INDIANAPOLIS — David Braun walked away from the podium and exhaled deeply, cheeks puffing, a thankless task completed, an impossible situation survived. He’d just done more than any of his no-account, hide-and-seek bosses at Northwestern University have done in weeks, by making himself available for an extensive public interview about the smoking crater of a football program he inherited.
Braun has been employed at Northwestern for less than six-and-a-half months. He’s been the emergency head football coach for 12 days. Yet he was thrown into Big Ten media days as the meat shield for a cowering university. Bless his heart, the guy handled it far better than expected. He may not win many (or any) games this season, but he absolutely won the press conference.
Which is one more press conference victory than Northwestern’s president, Michael Schill, or its athletic director, Derrick Gragg, have chalked up. It’s one more than they’ve even held since firing longtime coach Pat Fitzgerald after an investigation into alleged systemic hazing within the football program. The school’s leadership has handled just about every element of this scandal poorly, and Wednesday at Big Ten media days was a continuation of that.
