Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald was fired for a hazing scandal with his team. According to all published reports, Fitzgerald had no knowledge that any hazing was going on.
Fitzgerald has been an exemplary coach at NU. He actually won a bowl game. His team has played meaningful games, unlike almost every other team in the NU program’s history. By all accounts, people that played for him received degrees. It’s a tough place to recruit and Fitz turned down other jobs in both the pros and college due to his love for NU.
Given all the scandals at major universities around the country that have been “bombshells”, and then otherwise proven inaccurate, I would suggest everyone hold their confirmation bias in check and wait for all the facts to spill out. I am looking at you Vivian Stringer with your response to the BYU bombshell that was proven inaccurate.
Of course, as the hazing scandal has simmered, allegations of racism have crept in. It seems to be a by-the-book attack. Northwestern has had a pretty poor record the last couple of years, why didn’t the administrators just fire Fitz? However, it’s not like NU is some powerhouse athletic program. Most of the teams at NU are guaranteed victory for other Big Ten schools. “Hey, we might be bad, but we aren’t last.”
It might be best to ask a lot of questions right now and wait for answers. My friend Gilaad has a “three-day rule” on things like this and I think we probably will have to take more time thanks to lawyers.
From the Daily Northwestern student newspaper that broke the story:
A former Northwestern University football player told The Daily some of the hazing conduct investigated by the university involved coerced sexual acts. A second player confirmed these details.
The player also told The Daily that head coach Pat Fitzgerald may have known that hazing took place. (bold mine)
“May have known” is not actually anything when it comes to journalism, is it? Except, today, “may have known” becomes gospel for journalists or people with an agenda that seeks to implement it. Why couldn’t they nail down beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was known or not known?
Here is a question. If this scandalous behavior was going on at Northwestern, which sits in a major news market, why didn’t it come out before? Why didn’t the Daily Northwestern publish an article about it years ago given that NU supposedly has the best journalism school in the United States? Why didn’t a major market newspaper like the Chicago Tribune, which covers NU Football and the Big Ten break a story on this years ago? The allegations are pretty jaw-dropping. No player would have shut up about it in this day and age.
I don’t know the answer I just ask the question.
When I look at the players who went on record as saying hazing took place, it opens up more questions not answers.
The players that brought the allegations forward never really played. They were scrubs. They had a good seat at the game and they played on the scout team in practice. One was injured all four years, but he was kept on scholarship and received a political science degree from NU. He had previously tweeted about how proud he was of Coach Fitz and the NU program.
Try to stay on scholarship at a perennial power like Alabama if you are no good to the team. It won’t happen. I know a guy that was recruited to Notre Dame. When a coaching change happened, the new coach called most of the recruits from the old coach and told them to transfer. When my acquaintance didn’t, the new coach told him he would never play a down for ND. If you are at a perennial powerhouse program and injured so badly you will never play, coaches will find a way to run you out of the program so they can reuse the scholarship.
Other players were passed over. One was a quarterback. A walk-on played ahead of him. Oh, the indignity of not being good enough. All college sports from D1 to JUCO are competitive. Everyone doesn’t get a trophy.
The question I ask is what if this is a group of disgruntled former players getting back at their coach because they weren’t good enough to play?
I don’t have an answer, I just have a question.
I did notice that two New Mexico State basketball players used the hazing tactic to get an $8MM dollar settlement out of the university. These guys were probably not going to wind up in a pro league. That $8MM will set them up for life.
What is the current financial situation of the players that brought the hazing charge to NU? Is the fact that two other athletes got paid for a similar incident giving them an economic incentive to charge Northwestern’s coach for the same? Northwestern has a lot more money to play with than New Mexico State for what it is worth. Hey, at least they shouldn’t have student loan debt since they were decent enough high school players to earn a scholarship to NU.
I don’t have an answer, but I can ask questions.
If some of the hazing that was described actually happened at Northwestern, then it was out of line. The “Car wash” seems stupid and has no purpose other than to demean someone. Running a player for mistakes might have a purpose. When I played basketball and made mistakes, I often had to do things to “work” on them and sometimes it involved a nice sprint around the gym.
Hazing has been around forever. If you pledged to a sorority or fraternity, you got hazed. It can certainly get out of control. I went to a service academy and there was definitely hazing. It’s a tradition to make the freshman cadets go through a process to join the academy. At academies, it has sometimes gotten out of control. They bring the upper-class cadets back to earth and it gets normal. There is no doubt that sometime in your life, you have been hazed in some way.
Hazing can have a purpose. It can be beneficial.
At UNC, freshman basketball players used to have to carry all the team’s equipment out to the bus. Michael Jordan had to do it. James Worthy had to do it. Sam Perkins had to do it. Brad Daugherty had to do it. It was used as a rite of passage.
When I joined 3M Company ($MMM) out of college, there was a tradition of a “short snifter”. Someone called it and if you didn’t have a signed dollar bill, the drink tab was on you.
When I was on the trading floor ($CME), there were certain rites of passage that happened but few were institutionalized. They were random. The only certain one was taking the test to be a trader and going through the membership committee. Each pit might have its own rites of passage. Often on your first day with a badge, a member might yell at you to pull out a card and then they’d deliberately lose a tick to you. It was a way to congratulate you for making it that far.
