than I thought he would be, but goodness gracious, what are we doing here?

There is no way to read the Bajakian retention as anything other than a damning indictment of the man who made the decision, head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who appears to have no idea how rotted out his program has become.

Northwestern sits on the brink of losing so much momentum that they may never get it back. The house-of-mirrors-ass Big Ten West is dissolving after next year, presumably eliminating the road of “Be The 40th Best Team In The Country And Still Win 10 Games And Appear In A Conference Championship” that Northwestern rode in 2018 and 2020. Replacing that division inequity will be two new conference opponents in USC and UCLA, both of whom are far closer to the Ohio State side of institutional support than the Northwestern side. The talent on Northwestern’s roster is minimal, and if Malik Washington is any indication, the talent that is present may be looking to the portal. The top class of the sport is strapping on booster rockets in the form of NIL money and transfer portal excellence. Programs like Wisconsin and Nebraska, whom Northwestern shouldered past in the past 5 years, went out and made the two best hires of the coaching carousel in Matt Rhule and Luke Fickell.

Alarms should be ringing in Pat Fitzgerald’s $200 million glittering lakefront office. This is as close as you can get to DEFCON 1 for a program. And he’s bringing back the coordinator whose offense finished 128th of 131 teams in points scored this year.

Make. It. Make. Sense.

The kindest thing that can be said about retaining Mike Bajakian is that Pat Fitzgerald may be a savvy operator who understands that when his team sucks again next year, he can fire Bajakian and add year of safety for himself before the administration starts to think of a world Post Fitz.

If you choose not to read this decision as a shrewd move of someone who is trying to cover his own ass, the only takeaway you can have is that Pat Fitzgerald doesn’t have any clue what offense can be and wants to win games 17-14, which is a loser mentality and not one that any administration should accept.

Ball control offense, while not my preference, is a completely acceptable way to build a program. I am not requiring Pat Fitzgerald to hire Bob Stitt or some hotshot 30-something who thinks that you should throw the ball 65 times. What I am requiring from my head coach is the ability to see that when your offensive coordinator/qb coach can’t get a high schooler with a different power 5 offer to come play quarterback for him and then rolls out absolute dreck week-to-week that can’t score 14 points despite having an NFL running back, a top 5 pick at left tackle, and a very good top receiver, you should get a different coach. And if the head coach can’t see that, there’s no reason that head coach should be allowed to stay in charge of the program.

In the middle of Northwestern’s losing streak, I wrote about how Northwestern’s is not institutionally set up for success, but posited that Pat Fitzgerald was uniquely suited to be the man to fix it:

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…somehow represents Northwestern’s best chance to modernize.

Fitzgerald’s half measure of firing Jim O’Neil (who by every metric was the better coordinator!! Seriously!!!! However much Northwestern fans want to believe that he’s the worst coach on the face of the earth, the defense by every single metric you can use did its job way better than Bajakian’s offense!!!!!!!!!!!!) exposes that not only is he not ready to force the administration to reconsider the restrictions it places on its football program, he isn’t even ready to consider a world where his team tries to score more points than its opponent.

I like Pat Fitzgerald. I think what he has done with Northwestern over 15 years is a miracle. I think he is a good Face Of The Program, and I like how much he cares about his players’ success off the football field. I would very much like him to turn it around, and up until this week, I would have put money on him to do just that.

Now? I don’t know. You tell me, what would the difference be between what Pat Fitzgerald is doing and what a hypothetical coach who is out of touch with the modern game and circling the drain would be doing?

Let me spoil the next 2-3 seasons of Northwestern football for you. Next season, the team will be worse than it was this year but will win more games due to staying healthier longer. The offense will be one of the 40 worst units in the country. They will not come close to 6 wins. The next few seasons thereafter will be spent winning 2-4 games and watching Nebraska and Wisconsin’s new coaches double Northwestern’s win total with ease. UCLA and USC, despite struggling to adjust to their new conference, will look at trips to Evanston as functional bye weeks.

Northwestern will be buried by the rest of the conference.

That won’t be on Bajakian. That will be on the man who decided to keep him around.

The next few years will be marking time until that which must be done at some point will finally happen. Where’s the remote control? I’d like to press fast forward.