Thank God for The Daily Northwestern or maybe we would have never learned about the allegedly disgusting things going on inside the Wildcats’ locker room.
Reports of players wearing Purge-like masks and “dry humping” teammates in a dark locker room. Naked bear crawling and QB-center exchanges, and slingshotting the hazing victims across the floor using exercise bands. The list of alleged hazing traditions, most of them sexual, within the Northwestern football program go on and on, and are outlined in detail by The Daily Northwestern.
Of course, former coach Pat Fitzgerald said in a statement he knew nothing about this and was “not aware of the alleged incidents.” Players interviewed in the report begged to differ. Fitzgerald was fired Monday and it sounds like the only responsible thing that’s happened so far in this disgusting story. It was reported Monday night that Fitzgerald has hired bigwig Chicago lawyer Dan Webb.
If Fitzgerald was totally unaware of all this, as he claims, that’s worth firing him for being utterly clueless.
Coaches always act as if they are the smartest guys in the room, like they’re the only humans capable of doing the job, until they have to play dumb. Then they never saw anything, never knew anything.
Willful ignorance was no excuse here.
To believe Fitzgerald and no one – no one! – on Northwestern’s staff knew what was going on inside that disgusting locker room is to believe in the tooth fairy, except if the tooth fairy forcibly whipped his private parts against you while going in the shower.
Fitzgerald has always come off as a really decent human being. I want to believe he still is. He played at Northwestern. He turned down big-time promotions to stay at Northwestern. He had some winning years and the university was never going to fire him for on-field performance.
But this is such an abhorrent and degrading situation, either he knew this stuff was going on and wrongfully chalked it up to stupid locker room high jinks, missing the severity and grotesqueness of the situation, or he didn’t know what was happening and lost control. This wasn’t one time, isolated incident.
This whole situation brought back memories of what happened at Maryland a few years ago with coach DJ Durkin and his strength coach Rick Court, who’s tough when people can’t be tough back but wouldn’t last a second in a real fight against the players he was allegedly berating and degrading in the weight room.
At Maryland, according to reports, the abuse was ridiculous and beyond belief that it was allowed. It all was exposed publicly after Maryland player Jordan McNair died of heatstroke during a workout.
Of course, Durkin is the defensive coordinator and linebackers coach at Texas A&M now (lessons learned, of course) and Court later was hired as a strength coach at a Michigan high school (best of luck to those kids).
But back to Northwestern, enough was enough. The team has been God awful terrible first of all. Over the last three full football seasons, the Wildcats are 7-29 and they’ve won three conference games not counting the COVID year.
Preseason magazines pick them dead last in the Big Ten this season. Then USC and UCLA come into the conference and Northwestern will become even more irrelevant. Maybe too much time has been focused on pulling off weird pranks in the locker room and not enough on, ya know, getting better at football.
Take that and now include all these ghastly off-the-field, gross allegations. It’s time for a fresh start for the entire program.
Only Pat Fitzgerald knows what he knew and didn’t know about the horrific hazing that mostly freshmen were enduring inside the walls of his locker room. All I know is that this was allegedly happening on his watch. And it was time for Fitzgerald to go.
#Tuesdays #Gorney #Fitzgerald #hazing #investigation