There were surely several pivot points in Pat Fitzgerald’s fall from grace that could have avoided the mass exhumation of every grievance coming out of his Northwestern locker room over the last 17 years, culminating Monday with his inevitable firing.
No college football program is perfect, but too many former players had a painted a picture of a rotting culture rife with hazing and degrading behavior for Fitzgerald to survive. The question is how Fitzgerald, who was often selected by his colleagues as the coach they’d want their son to play for, lost track of what was going on right under his nose.
Maybe he stayed at his alma mater too long, got too comfortable. Maybe he ignored warning signs or intentionally kept himself too far removed from the players he was tasked with overseeing. Maybe he didn’t see a problem with the kinds of vile acts that were acknowledged by 11 current or former players in the course of a six-month investigation and more beginning to speak up as the media frenzy swirled. We may never know for sure.
But however it came to be that Northwestern lost its reputation as the gold standard for what’s right in college football, it’s never been more obvious what could have saved Fitzgerald from himself. It just so happened to be the thing Fitzgerald most feared and tried to suppress in 2014.
More:Pat Fitzgerald failed to protect players. New hazing allegations 100% his responsibility
College athletes at big-time programs desperately need a players’ union, which nearly came to fruition at Northwestern nine years ago until the university and Fitzgerald successfully fought the effort led by former quarterback Kain Colter.
Amidst a landscape of uncertainty these days on nearly every front in college sports, and particularly when it comes to the rules around name, image and likeness rights and the continued empowerment of college athletes, the path to normalcy is crystal clear.
College sports are big business, and there is no reasonable way to manage them in this environment without sharing the wealth and the responsibility with their business partners: the athletes themselves.
Many coaches like Fitzgerald are fearful of that future, worried about what greater agency for college athletes would mean for their own livelihoods or how the competitive landscape might shift to their disadvantage.
In reality, though, the past 72 hours at Northwestern is proof that unionization would be to the coaches’ benefit, too. A number of Fitzgerald’s colleagues right now are bemoaning the way society has changed and quietly calling this dismissal unfair. They should be looking at it a different way: If it can happen to one of the most well-respected members of the profession, it can happen to them, too.
A world in which players’ unions run college football locker rooms and serve as a clearinghouse for all a young person’s grievances may not sound appealing to many coaches, athletics directors and school presidents. But it is surely better than trying to navigate the unsustainable tension that exists when a coach must cast himself as the personnel manager of a 100-person team, an X-and-O genius, a father figure, a moral authority, a community leader and an omnipotent overlord of his empire all at the same time.
We don’t expect this of NFL or NBA coaches. Why? Because the boundaries between player and organization have been mutually agreed to, each fully aware of their own part in the relationship. And when there’s an accusation that a player’s rights are being violated or that some kind of misconduct is taking place, there’s a union in the middle to advocate for resolution rather than a university like Northwestern that has inherent conflicts of interests.
Though the decision Northwestern made on Fitzgerald was obvious, it was not easy. These things are emotionally charged, highly political and often clouded by the input of donors or faculty members on either side.
But if the school had a players’ union to deal with, or perhaps to fear, it’s hard to imagine the private Northwestern football rituals that are now a public embarrassment would have ever been allowed to take root in the first place.
Instead, what allowed things to spiral at Northwestern until a whistleblower finally came forward last year, was a default setting of hero worship around Fitzgerald and the fear of being ostracized if anyone dared to challenge what had become accepted as part of the program’s culture.
That’s not conjecture: We saw it unfold in 2014 after Colter went to the National Labor Relations Board office in Chicago with signed union cards from his Northwestern football teammates.
The highly-publicized effort ultimately failed for several reasons, including the national NLRB’s puzzling decision in retrospect not to move forward with certification – an act of deference to the NCAA and the status quo that would surely not stand in the current environment. As such, the secret-ballot vote that was taken among Northwestern players in April 2014 about whether to unionize was never counted. We’ll never know for sure whether it had majority support in the locker room.
But what we do know is that Fitzgerald was staunchly against it and put his thumb on the scale in every way possible, casting himself as the only protector his players needed.
“I just do not believe we need a third party between our players and our coaches, staff and administrators,” he said at a spring practice, according to a Sports Illustrated piece published two years later.
Irony of ironies: A third party is precisely what would have prevented the meltdown that cost Fitzgerald his job. Whether he knew exactly what was going on or not, the implied power he had been given – in fact, the implied power he fought to keep – became a burden that will now look like infamy.
As for Colter? When the unionization effort was all said and done, he – not Fitzgerald – was cast as the program’s divisive figure. In 2015, he told Deadspin he was shunned when he came back to campus for his Pro Day.
“I lost my alma mater,” Colter said. “I feel like I’m in exile. I still have my teammates and friends, but the coaches, administrators, none of them. That’s the hardest part, because I sacrificed so much. I loved my four years there.”
How much did that linger of the minds of Northwestern players who came after Colter? As more accounts of hazing and mistreatment come to the surface now, how afraid to speak up were those players in the moment knowing the history of what happened to those who didn’t fall in line?
In a locker room of 100-plus players, there will never be unanimous agreement about what constitutes hazing or where the line is between a ritualistic joke and horrific abuse.
But what’s very clear is that coaches aren’t equipped to be the sole arbiters of those decisions. After seeing Fitzgerald’s career implode, they shouldn’t want to be.
