Northwestern Fires Pat Fitzgerald

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There is never "good" timing for something like this at any school, but this is just extra-awful timing for Northwestern. Just weeks prior to the opening of fall camp. The outgoing staff and head coach were well established so the program not only will experience last minute change, but major change as well. And, Northwestern hasn't exactly been a well oiled machine over the past couple years. They were already predicted to finish last in the division. Now a wobbly roster will hit the season with a (likely) interim coach and the transfer portal will loom larger than ever.

This could create a massive hole for their program that may take any new coach a long time to climb out of... just as USC and UCLA arrive.

Nebraska and Wisconsin are poised to take their new coaches with past experience to break out of recent funks. Minnesota is now well established and an annual competitor. Illinois has made obvious strides under their new coach. And now you gut the one program that was undeniably in decline, and hadn't signed on to the hope of a new coach. Not a good time to be a Northwestern fan. Or given their home game attendance, may I say, not a good time to be the Northwestern fan.
 


STPGopher said:
Not sure how much research revenue is generated at Northwestern, but the perceived panick probably is coming from fear that this scandal could cause irrepairable damage to the University and its supporters.
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Northwestern is an elite academic institution, not a football factory. The damage this scandal has and could continue to do to the reputation of the institution as a whole far outweighs the damage of firing a coach. That’s why I was shocked at the NU president’s initial decision to only suspend Fitz, but he came from Oregon where football and sports are king, so that was likely his mindset. He didn’t know his audience. I know a lot of Northwestern alums, and every single one of them is disgusted by the stain this has left on the school, not that their football team is going to suck.
 





Some guy said:
Yes. Not “just” but within the last year or so
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I wonder if it will include multiple car wash lanes? You know, so fans can get their cars cleaned before, during or after the games.
 



I'm thinking a road trip is in order this year. Get a group of people together, 4 to 6 dressed as mitter curtains - the spinny cloth things, maybe 2 or 3 others as blowers, and the rest are run through the "wash" every time the Gophers score. Maroon and Gold mitter curtains, of course. :) :)
 

Spoofin said:
That’s exactly what confuses me about situations like this. Year after year, how is there a bunch of guys that want to do this? We are talking jNWU also, so we are talking about very smart people. It baffles me.
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I think you’re assuming all smart people are decent/moral people.
 


A_Slab_of_Bacon said:
They announced “plans” but they’ve had longstanding issues with their neighbors so the whole idea is pretty pie in the sky.
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They had hoped to start building next year, but I don't think that's going to happen.
 





WindyCityGopher said:
Northwestern is an elite academic institution, not a football factory. The damage this scandal has and could continue to do to the reputation of the institution as a whole far outweighs the damage of firing a coach. He didn’t know his audience. I know a lot of Northwestern alums, and every single one of them is disgusted by the stain this has left on the school, not that their football team is going to suck.
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Seems a bit histrionic? NU taking (allegedly) hundreds of millions in donations (for establishing a foreign branch campus, partnering with its state-owned media, and establishing the veneer of credibility that engenders) from an authoritarian regime that jails journalists, dissidents, LGBT doesn’t?

Who am I to judge. Back to ragging on football.
 

Bob_Loblaw said:
It's pretty crazy that the Northwestern decided it was in their best interest to invoke their right to remain silent here. I don't think they're getting out of Fitz's contract. This thing has settlement written all over it.
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I'm sure there isn't a whole lot they want to say right now but saying nothing just makes little sense to me.
 

GophersInIowa said:
I'm sure there isn't a whole lot they want to say right now but saying nothing just makes little sense to me.
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NU seems to be working very hard at saying nothing at this point.

I don’t know/ don’t care if they’re right or wrong but the lack of leadership willing to just do a press conference or something like that is striking.
 


SanDiegoGopherFan said:
I think you’re assuming all smart people are decent/moral people.
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For sure not. However, we aren't talking an isolated case here. We are talking about years from what I have read - which means lots and lots of people choosing to get involved. It appears to have happened - it just shocks me that so many would be interested..... especially so many smart people.
 

Stewart Mandel of The audible and Athletic picked a bad week to be on vacation (he’s a Wildcat)

Feldman is usually the more rational one of that duo, can only imagine Mandel’s take. Interested to hear from them as more details emerge.
 

Pompous Elitist said:
Stewart Mandel of The audible and Athletic picked a bad week to be on vacation (he’s a Wildcat)

Feldman is usually the more rational one of that duo, can only imagine Mandel’s take. Interested to hear from them as more details emerge.
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The fact that so many prominent media members are Northwestern grads is another interesting wrinkle to this saga.
 

A_Slab_of_Bacon said:
NU seems to be working very hard at saying nothing at this point.

I don’t know/ don’t care if they’re right or wrong but the lack of leadership willing to just do a press conference or something like that is striking.
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I'm sure there are much smarter people than me advising them what to do but it just seems a little weird to be completely silent.
 

