Pat Fitzgerald got fired. Super, super fired.
This is not breaking news, nor is it particularly surprising. Sure, it would have been shocking ten days ago; Fitzgerald was the fourth-longest tenured FBS coach in the country despite being only 48 years old. He had more than twice as many total wins as any other Northwestern coach. Of the 6 bowl wins in Northwestern’s entire program history, Fitzgerald was responsible for 5 of them.
He was also arguably (but not that arguably) the best player in program history; he was a two-time All American, two-time Bronko Nagurski winner, two-time Bednarik winner, and two-time Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year. In summary, Fitz has been Northwestern Football for the better part of a generation.
Which is why it is odd that his firing itself is not particularly interesting. It was a plausible outcome when the initial findings from the internal investigation were released and Fitzgerald was suspended, and it was fait accompli the instant the Daily Northwestern dropped their bombshell report providing the full context (followed by equally damning reporting from Louie Vaccher at the Wildcat Report and Adam Rittenberg at ESPN and Bradley Locker at InsideNU, among others).
It’s possible to hand-wave the sanitized “yes, there were some bad things, and yes, Coach AngryJaw wasn’t not possibly sort of maybe kinda responsible for those bad things not not happening, so the wrist must be slapped, and we consider this matter closed.” But once the length, breadth, and weird-ass nature of the hazing became public, no one could have survived that, especially a coach whose entire value proposition — in light of the recent on-field collapse — was ‘I run a mature, functional, responsible program of which Northwestern can be proud.’
But the cautionary tale of Pat Fitzgerald is not about the hazing. Sure, “don’t be a colossal dipshit who condones dipshittery” is a valuable lesson, but it is not a particularly novel one. No, the real object lesson here is actually the cautionary tale of Michael Schill. And while “always operate on the assumption that everyone will eventually know what you know” is only slightly less No Shit Sherlock than the Dipshit Conjecture demonstrated by Fitzgerald, it is a lesson many have nonetheless refused to learn.
Michael Schill took over as Northwestern’s president on September 12, 2022, two weeks after Northwestern’s last football win of the Pat Fitzgerald Era. Of all the problems he thought he might have to deal within his first year, a crisis in the head football coach’s office would be among the least likely. I imagine that the first briefing he received about Pat Fitzgerald contained two pieces of information: 1) he’s not going anywhere, and 2) regardless of the wins and (many) losses, we don’t want him to go anywhere.
So when Schill received the results of the internal report a few weeks back, you can see why he hesitated. If athletics is a University’s front porch, he couldn’t afford to lose the one reliable face rocking in the big wicker chair waving folks inside. As a result, on July 7th, after six months of information gathering was complete, Schill suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks.
Then, on the evening of July 8th, Schill announced that he “may have erred” by only suspending Fitzgerald for two weeks, shitcanning Commandant Neckroll shortly thereafter. Now, you may be asking yourself, “gee, it seems like July 7th and July 8th are pretty close together on the calendar. What could have changed that drastically in that relatively brief period of time to justify a change from ‘two weeks’ to ‘all the weeks’?”
The answer, of course, is that in the interim, additional information got out. Information so clearly disqualifying that Schill had to backtrack immediately. Information, presumably, that was revealed in the investigation. Information Schill already had. Information given to investigators. By humans. Humans who had already come forward with the goal of exposing this information to the world. Humans who can speak to other humans about that information. Information presumably contained in a report that was then read by even more humans, who in turn could speak to EVEN MORE humans.
The President of a major university made this kind of massively visible and news-garnering decision predicated on the assumption that this information wouldn’t get out. In the Year Of Our Lord 2023. It’s hard to comprehend the combination of stupidity and hubris that accompanies a decision like that. When has that ever worked? When has the other shoe not dropped?
Warde Manuel tried this last year. He was handed a report from a reputable law firm explaining, in great detail, the general dipshittery of his head hockey coach. He then proceeded to do precisely fuck-all about it for three months until the report was released to the public. Now, Warde added a layer of stupid stubbornness and refused to yield immediately thereafter, but the principle was the same.
The same thing cost two consecutive Ohio State coaches their jobs. Urban Meyer publicly denied knowing anything about Zach Smith’s dipshittery, and it cost him his job. And while TattooGate was, in retrospect, really really dumb, Jim Tressel forgetting that FOIA existed got him canned a dozen years ago. Even this week, Bob Huggins attempted the “no, man, I never resigned, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” presumably hoping that WVU wouldn’t feel the need to drop the most hilarious set of receipts I’ve seen in a hot minute.
You can tell a lot about power dynamics when someone thinks they can pull off the Chinese Emperor ‘Forbidden Knowledge” trick in the age where WhatsApp exists.
The other principle Schill violated was the admonition of my old law school criminal law professor, whose two pieces of advice for defending someone were (i) get paid up front, and (ii) if someone is going to jail, make sure that it’s your client and not you.
As University President, this was Schill’s responsibility and his mess to clean up, but it certainly wasn’t his fault. Dude had been in the building for like a half-hour when this whole episode started, and these allegations date back more than a decade. And in the rare situation where doing the right thing, doing the thing that is best for the University, and doing the thing that covered his own ass happened to align, Schill decided to choose Door #2 and work to try to save Fitzgerald from Fitzgerald’s own mess. In doing so, he bought Fitzgerald about 24 hours, and threw himself under the bus for the effort.
Here again, Schill is in good (or at least robust) company. History, and especially the history of college sports, is replete with such scandals. Maryland president Wallace Loh pulled a very similar maneuver in 2018 with Head Coach DJ Durkin. Durkin was suspended for two and a half months following the heatstroke death of lineman Jordan McNair during summer conditioning. The subsequent investigation revealed a program culture that was equal parts abusive, demeaning, and weird. To everyone’s shock, Loh then inexplicably reinstated Durkin to full active duty in late October. It was so shocking that he had to fire Durkin THE NEXT DAY.
But as dumbfounding as that whole episode was, Loh at least had a bit of a defense; the Maryland Board of Regents (equally inexplicably) forced Loh’s hand in the effort to keep Durkin. Time will tell whether Schill was acting on its own accord or as an intermediary between Fitzgerald and the power brokers at Northwestern (either the official ones or the Ryan Family), but at this point it looks like he just —to put this in Northwestern football terms— fumbled the ball, kicked it out of the back of the end zone, and gave himself a wedgie on the goal post all by himself.
The cover-up is often worse than the crime, but when the person doing the cover-up wasn’t involved in the original crime, the cover-up is orders of magnitude dumber than the crime. John U. Bacon is known to say, “never turn a one-day story into a two-day story.” And while this is true, I hereby offer my own correllary:
Never turn a He story into a We story.