The quickness of Pat Fitzgerald’s downfall is the most stunning part. Fitzgerald had been the head coach in Evanston for 17 years, and was settling in for another 20 or 30. This year he was set to coach his son Jack, whom I remember from my time interviewing Fitzgerald when I was a student reporter 15 years ago; back then, Jack scurried around the side fields in search of athletic equipment to play with. Northwestern seemed to have the most secure coaching situation in college football: Fitzgerald would never seek another job, and Northwestern would never seek another coach. In 2021, Fitzgerald signed a 10-year, $57 million contract extension to keep him at the school through 2030.
But in a few days, Fitzgerald went from a Northwestern lifer to a goner. On Friday, the university suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks without pay after receiving the findings of an independent investigation into allegations of hazing in his program. On Saturday, we found out what Northwestern’s culture of hazing entailed. A whistleblower on the 2022 Wildcats described hideous things to The Daily Northwestern. Among them: Players were punished with gang dry humping for on-field mistakes, and freshmen were made to perform naked drills like bear crawls and QB-center exchanges. “It’s done under this smoke and mirror of, ‘Oh, this is team bonding,’ but no, this is sexual abuse,” the player told The Daily Northwestern.
These and other allegations were broadly backed up by a series of reports featuring current Northwestern players, former Northwestern players, and former staffers, indicating that the hazing traditions described by the whistleblower had been present in Northwestern’s program for about as long as Fitzgerald had been coaching. Just about every time I looked at my phone during a 72-hour span, there was a new confirmation, corroboration, or report. By Monday evening, Fitzgerald had been fired, with Northwestern’s new president, Michael Schill, citing “a difficult and complex evaluation of my original discipline decision.”
The investigation summary notes that the whistleblower’s accounts were “largely supported by evidence.” Schill wrote in a statement that “eleven current or former football student-athletes acknowledged that hazing has been ongoing within the football program.” Schill also wrote that “the hazing included forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature” and “was well-known by many in the program, though the investigator failed to find any credible evidence that Coach Fitzgerald himself knew about it.” Schill noted that some players felt the hazing was actually light-hearted and voluntary, which seems to me like a thing hazers would say about hazing.
As a Northwestern fan and alum, I kept hoping that a swarm of players or coaches would come forward and say that this never happened. That never materialized. What we got instead were a slew of former players praising Fitzgerald’s character, and a letter, purporting to represent the “ENTIRE” team (the letter’s emphasis, not mine), that called the accounts “exaggerated and twisted” and maintained that Fitzgerald knew nothing. But this message was as damning as anything else.
No one man is responsible for a greater share of a college football program’s all-time success than Fitzgerald, who is the greatest player and coach in Northwestern history. There’s nobody else who can claim to be both for the same school. (The closest is probably Florida’s Steve Spurrier, but he’s got a lot of competition for both spots.) The Mount Rushmore of Northwestern football is four Fitzes. The university’s football program is molded in his image. Perhaps too literally—one of this week’s Daily Northwestern reports says that Black players were encouraged to cut their hair short instead of wearing dreads. Northwestern’s $800 million stadium renovation will be named after billionaire booster Pat Ryan, but before this week it could’ve been named Fitz Field.
Fitzgerald had infinitely more clout than Schill or athletic director Derrick Gragg, both of whom had been hired within the last two years and both of whom were the second choices for their respective jobs. (Northwestern’s first choice for a new president stepped down because of a cancer diagnosis; the first choice for a new athletic director stepped down due to outrage over his involvement in a sexual harassment lawsuit.) Clearly, neither wanted to oust Fitz—not for poor performances on the field, and not for a years-long culture of sexualized hazing. That’s why the administrators tried to sneak in a two-week suspension for Fitzgerald during the only slow time on the college football calendar and hope that no one noticed. And they might have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids in Northwestern’s journalism program.
Northwestern football is now rudderless. Nobody knows what football success at Northwestern looks like without Fitzgerald involved. Nobody trusts the athletic department, which simultaneously botched an equally ugly baseball scandal. Nobody thinks Schill handled things well—neither Fitzgerald’s defenders nor the people who wanted him gone. Nobody knows what Gragg, who has been AWOL from most of the Fitzgerald saga, even does. Nobody knows what will happen to the current Northwestern football players, some of whom were likely involved in this culture of hazing, and many of whom seem to support Fitzgerald. Nobody has any idea what a Northwestern coaching search will look like, since the school hasn’t really had one since 1999, or what candidates are available. The season opener is in about two months.
It is the quickness of the news in the past few days that stunned so many about Fitzgerald’s firing—but it is the slowness that eats at me. Fitzgerald wasn’t fired over four days of news reports and social media fury; he was buried by 15-plus years of failing to stop the indefensible. This hazing happened when I was in school, and that was a decade ago. It happened when Northwestern was winning and when Northwestern was losing. The past week has felt like an explosion, but behind that burst was a years-long buildup of pain. The decision was easy when the world found out about Northwestern’s hazing scandal—but why was it so hard to find out?