Bob_Loblaw said:
It's pretty crazy that the Northwestern decided it was in their best interest to invoke their right to remain silent here. I don't think they're getting out of Fitz's contract. This thing has settlement written all over it.
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NU leadership has nurtured the perception Fitzgerald ordered sexual assaults on freshman players and laggards. At least at this point given the pretty over the top commentary I think he’s interested in clearing his name, or at least extracting a clear and conciliatory statement disavowing confirmation or corroboration or suspicion of the worst parts of the narrative.
 

Pompous Elitist said:
NU leadership has nurtured the perception Fitzgerald ordered sexual assaults on freshman players and laggards. At least at this point given the pretty over the top commentary I think he’s interested in clearing his name, or at least extracting a clear and conciliatory statement disavowing confirmation or corroboration or suspicion of the worst parts of the narrative.
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I may have missed it but I thought the only mention of Fitz "ordering" sexual assaults was from the one player. I don't remember the university weighing in one way or another.
 

Gophers1992 said:
I may have missed it but I thought the only mention of Fitz "ordering" sexual assaults was from the one player. I don't remember the university weighing in one way or another.
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Agree completely. Prior take way too aggressive imo. All I’ve seen them say is things happened and he didn’t know but should’ve. Them not saying he did it is not them saying he ordered sexual assaults to happen
 

Pompous Elitist said:
Stewart Mandel of The audible and Athletic picked a bad week to be on vacation (he’s a Wildcat)

Feldman is usually the more rational one of that duo, can only imagine Mandel’s take. Interested to hear from them as more details emerge.
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Mandel: The bitter end of the Pat Fitzgerald era isn’t the end of Northwestern’s problems

By Stewart Mandel

I knew something would blow up in college football as soon as I left the country on vacation.

I would not have guessed it would be my alma mater’s football program.

Full disclosure before I continue: I have known Pat Fitzgerald since my sophomore year at Northwestern, when he was the star linebacker for Northwestern’s Cinderella 1995 Rose Bowl team, a season and story that cemented my love for college football. I’ve maintained a friendly relationship with him throughout his coaching career.

I don’t spend my Saturdays waving purple pompoms at my TV — I’m a little busy watching Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State and the many other programs I write about frequently. I’m less impartial, though, when it comes to Northwestern men’s basketball, having attended both of their recent (and only) first-round NCAA Tournament games.

I’m saddened that Fitzgerald’s 17-year run as the face of the program ended in scandal, but I agree with the decision to fire him. Whether he knew or didn’t know, he was the CEO of an organization that perpetuated disgusting, inexcusable systematic hazing, according to both a university-commissioned report and subsequent allegations and confirmations by former players and staffers. The head coach is responsible for the culture of his program, and the culture being described is horrific.

But there is much more to this story than the ouster of a long-revered coach. Something has gone terribly awry with Northwestern’s athletics department, and this latest scandal, as well as a simultaneous one involving the head baseball coach, demands some deeper reflection as to the source of the issues.

For those of us old enough to have experienced that historic ’95 season — in which the Wildcats came out of nowhere after 24 straight losing seasons to beat Notre Dame, Michigan and Penn State and finish 8-0 in the Big Ten — it was probably instinctual to view Northwestern football as the Little Engine That Could. A small private school with strict academic requirements playing in a conference with Ohio State and Michigan always felt like the farthest thing from a “sports school,” no matter how many bowl games and Big Ten division titles Fitzgerald’s program won.

In reality, Northwestern long ago made an institutional decision to participate in Big-Time Athletics. Under the leadership of sports-minded former president Morty Schapiro and renowned AD-turned-ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, It went from having the most outdated facilities in the conference to spending $110 million to renovate its dilapidated basketball arena and $270 million to build a palatial lakeside football complex, and just last year it announced plans for a brand-new $800 million football stadium to replace long-outdated Ryan Field.

High graduation rates be damned, this is how a high-level Big Ten or SEC university operates.

But that doesn’t mean it knows what it’s doing.

For example, after Phillips left in December 2020, the department initially promoted a deputy AD named Mike Polisky. He happened to be a co-defendant in a Title IX lawsuit at the time brought by a Northwestern cheerleader who claimed the school ignored her complaints of sexual harassment.

You can imagine how that went over. Amid intense backlash, Northwestern reversed course a week later, eventually hiring Tulsa’s Derrick Gragg.

Schapiro has since retired, replaced last year by Oregon’s Michael Schill, but the handling of the football scandal felt almost like a carbon copy. A private school not subject to public records requests, Northwestern quietly announced in January it had opened an investigation into hazing allegations while providing no further details. Until last Friday, when it quietly announced the investigation had “found evidence to corroborate claims made by an anonymous whistleblower regarding hazing activities and events.”

