NORTHWESTERN SHOULD QUIT THE BIG TEN BEFORE IT IS TOLD TO LEAVE
The football hazing scandal has escalated into an ugly legal double-whammy with racial and sexual-abuse ramifications — and the school should bow out of a power conference where NU likely isn't wanted
Chicago is a blathering blowhard, 228 square miles of barrel-chested bluster. It’s a town too polarized — racially, politically, intellectually, meteorologically — to be taken seriously as anything but the capital of flyover country. Sometimes, an outrageous event rises from the plains and exposes its self-appointed power elite to a disgusted world.
And it should surprise no one who understands the low spark of the city’s high-heeled boys, to borrow from a song, that the current storm involves a locker room of naked, sexually abused football players at Northwestern University. If sports always has been the local obsession, a wind-chilled school on Lake Michigan has been a traditional source of pompous, overcooked academic pride. A robust roll call of local heavy-hitters comprises the board of trustees — finance people, legal people, business people, sports people, media people, people whose hair hasn’t moved in decades — and as someone who wrote a much-read column in Chicago for 17-plus years, my sense is that most members serve only as an ego trip that adds a frilly line to a career bio.
Have they ever paid attention to what’s happening on campus?
They most certainly are now. Because the university’s leadership has been dragged kicking and screaming into a legal double-whammy that dropped an H-bomb — H as in hazing — onto a campus that never has been united in the conflicted mission of big-time college sports. If you’ve wondered amid the recent turbulence, as I have, how the scandal impacts Northwestern’s future aspirations in an expanded, locked-and-loaded Big Ten Conference, it’s also fair to ask if the trustees should harbor the same grave doubts. What exactly is the plan moving forward? This would be a very good time to decide. Is NU a baby Ivy Leaguer that should de-emphasize sports in the name of higher academia? Or is NU still committed to competing for College Football Playoff berths in what is now a Power Three paradigm atop the sport? You can’t have it both ways amid the revolution of player compensation — via names, images and likenesses — and the too-convenient transfer portal. Stanford knows, ducking away from NIL and the portal. Duke is focusing on its basketball pedigree in the post-Krzyzewski era. They have been Northwestern’s partners in studies-and-sports undertakings.
Shouldn’t the trustees take the smart hints and downsize, beginning with an $800-million stadium rebuild that should be halted immediately? Or abandon the Big Ten altogether for a smaller sandbox, letting Ohio State, Michigan and USC play in massive stadiums with 20 million watching? I say it’s time to Think Shrinkage, once the lawyers are freed from their current duties, which could last months if not longer. Or else the problems in Evanston, grounded in former coach Pat Fitzgerald’s alarming lack of oversight, are just beginning in college football’s anything-goes, make-up-the-rules, out-of-bounds culture.
The latest scandal — after a grimy past including point-shaving by players betting on their own games, and, later, a player who dropped dead during an unauthorized summer practice — should lead to hard questions about whether Northwestern fits in a monstrous Big Ten that will add USC and UCLA next year and possibly Notre Dame down the road. The same questions should be asked by the three TV networks — Fox, CBS and NBC — that cut a seven-year media rights agreement paying more than $7 billion to the conference. No doubt the NU leaders want their shared chunk of the annual fortunes.
But do the networks want THEM? Big Media needs competitive teams, not doormats, as the broadcast industry encounters its own existential disruptions. That goes hand in hand with the indignity of a Northwestern cultural crash, the last distraction needed in a conference waged in an arms race with the SEC for national supremacy. The Big Ten, based in the Chicago area, might not desire any part of a tarnished, mid-sized private institution dealing with two explosive, hazing-centered lawsuits — eight former players have retained the formidable civil rights attorney, Ben Crump, while another lawsuit Tuesday listed Fitzgerald, university president Michael Schill, athletic director Derrick Gragg and the board of trustees as defendants. The drama promises only to turn uglier, reaching back to the administration of former president Morton Schapiro, with Crump warning, “Whether the coaches at Northwestern approved or participated in the harassment of these players or not, they are responsible for allowing and enabling a toxic, disgusting and damaging culture in their programs. Sadly, our research suggests this kind of abuse of student athletes may be far more common on college campuses than we know, because there is tremendous pressure to keep quiet. It's time for a reckoning to protect young athletes.”
Yes, the man said “campuses” — plural. The fallout will extend beyond Cook County, which makes Evanston the new Ground Zero for everything wrong with college sports. The attorney for the unnamed player filing the latest lawsuit, Parker Stinar, said, “It seems like the athletic department as a whole was culturally tainted in a way that permitted hazing, sexual harassment, (and) racial discrimination.” It’s not a way to launch the bigger, supposedly better Big Ten, with the West Coast as a new privy party to big lawyers painting Northwestern as racist, cruel and a little sick. Forget about recruiting, with the portal now a hopeless one-way rabbit hole. Forget about Fitzgerald’s ultimate successor convincing parents in living rooms that NU is a safe, sane and diverse place. Who is in his right mind would even want the coaching gig, which becomes an instant death sentence for an incoming coach who wins once or twice a year and is clobbered often?