When I was at USAFA, I can cite three instances of hazing for my readers. They are good examples of hazing out of control, hazing that happens when one person violates the code, and hazing that has a definite purpose. Hazing at service academies is institutionalized. Hazing in the military is institutionalized period, but it has a definite purpose.
This is hazing out of control with no purpose. An upper-class cadet chained a classmate of mine to a tree for some unknown issue. He was in the wrong, and he was severely disciplined for it by his other upper-class cadre and the officers that oversee them. It didn’t take long. There were no lawyers or official boards for the discipline to take place. It was immediate and firm.
Interestingly I don’t think that could happen in today’s America. The incident occurred in 1980 when Americans thought it was okay to be accountable for your actions and to punish actions immediately that were out of line. Now we all have to be tolerant of everything. “Just silly kids doing silly things”, right?
The second was when I was “touring” the bayonet assault course. I was standing at attention learning how to use a bayonet. A person, a fellow basketball player, who had helped recruit me to the academy, was intently giving me instructions on how to properly use my weapon for maximum efficiency in hand-to-hand combat. He said to me, “You got that Mister.”, and I replied, “Yes Silk, I got it.” My response should have been “Yes Sir.” However, I smarted off a bit and took advantage of a situation and because I had familiarity with the instructor, I used his nickname instead of using a word that I was supposed to use.
Silk went apeshit on me. Another upper-class cadet joined in. I was off for a full five to ten minutes of fun in the woods doing push-ups, sit-ups, burpees, and jogging around.
That is a haze, and it’s not abuse. If one of my classmates did the same, they would have received the same. It’s also not demeaning or character-destroying. It was character building and it was done in the spirit of educating someone what the chain of command looked like. Shit flows downhill.
The third was when we were in drill. At academies, new cadets get the opportunity to go out and march in formation every single day, sometimes many many many times a day. Each and every day, they are given pointed instructions as to how to walk.
You would think that this would be a simple operation, but it isn’t. You have to listen to commands, instinctively react to them immediately, and be in absolute sync with all your fellow cadets in the formation. The group moves as one.
Once they learn how to walk, they get the chance to walk with a rifle. This uniform variation at USAFA had its own special name, “white gloves under arms”. You wore white gloves, and you carried an M1 rifle that was on the rack in your room. We would drill with rifles. Drilling with a rifle adds more complexity to the activity.
When you are re-learning how to walk in the military, invariably when the officer says “Right face”, someone will face left. Woe befalls the freshman cadet that faces left. Upperclass cadets will descend on that freshman like hawks from the sky. They will impart instructions close to the face of that freshman and the tone of voice that they use will be extremely elevated. Sweat might start running down the back of that cadet. The entire formation might have to stop, drop and do pushups for a little bit in order to get their mind right on the proper way to walk.
My flight had a particularly aggressive upperclass cadet who was what we would call a “yeller”. He would yell constantly. He was in your face. We did a lot of pushups. Even when we managed to seemingly execute all the commands correctly, our execution was not crisp enough for this upperclass cadet. He was hyper-demanding.
One day, out of frustration, someone in our flight asked this upperclass cadet nicely why he was such a dick. I will never forget his answer.
He said, and he said quietly, “Think about if you are flying in a formation. You are going into battle. Your lead commander tells the formation to break right, and you break left. What happens to everyone in the formation?”
We were quiet.
He answered his own question, “Everyone dies.”
We all got it. Drill was never the same after that. It was serious business. By the way, in the competition between all the freshman cadets at the end of BCT my flight won. We were the best flight in the entire academy for drill. Our reward was to be able to drink actual Coca-Cola, and have popcorn.
My beef with the Daily NU paper is that I think they had an agenda prior to writing their article. Instead of objectivity, it looks like they let their own confirmation bias do the reporting. My questions above remain. Now that everyone has lawyered up, it will take a lot of time to get them answered, if ever.
Badly handled by NU. First an investigation that says the coach didn't know, then a two weeks supension because he should have known and he's the boss, then suddenly he's fired? Fitzgerald signed a 10 year extension in 2021. Will NU try to weasel out of the contract? The very good recruits will all bail. Who ever takes over the program will know up front the president is an unreliable jerk, so the program won't attract quality candidates. Hope the in house next in line realizes what he's in for.
Nicely written. I agree that the media so far hasn't done well on the story. ESPN did do a piece where they presented Fitzgerald as a decent man and an inspiring coach and noted clearly both his statement and the original statement from the university that he didn't know what was happened. That piece also explored the controversy and the timeline.
Like you, I wonder how hazing like this could exist in the current age of social media. Then again, Jerry Sandusky got away with much, much worse for a long time. So who knows?
The University is weaseling out because of the publicity and the machine that the woke-folks use to turn up the heat. You can see this clearly in how the story has developed; as in football, someone here knows the playbook and is using it. Fitzgerald has to go because reasons, you bigots.
It's going to take a while now for more facts to come out. In the end, Fitzgerald likely gets some settlement to leave, and he never works in football again. That will be a shame since he's dedicated his entire life to it and by all accounts was very, very good at what he did.