(Note: The articles upon which this post is based contain mentions of hazing, sexual assault and suicidal ideation).
Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald could be looking at a sterner penalty than the two-week suspension originally assessed regarding the hazing scandal around his team.
The school president said Saturday that he basically “may have erred” in issuing the light punishment given details of the hazing revealed in a school newspaper expose.
University president Michael Schill, in a letter sent late Saturday to the Northwestern community, wrote that he “may have erred in weighing the appropriate sanction” for Fitzgerald, who began serving a two-week unpaid suspension Friday. Fitzgerald’s suspension was among the measures Northwestern announced after concluding the six-month investigation it commissioned into hazing allegations made by an anonymous whistleblower.
Schill will take the issue to the school’s board of trustees.
“In determining an appropriate penalty for the head coach, I focused too much on what the report concluded he didn’t know and not enough on what he should have known,” Schill wrote. “As the head coach of one of our athletics programs, coach Fitzgerald is not only responsible for what happens within the program but also must take great care to uphold our institutional commitment to the student experience. … Clearly, he failed to uphold that commitment, and I failed to sufficiently consider that failure in levying a sanction.”
The Daily Northwestern broke the story of how players were subject to hazing, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation.
CW: This story contains mention of hazing, sexual assault and suicidal ideation.
BREAKING: A former Northwestern football player is alleging that some of the hazing conduct that took place on the team involved coerced sexual acts. 🧵https://t.co/idm3mRYMdV
— The Daily Northwestern (@thedailynu) July 8, 2023
Touchdown Wire’s Doug Farrar called for the school to remove Fitzgerald as its head coach.
New on @TheNFLWire: A decade ago, Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald was a vocal opponent of player unions at the college level, insisting that his protocols for player well-being eliminated the need for advocacy oversight.
Yeah… about that. https://t.co/DAEo9TBRAO
— Doug Farrar ✍ (@NFL_DougFarrar) July 8, 2023
The Chicago Sun-Times went back to 2014 in its article on the issue and Fitzgerald’s words may come back to cost him.
In a 2014 video for the Positive Coaching Alliance shot on a Northwestern practice field, Wildcats football coach Pat Fitzgerald discussed hazing in college athletics. Specifically, he said there was ‘‘zero tolerance’’ for it at the school where he starred as a player in the mid-1990s and has coached since 2001, including the last 17 seasons as head coach.
‘‘There’s no reason to ever have it,’’ he said. “I know there’s 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 as society has evolved and we really thought deep about how we want to welcome our new family members into our organizations, hazing should have nothing to do with it.’’