But rest assured, they had everything under control now, suspending Fitzgerald for two weeks in July — the two quietest weeks of the entire coaching calendar.

I’m continually astounded at how poorly universities manage crisis communications. Time after time after time, we see schools respond to scandals like this one by initially taking the path of least resistance, either ignorantly or obliviously failing to realize that the full story almost always comes out. And when it does, if it looks like you were trying to hide something, the public backlash will be swift and ferocious.

Which is exactly what happened here when, just 24 hours later, the anonymous whistle-blower shared specific and gory details of said hazing activities in The Daily Northwestern. In an incredibly awkward 180, Schill released a new statement acknowledging that “In determining an appropriate penalty for the head coach, I focused too much on what the report concluded he didn’t know and not enough on what he should have known.”

Since that moment, I knew Fitzgerald was toast. Yet I’m struggling to begin to picture Northwestern football without the guy who was a player or coach there for all but four years over the last three decades. In a profession full of mercenaries, the guy was so loyal to his school he turned down overtures from Michigan in 2010 and the Green Bay Packers in 2018. He ended every call, text and press conference with “Go Cats.”

But that, too, may have contributed to the problem. Time and again, we’ve seen coaches who become so entrenched that they effectively become kings of their own fortress. No one questions them. No one scrutinizes them. It’s not hard to see how such a toxic culture could have gone on undetected for years. And yet, the investigators said that “there had been significant opportunities (for the coaches) to discover and report the hazing conduct.”

If Fitzgerald or one of his staff members had proactively stamped out the disgusting behavior, he may still have his job. That it took an anonymous whistleblower to do so suggests this was not an environment where people felt comfortable asking questions.

Meanwhile, at the exact same moment the football program was imploding, we learned Sunday that Northwestern’s baseball program recently underwent its own HR investigation, which found that first-year coach Jim Foster “engaged in bullying and abusive behavior,” leading to a mass exodus of assistant coaches and players. Apparently, the school was planning to sweep that one under the rug, too. Fitzgerald is out, but as of this writing, Foster is not.

Neither is Gragg, the person overseeing what is quickly becoming the most dysfunctional Power 5 athletic department in the country.

In addition to being a Northwestern alum, I live 15 minutes from Stanford, another academic-minded program I probably follow closer than most. There, I had an amicable working relationship with the Cardinal’s own alum-turned-successful-coach David Shaw for more than a decade.

There was a time when I believed both Shaw and Fitzgerald might coach their alma maters for decades. Both were seen as untouchable. Now, in the span of eight months, they’re both gone. And the parallels are eerie.

Shaw’s tenure began to go south around the time longtime strength coach Shannon Turley was ousted in 2019 following an investigation brought on by an anonymous complaint against him. Shaw at least left on his own terms after the 2022 finale, but not before his program severely regressed on the field.

Fitzgerald experienced the same arc, reaching the peak of the 2020 Big Ten championship game before bottoming out at 3-9 and 1-11 the past two years. I can’t help but think that the program’s twisted locker-room culture and its football futility were related.

One thing’s for certain: Both these programs might soon fall off the map completely. Their universities’ larger cultures don’t mesh with college sports’ rapid shift from old-school ivory tower amateurism to a professionalized model with NIL, an expanded Playoff and, inevitably at some point, an employer-employee construct.

Now might be an opportune moment for Northwestern as a university to hit pause and do some soul-searching. As one of 14 (soon to be 16) universities fortunate enough to be a member of the richest, most nationally visible conference in college sports, the money is only going to grow higher, and the competition is only going to grow tougher with the arrival of USC and UCLA.

Is Northwestern truly prepared to compete in that environment? Does the university have the right infrastructure to support such an expensive and complex endeavor?

Because what we’ve seen unfold just since late last week is a staggering clinic in arrogance, obliviousness and incompetence all wrapped into one.
 

Radio says Gragg has been on a vacation during this whole firestorm. You'd think he at least call back to the office to see if he should return or respond. They were ripping on him concerning a letter that was written for him saying how good he will be as the AD for NU. The letter was written by Kevin Warren.
 

A_Slab_of_Bacon said:
I’d be shocked if they got past the city and locals that fast.
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It seems much of the holdup is related to NU wanting to hold other events, including concerts, at the venue, and the locals don't want that.

If it was only football, I'd say "You chose to live near a major university campus. Suck it up." Also, nobody goes to NU games anyway.
 

disco said:
It seems much of the holdup is related to NU wanting to hold other events, including concerts, at the venue, and the locals don't want that.

If it was only football, I'd say "You chose to live near a major university campus. Suck it up." Also, nobody goes to NU games anyway.
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Plus proposed capacity is 35,000 which is 12,000 less than current, so in theory less potential for disrupting the neighbors for football games. Has to completely be about other events/concerts that locals are balking about.
 

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