Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern's rapid fall from grace a lesson in how not to handle modern crisis

Last Friday, Northwestern president Michael Schill read a report on a six-month independent investigation into allegations of hazing within the Wildcat football program — complete with 50-plus interviews — and deemed that head coach Pat Fitzgerald should be suspended for two meaningless July weeks.

On Monday, after details of the allegations began becoming public through media reports — including the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern — Schill determined that he was so troubled by the exact same information he already had that he needed to fire Fitzgerald immediately.

Then he tried to claim the ethical high road.

"Since Friday, I have kept going back to what we should reasonably expect from our head coaches, our faculty and our campus leaders,” Schill said in a statement. “And that is what led me to make this decision [to fire Fitzgerald].

“The head coach is ultimately responsible for the culture of his team. The hazing we investigated was widespread and clearly not a secret within the program, providing Coach Fitzgerald with the opportunity to learn what was happening …”

Welcome to America, where you only do the right thing when someone is watching.

Nothing changed from Friday to Monday except Schill realized he couldn’t keep the allegations under wraps. As such, he was suddenly horrified. Fitz was cooked.

“During the investigation, 11 current or former football student-athletes acknowledged that hazing has been ongoing within the football program,” Schill said. “... this has never been about one former student-athlete and his motives; this is much bigger than that."

So why did the 11 current or former student-athletes not matter last week? Schill didn't say. He was busy patting himself on the back.

“As much as Coach Fitzgerald has meant to our institution and our student-athletes, we have an obligation — in fact a responsibility — to live by our values, even when it means making difficult and painful decisions such as this one,” Schill continued. “We must move forward."

Northwestern will move forward, just without Fitzgerald for the first time in decades.

He was the ultimate, and ultimately most important, Wildcat in the program’s history. As a player, he was twice named the Big Ten’s defensive player of the year and was a blood-and-guts leader on the 1995 team that reached the Rose Bowl for the first time in 47 years.

By 31 he was the head coach, where he spent 17 years elevating a program with considerable disadvantages into a quality winner. He delivered 10 bowl appearances and a couple of Big Ten West titles. The native of a South Side suburb, he showed his loyalty by remaining at NU even when he had clear paths to elite jobs at Michigan and Notre Dame.

Yet it ended in scandal.

This is 2023 and every coach, boss, teacher, leader and so on knows that times and standards have changed. Any football coach that is tolerating — or even failing to actively root out — any element of hazing within their program is risking their job.

What once was a tradition is now taboo. That’s just reality. Fitzgerald is just 48, albeit with an old-school soul, so he should have been capable of change. While the investigation didn’t uncover proof that he knew what was happening, Schill rightfully wondered how either he — or someone on the staff — couldn’t have known.

In a statement late Monday evening, Fitzgerald reaffirmed that he "had no knowledge whatsoever of any form of hazing" and that he's instructed his legal counsel — high-powered attorney Dan Webb — "to take the necessary steps to protect my rights in accordance with the law."

Until Northwestern releases the full report, no one knows all of the facts and perspectives. For that reason alone, it's a lousy way for the Fitzgerald era to end, albeit not as lousy as what some of the players had to endure through juvenile, sexualized harassment.

Schill blew this scandal in almost every imaginable way. The Friday news dump was a red flag that there was more to the story. Then the school was painfully naive to think it could keep the details of the case quiet — the whistleblower was assuredly going to turn to the media.

And now this complete reversal of fortune which makes the school appear to be bending to the will of select public sentiment.

Now Schill needs to find a new coach for a flailing team that was built around the personality and qualities of Fitzgerald. The coach was the program, and even then it wasn’t easy. NU has won just four games the past two years.

You can expect the transfers to flow and plenty of pro-Fitz boosters to hold their wallets. Northwestern has embarked on an ambitious plan to construct a new $800 million football stadium. Can they still pull that off?

Someone will take the job. This is still the Big Ten and it commands a hefty salary. Future results though are hardly guaranteed.

Maybe that’s what inspired Schill to try to thread a punishment needle of sitting Fitzgerald but not canning him. Maybe knowing how hard it would be to find a replacement is what made him think the school could dodge and conceal long enough that people would forget this even happened.

Maybe that’s what made him take one course of action on Friday and another on Monday.

Whatever it was, this was quite the reversal, a cold, bottom-line flip-flop once the story got out of hand and the president started feeling the pressure.