Not a good look for Northwestern.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/c ... 394594007/The only way Pat Fitzgerald is coaching Northwestern when the 2023 season begins is if one of AmericaΓÇÖs elite academic institutions has decided that a guy who calls football plays is worth more than the pain and suffering of young men who werenΓÇÖt just hazed when they arrived in his program but were reportedly violated, defiled and humiliated as part of a twisted so-called culture that is 100% his responsibility and now 100% his shame.
Even if you are naïve enough to believe that the person who has been leading Northwestern’s football program for the last 17 seasons didn’t know the exact ways that his upperclassmen were allegedly indoctrinating newcomers — or, as others may call it, sexual assault — Fitzgerald has utterly failed.
He failed in his duty to protect young men and he failed their families, whose living rooms he went into and promised to treat like his own family.
He failed to set a standard by which it would never occur in the first place for players in his program to do the vile things alleged Saturday by former players in the Daily Northwestern.
He failed to be the man he spent an entire career pretending that he was.
On Friday, Northwestern suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks this summer during a time when nothing much is happening in college football, expecting the cloud would pass by the time the real important work begins to make the Wildcats something other than the 1-11 embarrassment they were last season.
They dropped the news in a vague press release announcing the vague results of a vague investigation into a whistleblowerΓÇÖs accusations of hazing within the program.
Under the guise of an independent firm being unable to corroborate FitzgeraldΓÇÖs culpability, they let him off with more of a pat on the head and an admonishment to do better ΓÇö even though the firm itself said the accusations were ΓÇ£largely supported by evidence.ΓÇ¥
But NorthwesternΓÇÖs student journalists found more. A lot more. A sickening amount more.
Accusations from former players that are so specific and perverse, it would be difficult to believe they are made up.