Pat Fitzgerald trademarked Good Clean American Fun. This is not a euphemism or a weird joke: In 2019, he filed for the exclusive right to sell “Good Clean American Fun” clothing. That’s how he described celebrations of the team’s victories. It fits the ideal that Fitzgerald had set for his program, one of hard work and retro vibes. Fitz is a big catchphrase guy, and he said his catchphrases with his whole linebacker chest.
The greatest skill a college football coach can possess has nothing to do with X’s and O’s or schematic brilliance: It’s the power to be able make someone feel special. Fitzgerald has this power in droves. He’s preposterously optimistic and sounds like he believes everything he says to his core—and he’ll make you believe it, too.
I once shared a few beers with a former Northwestern player who recalled a story about how easy it is to buy the coach’s hype. Fitzgerald called a one-on-one meeting with this player and cut him from the team—but the player said that when he walked out, he wasn’t angry at the coach who had just ended his football career. He still felt like Fitz was looking out for him and wanted him to thrive in life. Fitz is so charismatic that he can squash your hopes and dreams in the name of roster math and leave you wanting to run through a brick wall for him anyway.
This power is how Fitzgerald inspired dozens of talented high school football players to attend Northwestern over schools with bigger fan bases, richer traditions, and less rigorous academic standards for athletes. It prompted Northwestern’s army of award-winning journalists to forget objectivity and talk about Fitzgerald on TV as if he were a close personal friend and not the subject of the story. It motivated boosters to finance Northwestern’s $250 million football practice facility and $800 million stadium renovation. This power reshaped Northwestern’s football program, and in turn the athletic department, and in turn the university as a whole.
Fitzgerald was so convincing in part because he lived the dream that he sold. Northwestern finished last in the Big Ten in most sports until 1995, when Fitzgerald led a hard-nosed defense and propelled the Wildcats to back-to-back Big Ten championships. An unrecruited linebacker coming out of high school, he won national defensive player of the year awards and has since been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. He returned to Northwestern as an assistant coach in 2001 and took over as head coach in 2006 after the sudden death of Randy Walker. By the time Fitzgerald was 40, he was already the winningest coach in the school’s blighted football history.
And once Northwestern got a taste of football success, the whole athletic department took off. Nine of the school’s 10 national championships in team sports have come since 2000, and the men’s basketball team’s only two NCAA tournament appearances have come since 2017. The school has renovated the basketball stadium and built a gleaming athletic facility overlooking Lake Michigan.
When I started a blog about Northwestern sports in 2009, I found something strange: readers. There were thousands of people who wanted daily updates on the Northwestern Wildcats. And all of them loved Pat Fitzgerald. Before Fitzgerald, the classic Northwestern snob insisted on a joking ignorance of all things sports. But Fitzgerald molded a new version of Northwestern-ness, one in which athletic excellence was another way of being better-than. Fitzgerald told recruits that coming to Northwestern was a “40-year decision” instead of a “four-year decision,” that playing for another school might allow them to win football games, but that Northwestern would set them up for life. Northwesterners have a smug tendency to believe that they’re better than everybody else—and Fitzgerald’s vision for the program all but confirmed that.
Yet there were signs that Fitzgerald was not, in fact, the best of Northwestern. His football strategy—and his opinions about just about everything, such as cellphones—were stuck decades in the past. He told critics of his struggling football team that his email address was “Hashtag I Don’t Care.” He seemed totally unwilling to change his strategy or his staff, keeping underperforming assistants around for years too long.
In 2014, Northwestern players attempted to unionize, which would have been a huge, historic move for college athlete rights; Fitzgerald squashed it. (A union might have addressed workplace protection for player-employees, and might have made it easier to put a stop to hazing years ago.) And in recent years, the Wildcats had struggled on the field, going 14-31 in the last four seasons, after averaging nine wins a season in the four years before that. They bottomed out in 2022 with a 1-11 record, the worst season since a winless 1989 campaign.
Perhaps it is crass to note the connection between Northwestern’s poor on-field performance and the hazing scandal—but I don’t think it’s coincidental. In the past few days, we have heard players resurface decade-old stories of shame and humiliation. But in many cases, it was suffered in service of a winning program built on righteousness and success by the only man who could lead Northwestern’s program to greatness. The players who were wronged felt they were the ones who had failed and needed to fit in. It wasn’t degradation—it was Good Clean American Fun.
Fitzgerald set out an idealistic vision for Northwestern football, and so much of it was true. His story was real. For a long time, the wins were there. Surely, the stories that many of his former players are now telling about how Fitzgerald changed their lives for the better are true. But almost-idealism can be the most hurtful type.
College football is filled with obvious snakes and grifters who want nothing more from players than their athletic talent, but Fitzgerald told his players and fans that Northwestern was different. What must it have felt like for players who bought in, only to wind up scarred?
The quickness of Fitzgerald’s fall is the stunning part—but the dream of a program where a team wins by doing things the right way is incompatible with the reality of one where hazing happened for 15-plus years. And buildings can collapse awfully quickly if their foundations were flimsy all along.
