In 2005, Gary Barnett was forced out as football coach at Colorado. His otherwise stellar career had been weighed down by allegations of recruiting improprieties, followed by insensitive comments about former kicker Katie Hnida, who said she was raped by a teammate. Barnett was temporarily suspended in ’04, then pushed out in ’05 after a 70–3 loss to eventual national champion Texas in the Big 12 championship game.
This is instructive because in Barnett’s previous job, at Northwestern, the best player he coached was a hard-nosed linebacker from Chicago’s South Side named Pat Fitzgerald. He was the defensive linchpin of the team that improbably won the 1995 Big Ten championship and played in the Rose Bowl. Credit for that football miracle belongs to many players, but the one who most embodied the defiant optimism of Northwestern’s renaissance under Barnett was Fitzgerald.
Fitz became a coach shortly after college and worked under Barnett at Colorado as a graduate assistant in 1999, then returned to his alma mater as a full-time assistant coach in 2001 and never left. Until Monday.
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Fitzgerald was abruptly fired amid off-field scandal, echoing his former coach and mentor’s dismissal some 18 years earlier. While the result is similar, the details are different: Northwestern had become immersed in a hazing investigation that bubbled to the surface last Friday. After the school botched the initial rollout of its sanctions of Fitzgerald, giving him a two-week suspension without fully explaining why, school president Michael Schill reversed course and terminated his longtime head coach Monday night.
If you’re wondering how fast a 30-year connection to a school can disintegrate, well, Pat Fitzgerald just showed us.
We still don’t know everything that was found in the hazing investigation report conducted by an outside law firm, but Northwestern released a few more details Monday night. Eleven current or former football players said hazing had been ongoing, and others said it was systemic and a longtime facet of the program. Some of the hazing, as first reported by The Daily Northwestern student paper Saturday, included coerced sexual acts. There also were racist actions and remarks described by former Black players.
(Not many coaches or fraternity presidents or others in campus leadership positions are going to win a PR battle in 2023 if the words “hazing” and “naked” have been attached to your organization.)
One area identified by the outside investigation as a hazing hot spot was Northwestern’s preseason training at Camp Kenosha, in southern Wisconsin. The camp was cherished by Fitzgerald as a distraction-free, football-immersive getaway that enhanced team bonding. Away from the eyes and ears of Northwestern administrators, it apparently also included some problematic initiation rites.
The tradition of going to Camp Kenosha was started by Barnett. What went on then, who knows? But after the hazing investigation, Northwestern’s near-three-decade history there has been discontinued.
Full disclosure: I played football in high school for Barnett. He was a brilliant leader and motivator, and I owe him a considerable amount for taking a personal interest in my development and maturation as a teenager. I will always respect him, and we have a good relationship to this day.
But I can also recognize that part of his downfall at Colorado was a refusal to back down in the face of criticism for off-field issues, much of which he thought was unfair. His pride got in the way of taking full accountability. He was open-minded enough to have a female kicker 20 years ago, but not enough to understand how to properly address the very serious allegations she made. He fought when he should have bent.
I wonder whether Fitzgerald was undone at his alma mater by a similar refusal to bend. When the hazing whistleblower took his story to The Daily Northwestern, a letter attributed to “the entire Northwestern football team” was quickly produced pushing back at the claims. It had the feel of being orchestrated from above.
Fitz also claimed no knowledge of the alleged hazing. But the more information that came forth, the more that seems unlikely. It’s more believable Fitzgerald chose not to acknowledge what was going on while tolerating its existence as a traditional hallmark of the program.
Problem being: What was bonding in the 1990s isn’t considered bonding in the 2020s, nor should it be. We’re smarter now, and more understanding of team dynamics that are abusive.
As the years went by and Fitzgerald became the winningest coach in his alma mater’s modest history, empowerment and entrenchment were predictable byproducts. Like Barnett before him, who turned down jobs at Georgia and UCLA, Fitz declined overtures at more prestigious programs where it’s easier to win. His loyalty to the school bred loyalty in return, which allowed him to stubbornly resist staff changes and survive a 4–20 record the past two seasons.
Would he still be the coach if that record were reversed in 2021 and ’22? Probably. But this is Northwestern, which has a far bigger stake in academic prestige than athletics. A hazing scandal was always going to be harder to overcome here than at most other Power 5 programs.
But unless there is more damaging information forthcoming, it’s easy to see Fitzgerald getting what Barnett did not get—a second chance after a scandal. Barnett never coached again following his ouster at Colorado. Fitzgerald, just 48 years old, likely will have another job within the next six months if he wants it.
College athletics has become sufficiently bottom-line oriented that winning sinners such as Hugh Freeze, Rick Pitino, Chris Beard and Will Wade all have gotten rebound jobs after significant problems. Fitzgerald will have to convince a school president—and the families of recruits—he’s not a guy who tolerates player hazing or requires Black players to cut their hair to a certain length, but his 110 wins at a prestigious academic school will carry the day.
In an era of accelerated coach hirings and firings, don’t be shocked if some embattled athletic director deploys a “Fire for Fitz” strategy come September. Pat Fitzgerald will be back, hopefully wiser. He can learn from the leadership shortcomings of his mentor, and of his own making.
