CHICAGO — Northwestern begins its 2023 football season Sept. 3 at Rutgers.
Whether Pat Fitzgerald will be on the sideline for the Wildcats’ opener was the subject of intense speculation Saturday after disturbing new details of the hazing incidents that led to an outside investigation and two-week suspension without pay for the veteran coach.
The explosive report in the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, detailed a former player’s account of the incidents.
The former player described a practice called “running” in which primarily freshman players were punished for on-field mistakes by getting restrained in a dark locker room by eight to 10 upperclassmen wearing masks who would “dry hump” the younger player. A second player confirmed those details to the paper.
Northwestern announced Fitzgerald’s suspension Friday while releasing an executive summary of external investigator Maggie Hickey’s findings. The summary did not include details of the hazing but said Hickey found evidence to confirm an anonymous whistleblower’s report of the incidents.
In an email response to a Chicago Tribune inquiry about Saturday’s Daily Northwestern report, university spokesman Jon Yates said: “Our first priority is to support and protect our students, including the young man who brought these matters to our attention and all student-athletes who had the courage to come forward in this independent investigation.
“That is why the university immediately opened this investigation upon learning of the allegations and why we took decisive action once we ascertained the facts. Out of respect for the privacy of our student-athletes, we will not comment about the findings beyond what we stated in the release and executive summary of the investigation.”
While the summary said there was no “sufficient evidence to believe the coaching staff knew about the ongoing hazing conduct,” Hickey’s investigation determined “there had been significant opportunities to discover and report the hazing conduct.”
Fitzgerald, in a statement Friday, said he was “very disappointed” to learn about the hazing and that the university holds its student-athletes “to the highest standards.”
Even if Fitzgerald didn’t know about the incidents, his reputation has taken a significant hit. As a board member of the Positive Coaching Alliance, Fitzgerald once made a video in which he said his program had a “zero tolerance” policy regarding hazing.
“There is no reason why to ever have it,” he said in the video. “I know there are a lot of initiations and traditions and things of that nature. And we had that here back, frankly, when I was a player in some different ways.
“But society has evolved, and as we’ve really thought deep about how we want to welcome our new family members into our programs and into our organizations, hazing should have nothing to do with it.”
But apparently players in his program didn’t heed that message. The former player told The Daily Northwestern he was an eyewitness to “absolutely egregious and vile and inhumane behavior” by fellow players.
The paper also obtained images from whiteboards that, according to the former player, listed the names of players who needed to be “ran.” The former player said the ritual was done during training camp and around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays under the guise of “team bonding.”
Other acts the former player described to the paper included freshmen being forced to strip naked and bear crawl or “slingshot themselves across the floor with exercise bands.” He also described “the carwash,” in which players spun around naked at the shower entrance and other players were forced to rub up against them, as well as an act in which a freshman center and freshman quarterback were forced to get in position and perform a snap naked.
In addition to Fitzgerald’s suspension, Northwestern on Friday announced what it called “significant actions to prevent hazing within its football program,” including the permanent closing of training camps in Kenosha, Wis., and implementing several anti-hazing measures.
Investigators interviewed more than 50 people and reviewed hundreds of thousands of emails to determine the whistleblower’s claims “were largely supported by the evidence,” according to the executive summary.
Fitzgerald, a former star linebacker at Northwestern from 1993-96, became head coach in 2006 at age 31, replacing Randy Walker, who died of a heart attack. Fitzgerald received a 10-year contract extension in 2021 after taking his team to the Big Ten championship game for the second time in three years.
He is the winningest football coach in NU history with a 110-101 career record in 17 seasons. While the Wildcats suffered through 11 straight losses in 2022 after winning their opener against Nebraska in Ireland, there never were any rumors that Fitzgerald’s job was in jeopardy.
But after Saturday’s Daily Northwestern report, the calls for Fitzgerald’s ouster have begun.