Fox doesn’t want USC 72, NU 6. The Big Ten and college football don’t want Ohio State 59, NU 3. But that’s the new purple-pummeled reality. Do Schill and the trustees want that weekly reality slap in the scandal aftermath? Hell, do the trustees want Schill or Gragg? I don’t see how either survives.
The trustees will try to stay silent, but their reputations are at stake simply by their appearances on the lawsuit-hammered board. In particular, all eyes are on the most powerful and generous of the “life” trustees, Patrick G. Ryan, whose family name is on the stadium and numerous buildings on campus. But also in the muck is Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz, whose NHL team tried to cover up a sexual assault scandal before finally settling a lawsuit with the 2010 victim. It’s always a problem when Jerry Reinsdorf, who owns two Chicago sports teams, is stuck in another quagmire amid his recent history of sports-related sleaze.
When hit by lawsuits, there’s always the chance that depositions will contain more dirt about those men and other trustees. Shouldn’t they have known about alleged systematic football hazing over multiple years? And if not, didn’t they hire the day-to-day presidents and officials who surely should have known? Legal action also may stretch to the Atlantic Coast Conference and commissioner Jim Phillips, who served as Northwestern’s athletic director until early 2021. For now, the university’s statements aren’t resonating much, including a Tuesday afternoon announcement that the athletic department is launching two external reviews of the football and baseball programs after the firings of Fitzgerald and baseball coach Jim Foster, the latter accused by players of bullying. Schill said the reviews will be made public. Don’t expect anything close to full disclosure, which will be demanded as ex-players divulge details. Lloyd Yates told the Chicago Tribune: “We would get ambushed by you know, 10 different guys, and then they would come hold you down. They would put you in the doggy-style position and proceed to dry-hump you. Guys would take turns, and it’s just a very degrading, dehumanizing, embarrassing act.” Dry-humping, doggy-style, is supposed to build character and bond young males? On Planet Fitz, apparently so.
“I will continue to do whatever is necessary to address this situation and ensure that our athletic program remains one you can be proud of and one that is fully aligned with and reflects our values," Schill said in his latest letter to NU faculty and staff. "Equally important, I give you my commitment that we will redouble our efforts to safeguard the welfare of each and every student-athlete at Northwestern. … In the wake of this unfortunate situation, my job is to work closely with you to not just restore trust in the athletic program, but to make it better and more closely integrated with our academic mission.”
Meanwhile, I continue to monitor the comments — or lack thereof — of two Northwestern alums in the media. ESPN’s Michael Wilbon should not be serving on the board of trustees, as I wrote last week, and after a day off, he returned to his “Pardon The Interruption” co-hosting post Tuesday. Despite a lawsuit that led ESPN’s online news digest much of the day, the show did not address the story or any NU topic. Do I have this straight? A program that normally discusses the day’s news avoided Northwestern because … Wilbon was on the show? This is ESPN’s way of addressing a journalistic conflict of interest — by ignoring the story altogether? Which looked especially lame when “PTI” was wrapping up, with short snippets about comparatively meaningless subjects, as the ESPN crawl teased the “latest Northwestern developments.” Seconds later, that story led “SportsCenter.”
God help the media business.
As I also pointed out last week, Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times — a former NU football player — was a workplace bully on several occasions over a number of years. How about the time he chirped “Cancer!” in the Soldier Field press box as I sat two seats away, dealing with the disease in my family? It was part of a toxic Sun-Times culture that forced me to play peacemaker much too often — Telander wanted to fight one night in an out-of-town arena, among his other wild debacles, and football reporter Mike Mulligan (now a local talk host) routinely engaged in wicked one-sided beefs with colleagues Brad Biggs, Greg Couch and Mark Potash. How about the day I had to fetch the Sun-Times security director, Mike Weaver, to stop a news columnist from bothering me and my producer before tapings of “Around The Horn” — the daily ESPN show that helped keep the paper nationally relevant for eight years? In a normal workplace, these people would have been suspended or fired on the spot. The top editors didn’t care, because Michael Cooke was a bully himself, like his predecessor, Nigel Wade, who went away after he forearm-shivered me in his office. I could go on. The Sun-Times is hopeless, its daily print circulation free-falling from 330,000-plus in our glory days to 48,000 today.
Point being, how did Telander conclude his once-weekly column on Monday night? He quoted an attorney, who happened to be his Northwestern teammate, about his legal experiences involving hazing: “It’s hard to put ‘one size fits all’ in these resolutions. We all did crazy stuff in college.’’
To which Telander added, “We likely did.”
Would the workplace harasser like to elaborate?
He is 74. Wilbon is 64. If they don’t get it by now, whether saying the wrong things or avoiding the topic entirely, they never will. Nor will their employers, who continue to cover the Northwestern story while those employees indict themselves. I wrote the current Sun-Times executive editor, Jennifer Kho, and told her she’s playing with hypocritical column fire when past harassment is ignored in the context of current hazing. She had no idea what she was getting into when entering that hellhole.
Consider it another reason why the school must decide what it wants to be, here at the quarter-pole of the 21st century. Does NU want to be an upstanding, civilized, top-10 American university? Or does it want idiots doing “crazy stuff” in the football locker room that shames and scandalizes a campus?
Northwestern doesn’t need the Big Ten.
The Big Ten needs Northwestern even less.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.