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.
