Northwestern Football presses inexorably on toward the beginning of a doomed season. Watching fans of other teams drool over training camp reports about how the backup right tackle is looking and clips of 7-on-7 deep balls finding their mark feels like watching a block party outside your window while under house arrest. It must be fun out there. Too bad we’re here, rooting for a team whose fate is sealed and for whom the results matter far less than how it feels to watch them.
I could pay lip service about what the team will look like on the field this season, but I fail to see the utility in that. Here’s a short version: they’re bad. The defensive front seven is still unbelievably thin, and despite the back four being very good, they’re not good enough to cover for the mistakes the front will make. Coco Azema rocks. Not much else to report.
The offense is similarly bereft of talent. I am very excited for the concept of A.J. Henning, someone who I think is good, though not as good as he will likely need to be to overcome the quarterback play around him. I also would very much Cam Porter to look like the Cam Porter he was before the knee injury, at the end of his freshman season. That version of Cam Porter was awesome and intoxicating. The version from 2022 wasn’t the same. Maybe that changes. I hope it does.
I also fear it will not matter. The offensive line is extremely inexperienced and thin. More importantly, the quarterback position is still a howling chasm. Brendan Sullivan played last year and the optimism surrounding his potential far outstrips his measurable results, which were horrendous. A 74% completion percentage is good! A 74% completion percentage when zero passes were thrown more than like 7 yards downfield is irrelevant. Ben Bryant, on the other hand, is a late transfer from Cincinnati. His play there was uninspiring, at best. I generally trust Patrick Mayhorn, who I consider to be the pre-eminent Ball Knower, when it comes to scouting players I have not watched. I had a hypothesis on Bryant and consulted with Patrick.
That’s really all that can be offered in terms of analysis this year. The team is bad, horrible even, and no one with any semblance of credibility would dare to suggest the team could win six games. They won’t, nor will they be especially close. More importantly, they’re a chore.
Since ShrekGate went viral, I’ve been trying to figure out what my relationship to Northwestern football is, trying to figure out what this season is going to look like from a fan experience. It’s a jarring enough story to force that look inward.
When I saw Brendan Sullivan posting the “Cats Against The World” shirts with Pat Fitzgerald’s No. 51 emblazoned on them to his Instagram Story this summer, I was disappointed, but not angry. Northwestern players being upset about the treatment of their now-former coach is the world’s most understandable feeling. Were a father figure in my life to be fired in a manner that I had disagreements with when I was a teenager, I’d be similarly up in arms. That’s what children do. It is the wrong reaction, to be clear, but it is neither shocking nor inexplicable. If players want to, in private, voice full-throated opposition to the firing of Pat Fitzgerald, that does not upset me. I think it is silly; I think it’s something that they will regret when they’re 10, 20, 30 years older, but that’s the privilege of youth, to be given the grace of making that kind of mistake.
Coaches choosing to partake in this behavior, and choosing to do so publicly, is a very different matter. Offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian showing up to an open practice with that shirt on is a flagrant middle finger, one that is extremely unbecoming of someone who is supposed to be one of the mature ones in the room. Bajakian is incentivized to act like that. When he is eventually removed from his role at Northwestern for continuing to produce some of the worst offenses in the sport, he will need to prove to his future boss that he can be a loyal soldier. Choosing to show his ass by wearing the dumb t-shirt certainly does that in spades.
In between table stakes coachspeak about how the team’s message is to “stick together” and mealy-mouthed statements about the “adversity” that the team has faced (adversity, in this case, can be defined as “doing hazing so badly that you are responsible for getting the most powerful person at your university fired”) is the subtext of wearing those kinds of shirts. There is a simple message coming out of Evanston: you’re either all the way in, or all the way out.
How else are you supposed to read “us against the world?” If you do not play for the team, or at least do not agree full-throatedly with the team’s discontent, you are an outsider, and they are not interested in outsiders, and thus not interested in you. That is a choice that the coaches and players have made. A defensible choice and one that a gazillion besieged groups of people from time immemorial have chosen as their defense mechanism. It is equally defensible, then, for me to oblige their request and not root for them.
I don’t believe that this team is worthy of support this season. Maybe it’s not fair to members of the program and the wider Northwestern athletics community who were not party to the hazing and perhaps even did their best to stop it. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take. My support of the other teams at Northwestern remains unchanged. But until the football program has fully taken its medicine, I’m pretty confident I don’t want them to be successful, and the medicine has not been taken yet.
I’m not sure what I would be rooting for if I flipped on every Northwestern game and hoped the purple team would win. If the team feels empowered enough to wear “firing our coach because of a national hazing scandal was bad” t-shirts to practice, that tells you how seriously they take the allegations about their locker room. If the coaches are wearing those shirts in front of the media, it’s pretty clear what The Team stands for, and I, someone who thinks that hazing is bad, don’t stand for the same things. Would I be rooting for the institution? The institution, it seems, is headlined by a nitwit president who digs the university deeper into a hole with every half-baked 750-word alumni email he fires off and an athletic director who has lost the faith of seemingly everyone within a 100-mile radius of Evanston (for the Fitz defenders who happen upon this post, take solace in that you and I agree that Derrick Gragg should be removed via coup). Would I be rooting for Northwestern because that’s what you do in the fall? That feels like a lack of introspection.
I have to look in the mirror and explain to myself why I would want this Northwestern football team to win games. I can’t do it, and I have my answer as to where my rooting interests lie. Maybe you can. I’m not there yet. The allegations are too fresh. The team and its coaches are too irreverent. An indignant letter from ex-players from a decade and change ago about how hazing has no place at Northwestern does not move me. Clearly, from the extensive public reporting and its own internal report, hazing did have a place at Northwestern. If the football program had its way, it seems like hazing would still have a place at Northwestern. After all, “The ENTIRE Northwestern Football Team” signed that internally incoherent letter back in June. Maybe we should take them at their word.
As an angrier, less settled 22-year-old, I asserted that Northwestern basketball was a rotted ship that wasn’t deserving of support because of the allegations regarding Johnnie Vassar. I think that it is fair to say now that was an overstep. I remain disappointed by the lack of transparency regarding those allegations and while I will likely never be able to root for Chris Collins unless he saves some puppies from a burning building, with the benefit of hindsight it was and is possible to root for that program without supporting the actions of its head coach and staff. That team was made up of 15 18-22 year olds who played fun, hard-nosed basketball. That was a good thing, and my concern trolling I think was probably over the top.
I don’t think the football team is similar, or even remotely close to that situation. The hostility from all levels of the program to anyone who wants to see punishment for a decades-long Shrek Hazing Cult is too out in the open to shut my eyes to it. I don’t know how long it will be before it feels right for me to hope Northwestern football wins some games. If there’s an exodus this off-season and a spring cleaning of the coaching staff and athletic department, that would go a long way.
For now, I’ll be content to flip on the game this Sunday and see if Greg Schiano can turn the corner in Piscataway, imagining the halcyon days of having a horrible football team I can root for instead of a horrible football team that promises little more than a strange fascination.