Tumbling Down.
On the end of Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern Icon
It bears repeating how unique Pat Fitzgerald’s career arc and standing at his university are. Or were, I guess, in the aftermath of his firing as Northwestern coach on Monday evening.
Here’s the list of people who were both inarguably the best football player and the best football head coach in their alma mater’s history:
Pat Fitzgerald
Fin.
It also bears repeating how much the 1995 and 1996 Northwestern football teams meant to the people who witnessed them and even to the people who only saw it on highlight reels. That team went from the lowest of the low in college football to the patented Technicolor sunset above the Rose Bowl. Those moments defined what Northwestern sports could be. You don’t get the dynastic successes of Northwestern lacrosse, field hockey, softball, you name it without the proof of concept of the Rose Bowl team. All athletic investment stems from that genesis.
And you don’t get that proof of concept without Pat Fitzgerald, the best collegiate linebacker of all time.
Pat Fitzgerald is, or was, I guess, that important to the ecosystem of Northwestern athletics. It’s also worth remembering now how his tenure at Northwestern started, in tragedy after Randy Walker’s death. Just as one generation will remember Fitzerald for his neck roll, another will remember him as a bright-eyed 30-something head coach, maybe a bit out over his skis, but learning on the job, clapping, cheering, leading, and winning at a consistent level that no one ever had in Evanston.
And likely winning at a consistent level that will never be seen again.
Now we’re here, in the rubble of the Fitzgerald Era, the most optimistic, winningest, consistent, lasting era of Northwestern football history, after it all came crashing down in the midst of a hazing scandal that continues to evolve and continues to ensnare more of the most powerful people in Evanston.
Extricating Pat Fitzgerald from Northwestern is, or was, I guess, an impossible thing to imagine. The staff discussion I remember most at Inside NU was us discussing how many games in a row Pat Fitzgerald would have to lose before he would be fired. We landed on around 30 straight before the seat got hot. Fitzgerald’s more than part of the furniture, he’s the reason the furniture is there to begin with. Will his name be pulled from the All-American Ring of Honor that adorns Ryan Field’s upper deck? Will 1995 highlight reels in pump-up montages carefully clip out the star linebacker? These are not questions you normally have to ask when you fire your coach.
The crumbs of details that fall out from the as-of-now-not-and-likely-never-to-be-released university report, the far more detailed whistleblower account, and further reporting paint details that are shocking, disturbing, bizarre, and brazen.
Yet the scandal also feels disorienting for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that we get sentences like “Every single player in this program from 2020 to 2023 knows what Shrek is and knows about the hazing that occurs.”
For the sake of clarity, the university report confirmed that hazing happened, confirmed that it was sexual in nature, and confirmed this through at least 11 different accounts. The rationale of the whistleblower is irrelevant and the veracity of the reports are not in dispute by anyone tangentially involved with the investigation. To suggest otherwise is more than unproductive, it’s observably wrong, and those who would like to pretend otherwise would be best served keeping those thoughts to themselves.
What remains unresolved is the thinking and conduct of those in charge in Evanston through the past weeks, and namely through the last few days. We know now that the report the administration had in their hands to determine Pat Fitzgerald’s punishment was more-or-less what was reported in the Daily Northwestern and confirmed in other sources. The crucial question is quite simply how did Athletic Director Derrick Gragg, University President Michael Schill, and whoever else was involved look at that report and think that a two-week suspension in the deadest part of the college football season was even remotely acceptable as a punishment.
Pat Fitzgerald’s fate is sealed. Gragg, Schill, and others’ fates are unresolved. Their failure is total.
It was total before the allegations regarding Northwesteren’s baseball coach, Jim Foster, came to light on Monday afternoon. It’s hard to lay out all the incredible details of that story succinctly, but they’re shocking in every single way an institutional failure can be shocking, and the blame vector points directly at not only the head coach, but Athletic Director Gragg in a way that beggars belief (pending those claims veracity, obviously).
Gragg, by the way, has not had any public statement other than a few rote lines in a press release on Friday. He briefly appeared on a Zoom call announcing Fitzgerald’s dismissal at a team meeting. Otherwise? Crickets.
Did Pat Fitzgerald deserve to be fired for what happened under his watch? I think so.
I know, with certainty, that following the initial slap on the wrist, the revelation of the full details made the firing necessary and inevitable.
But I don’t know what the response would have been had the administration released the full findings of the report and issued a punishment with teeth before they were forced to. If we woke up Friday to an announcement that Pat Fitzgerald was suspended for half a season or an entire season, was made to pay a significant fine, and the program was forced to enact several meaningful changes, including potential disciplinary action for staff and players, I think that it is likely that Pat Fitzgerald could have held on. I don’t know if that would have been just. I don’t think it would have been. The behavior that occurred under his watch was unconscionable, but I think the veneer of plausible deniability and the overwhelming institutional momentum of Being Pat Fitzgerald would have been enough.
But that isn’t what happened. Instead, the administration took a course of action that only makes sense if they believed that the details of the allegations would never be made public and Northwestern’s status as a private institution exempt from FOIA would provide institutional cover. It doesn’t pass a smell test. Once the story leaked, public opinion forced the hand of the athletic department. And now, it’s the decision makers at the top of the tree who still have to answer what amounts to one of the most staggeringly insufficient punishments imaginable.
Fitzgerald is paying the price for not only his own actions (or lack thereof), but for the strategic hackery that Gragg and Schill have wielded as well.
And maybe that isn’t just to Fitzgerald. Certainly that seems to be his contention as his statement makes it sound like he plans to litigate for the receipt of his full buyout. Maybe that’s part of the reason former and current players have dug their feet in in a way that is hard to empathize with those who aren’t part of that group. Maybe it’s born from their experiences with a father figure who so many of them say is responsible for shaping them into men that they’re proud to be.
But maybe none of that matters. What we’re left with at the end of the day is a story about a person who was in charge of a group of people who did things you cannot do. Not only should those people who did those things be punished, but the one responsible for them must be as well. The calculus is not complicated. The other numerous factors at play are not important. This is a simple decision, a decision so simple it’s shocking it was made so wildly, completely, and totally incorrectly just 3 days ago.
The fallout, which will continue for weeks, will be sizable. If you asked me to place money on it, I’d bet the Athletic Director will not be in Evanston by the time the football season starts. The football program may well be stripped to the studs. It’s hard to imagine anyone who was involved in the letter claiming to be from “the ENTIRE Northwestern Football Team” would have any interest in suiting up for the school that they clearly feel railroaded their coach. It’s difficult to imagine a world in which several coaches don’t depart as well. It’s difficult to envision a world where Northwestern’s grand plans of a sparkling new football stadium aren’t radically altered by an environment where boosters feel uninspired to support a football program that looks toxic to the touch.
It isn’t even terribly difficult to imagine a not-so-distant-future where Northwestern, a school whose alumni care infinitely more about US News and World Report Rankings than AP Polls and whose dissatisfaction with the professionalizing of the collegiate athletics model is open, decides that this game isn’t for them anymore. Northwestern is a university first, and if athletics bring more scorn than celebrations, it’s easy to picture a world where their athletics rival is the University of Chicago, not the University of Illinois.
Every passing hour brings another revelation that makes me embarrassed to root for Northwestern football. I am reading every statement from the administration looking to be mad and finding ample ammunition to feel so.
This is as low as it gets to be a fan. And for Northwestern fans, whose solace has long been that we “do it the right way, win or lose” it’s disorienting. Because it seems clear now that we haven’t for quite some time.