This story is part of Sports Illustrated’s exploration of the ways sports and finance intertwine—from the NIL revolution to online betting, business-minded athletes and more. For more on sports and money, see SI’s October 2023 Money Issue.
The saying in academia goes like this: The battles are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Presumably it comes with an exception for the fierce fights involving a school’s athletic department. In that corner of the university, the stakes aren’t low at all. Especially when it comes to the fallout from scandal.
It was a typical Friday news dump, late on the morning of July 7. A small item crawled across screens and perhaps popped up on news alerts: Northwestern’s football coach, Pat Fitzgerald, received a two-week suspension—in midsummer, coinciding with the weeks he was supposed to take vacation—after an investigation into a complaint about hazing within his program. Nothing to see here, folks. But, of course, there was.
