I am not a talented sleeper, and I never have been. The general path of my nights involve going to bed, thinking I am tired enough to go to sleep, realizing I am not, scrolling on my phone until my eyes start to hurt, then trying to find something to numb my brain with before I finally drift off. Generally, the thing that my brain gets stuck on before bed is imagined conversations. Conversations I could have about work, about friends, about relationships, about family, whatever, I can keep myself occupied thinking about what combination of words I could use to get one over on someone, or dull some stress I’m feeling.
Those conversations, invariably, never actually happen.
There is, almost without exception, no payoff in giving someone a piece of your mind. There are, almost without exception, consequences for communicating what is on your mind without a filter layered on top of it. Those imagined conversations don’t happen because under the scrutiny of consciousness, those consequences are not worth whatever imagined catharsis there may be.
In the real world, catharsis is not real, really. The amount of times where it is advantageous to actually release repressed feelings are so few and far between, that the moments where you do so stick in your head for years. The longing for those moments remains, but it’s invariably wiser to keep your mouth shut.
I am somewhat confident that what Pat Fitzgerald is not saying what is on his mind when he slumps his way to the microphones after losing in embarrassing fashion every week. There is, I suppose, some possibility that he has self actualized his brand of “trust yourself, good week of practice” CoachSpeak, but the simplest explanation is just that nothing would be gained from telling his team, his coaching staff, and the world that Northwestern sucked this year.
That is, of course, all that Northwestern fans want to hear.
To scroll comment sections and timelines after a Northwestern game is to read comments from a bunch of Investment Bankers from Lake Forest who are seething mad that Pat Fitzgerald “isn’t taking responsibility” or is “being arrogant” by refusing to communicate that his team is bad and the hires he has made have failed.
The worst place to be as a fan is finding yourself looking up press conference quotes. Once you enter that headspace, there’s no way back. And yet, here I am.
I went scrolling for Twitter feeds that would regurgitate Fitzgerald’s dreary coachspeak on Saturday, hoping for some crumb of admission that things had gone badly, crumbs that in no real world he could provide. What can your answer to “do you feel like your offense is going to be better next year” be other than “absolutely?” You can’t, as a leader of a bunch of teenagers and young adults, say that your team stinks, regardless of how true it may be or how badly your fans want to hear you eat crow. To do so would be to send a torpedo into your own credibility. Instead, after a season of historic ineptitude, Northwestern fans are left with more platitudes that mean nothing and must resort to tea leaf reading about what may or may not be done to course correct.
The search for catharsis continues.
There is little that can or should be written about the last few weeks of Northwestern’s embarrassment of a season. When you’re on your fourth and fifth quarterbacks, you lose games in deranged and depraved ways, as Northwestern did by turning it over 6 times and getting pantsed by its in-state rival on its own field. There, equally, is little to add from what has already been written in these parts about how Northwestern can dig its way out of the Dark Ages-sized hole it has dug itself over the past few seasons. I am bored of writing “SPEND MONEY ON FOOTBALL PLAYERS INSTEAD OF SHINY BUILDINGS!” in this newsletter in different ways.
If you are a fan of one of the college football teams who matter, you are relevant every day of every season. Obviously there are the playoff teams and the playoff contenders, but even a half hair down the program totem pole, there are still reasons for neutrals to care, like potentially powerful teams breaking in talented young coaches (Washington, Notre Dame), or teams trying to crack a conference title game appearance (North Carolina, Utah).
The middle class of college football are forever hunting that relevancy. Fans of teams like Minnesota, or Syracuse, or [insert 5th-to-8th best program in a P5 conference here] just want to be perceived by the rest of the country, to matter for as long as possible.
Removing the Covid Year (a carve-out I feel comfortable making given how much that year looks like an insane outlier in retrospect), Northwestern has been nationally relevant for two games since 2019, the 2019 season opener and the 2021 season opener, both of which were losses.
Worse still for Northwestern, they aren’t even relevant for their own fans anymore.
A normal Northwestern fan should have cared about this team for precisely three days in the calendar year of 2022. Everything else could have, and likely should have, been ignored.
The season opener, which was a win and signified that the team could maybe be interesting this year
The second game, which was a loss to Duke and evidence that the team was actually bad
Whenever it’s announced which/if staff members have been fired
Given that the team will lose Peter Skoronski, Adetomiwa Adebawore, and Evan Hull to the NFL, 3 other starting offensive linemen, at least two starting defensive backs (and Cam Mitchell will have a tough decision to make regarding the NFL or the portal), and its only good receiver in Malik Washington, there seems to be no reason to believe the team will improve next season. It’s early yet, but my assumption is that Northwestern will be relevant to its fans for all of one game next season, a loss in the season opener to Rutgers.
In 2019, offensive coordinator Mick McCall was fired on December 1st, one day after the 2019 season ended. As such, Northwestern fans will likely not have to wait long to discover the fate of their coordinators this week. For a program that has completed the Conference Championship To Laughing Stock Speed Run in record time, anything short of both coordinators being promptly given their walking papers by Monday afternoon would be a failure.
Even still, if both coordinators do depart, Pat Fitzgerald has failed in three of his four coordinator hires thus far in his tenure (Mike Hankwitz was great, Mick McCall, Jim O’Neil, and Mike Bajakian were not), and Wildcat fans would do well to remember that before believing the new boss will be any better than the old boss.
Northwestern fans will be left clinging to the crumbs of press releases and press conference sound bites, desperately trying to figure out if the administration has realized how deep the rot in the program is.
The search for catharsis continues.
Waiting For Godot On A Saturday Afternoon In Evanston
It's really been so bleak, and it's hard to understand how rapidly things have declined and for what reasons. The most appalling thing about this year is how predictable it was. My best guess going into the year was 1-11 with a win over Nebraska, and that's exactly what we got, and it was somehow even more excruciating than I expected.
I don't see a way out of this with any of the current people involved at the top. Fitz could just take the David Shaw escape hatch out of love for the school, but I have absolutely zero belief that the current AD would make a hire that does anything to reflect being ready for the next era of the Big Ten. Northwestern is currently the 14th-best program in the conference two years after a division title, and they are extremely on track to be 16th when it expands.
So good, man. No surprise, of course, but just wanted to let you know