The deep rot at Northwestern

The Wildcats' problems go well beyond football and it's almost certain to get messier before it gets resolved

As everything appeared from the outside, Northwestern’s athletic concerns were relatively tame entering the second week of July. 

The Wildcats’ women’s lacrosse team won its eighth national championship in late May. The men’s basketball program made just its second-ever NCAA Tournament in March and once there, it even won a game. The football team was reeling from a 1-11 season, its fewest wins since 1989, but it was just two years removed from a top-10 finish in the AP poll, had an $800 million facelift to their stadium to look forward to and, most of all, was led by its most successful coach ever, a man who happened to be arguably the greatest player in Wildcats history and the living, breathing embodiment of the program.

Whatever good feelings or semblance of control Northwestern had has crumbled in rapid and spectacular fashion.

Within a matter of days, school administration suspended Pat Fitzgerald, the football program’s all-time winningest coach and only two-time consensus all-American, for two weeks over a hazing scandal before quickly backtracking and firing him. Shortly after the hazing investigation came to light, Wildcats baseball coach Jim Foster faced allegations of misdeeds and misbehavior within his program. He, too, was dismissed.

Northwestern’s problems don’t end there. Earlier this week, attorneys representing a group of Wildcats football players said they have learned about hazing incidents within the softball, volleyball and cheerleading programs.

This turbulence has come as the university has dealt with a revolving door of leadership both at president and athletic director. The transgressions have occurred under the watch of more than a powerful individual or two, making it difficult to assign blame without taking a broader, more comprehensive look at the school as a whole.

What has long been regarded as a small, private and academic-focused outlier in a conference full of large state schools has shown that it’s not immune from the kind of scandal that has engulfed many of its bigger, more historically successful Big Ten counterparts over the past 15 years.

Let’s start with football

The saga surrounding Fitzgerald and the Wildcats’ football program has been a dominant force in the larger sports news cycle for the better part of two weeks, so I’ll be as succinct as I can here.

A university investigation dating back to Nov. 2022 found that a whistleblower’s allegations of hazing within the program “were largely supported by the evidence gathered during the investigation, including separate and consistent first-person accounts from current and former players”, a finding that ultimately led university president Michael Schill to suspend Fitzgerald for two weeks. 

As it turned out, there was more to the story. 

A day later, the Daily Northwestern, the school’s student newspaper, spoke to two former players, who provided more graphic details than the university-issued executive summary was willing to do. They spoke of “running,” a practice in which underclassmen were restrained in a dark locker room and dry-humped by masked upperclassmen, and what became known as “the car wash,” when players would stand naked at the entrance to the showers and force those trying to get in to rub up against their bodies.

Despite pushback from players who defended Fitzgerald in a letter signed by the “ENTIRE” Northwestern team – a claim that’s hard to believe for anyone who has tried to organize 10 college-aged students to do anything, let alone close to 100 – the 17th-year coach was fired after Schill found that 11 current or former players admitted hazing was still an ongoing practice within the team.

In separate news conferences this week, former Northwestern players suing Fitzgerald, Schill and other university leaders alleged that the football program has had “longstanding issues involving hazing and bullying that takes on a sexual and/or racist tone” and that coaches and administrators were negligent in trying to end that pattern of behavior. Additionally, a player alleged Fitzgerald himself “forced players of color to cut their hair and/or behavior differently to be more in line with the ‘Wildcat Way'” and “enabled a culture of racism and/or other microaggressions” on the team. The hazing and sexual violence had become so pervasive, players said, that coaches participated in some of the acts.

According to reporting Thursday from The Athletic, the seeds of the hazing span over several coaching tenures, going all the way back to the early 1990s when the team began spending a week of training camp in Kenosha, Wis. Over time, as the acts became ritualized and repeated year after year, the culture around the program became that much more worrisome and, based on Illinois state law, criminal.

“The classes after us took this all to a whole ’nother level and brought it to campus, which was like, these dudes are fucking crazy,” a former player from the 2010s told The Athletic.

One scandal leads to another

Hours before Fitzgerald was fired, troubling allegations surfaced against another prominent figure within the Northwestern athletic department – baseball coach Jim Foster.

A university investigation found that Foster “engaged in bullying and abusive behavior,” according to an internal HR document obtained by the Chicago Tribune. As ominous as it sounds, that phrase paints an incomplete picture of what went on within the program.

Foster allegedly discouraged players from seeing the team trainer or pressured injured players to speed up their recovery process by instilling them with the fear that they’d lose their spot on the team. Northwestern’s investigation corroborated a claim that he said a female staffer couldn’t be on the field because he didn’t want players “staring at her ass” and that she should instead be in the press box taking notes. That staffer distanced herself from the team because of Foster’s comment and behavior, according to Chicago radio station 670 The Score.

The Score has additional reporting on a slew of racially insensitive comments made by Foster.

Foster referred to an Asian player at a camp as “the Chinese kid” despite knowing he wasn’t Chinese, sources said. He once asked a fellow coach in a recruiting meeting if the coach would still advocate for recruiting a minority player if he was white. When the coach replied yes, Foster said he wouldn’t, sources said. Foster also blew off a mandatory diversity training program and was dismissive of the worthiness of doing it, sources said. A black player on the team didn’t feel comfortable enough to wear a chain or durag under his hat, a source said.

Even before these unsettling findings, signs of unrest were already present. In February, right before the start of the season, the team’s hitting coach and recruiting coordinator left. After the Wildcats’ first road trip, the pitching coach and director of operations also departed. After a woeful 10-40 season ended, 16 players entered the transfer portal, according to the Tribune, and “a half-dozen players individually met with Gragg or other athletic department leaders to voice their concerns over Foster.”

On July 13, Foster was fired.

One of the more remarkable aspects of Foster’s missteps is how quickly they occurred. Unlike Fitzgerald, who had been at the university for most of his adult life, Foster was hired by Northwestern in June 2022 after a successful six-year stint at Army. Before that, he was a head coach at Rhode Island from 2006-14. During that time, in 2011, 20-year-old Rams pitcher Joseph Ciancola collapsed while running during an outdoor strength and conditioning session with the team and died three days later at a hospital. His family later sued the university and came to a $1.45 million settlement.