OUR HERO IS DAVID BRAUN, WHO SHOULD LEAVE NORTHWESTERN RIGHT NOW

His stunning work amid a destructive hazing scandal has caught the attention of college programs, and given past downfalls in Evanston, he should ponder all offers after an 8-5 season and a bowl win

     The most important coach isn’t Nick Saban or another in the College Football Playoff, who have gathered to applaud David Braun. In the chronicles of scandal, never try overtaking this year’s torture at Northwestern. Did someone stumble in from North Dakota State to subdue institutional hazing warfare, the dismissal of a once-popular leader and somehow finish at a startling 8-5 with a victory over Utah in — where else? — the Las Vegas Bowl?

     “Surreal,” Braun said.

     And worth abandoning, at once.

     As a smart man of 38 and keen observer of his sport’s wrongdoing, he will hear offers from bigger programs. Why not exit this mess before it bites him? A hazing debacle remains in full legal chaos, aligned with racist allegations charging Pat Fitzgerald’s regime with a “degrading, dehumanizing, embarrassing” culture including naked rituals — rubbing crotches in teammates’ faces, dry-humping players in dark locker rooms and other inhumane acts from past centuries. The former coach wants $130 million and his sullied reputation to be restored. The university wisely hit up Braun, in an unforeseen revival, and made him the full-time coach in November.

     “Dave’s values are Northwestern’s values,” president Michael Schill said.

     Why would Braun, whose feats already are acclaimed, want more of the same stuff? As it is, he’s trying to keep peace with Fitzgerald, trading phone calls with someone who hired him to coordinate the defense. At one point, he tried to defend players and coaches honoring Fitzgerald with t-shirts, saying, “It’s not my business to censor anyone’s free speech.” With a remarkable ending comes coaches who now will leave the program — including offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian, who said the hazing charges were lies — and players who either won’t stick around or others who won’t go near Ryan Field. To lead a team through the abuse elevates Braun to more orderly and expansive plateaus and further shames Jim Harbaugh, who found more fault while Braun was blowing away fumes in Chicago.

     All you need to know from Saturday night is the commentary of ESPN’s Sean McDonough. He went beyond the ethics of a play-by-player and appeared to take Fitzgerald’s side instead of detailing harsh charges against him, forcing a partner, Greg McElroy, to acknowledge two sides when the school fired him. This is more dicey territory for the network, ignoring the racial element when ESPN ran an ode to Northwestern’s sports media program as a public-service advertisement. We’re supposed to care about Mike Greenberg, Christine Brennan and Mike Wilbon when the latter two were on the university’s board of trustees — along with Mark Walter, who pays more than $1 billion to Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto as controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers — when the egregious football acts took place? Something is wrong with journalism at NU when the journalists don’t act the part.

     There is newsgathering business here. “It’s huge. You know, we talked about how we had unfinished business,” Braun said on the Allegiant Stadium field, where a Super Bowl arrives soon. “This team wasn’t just satisfied getting to this point. So proud of what they had done up to this point, but we wanted to make sure we finished it off the right way.”

     He looked at his players, including quarterback Ben Bryant, who showed the best accuracy of any Chicago quarterback in hitting Bryce Kirtz for the game-winner in a 14-7 win. “Everything that this team has achieved is a reflection of the character of this group," Braun said. “The character of these players. I was asked yesterday, you know, how we did this, and it's the leadership. It's the leadership from our student-athletes. It's a staff faced with an incredible amount of adversity who find a way to pull together. A locker room that did the same, and that honor is simply a reflection of everyone who's part of this program. … Ben being a transfer, he embodies what it looks like to be a transfer to Northwestern. It’s about the right person. Not the right athlete, but the right person.”

     Said linebacker Bryce Gallagher: “He told us we’ve got a chance to write a really special story. There was the initial phase of shock, but that’s a credit to coach Braun for keeping this team together. With the transfer portal, if you lose a coach, there’s a window where guys could leave, but we didn’t have a whole lot of guys doing that.”

     In due time, Braun should realize good times lead to bad at Northwestern. The Wildcats enter the expanded Big Ten, with USC and UCLA coming, and it will be difficult to keep pace when players aren’t sure about hazing repercussions. This is a program where Rashidi Wheeler died on a practice field in an uncommon summer period, when the school’s attorneys unsuccessfully tried to minimize a lawsuit from his mother. The school, with Ivy League credentials, has endured point-shaving and drug scandals. Now there are hazing charges throughout the athletic program, where baseball coach Jim Foster also was fired.

     Before Schill came around to “Dave’s values,” he was the administrator who initially suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks without pay. Then the investigation went bonkers, with The Daily Northwestern crushing the story in July and blowing away layoff-destroyed Chicago newspapers. The student newspaper reported several upperclassmen would restrain younger players with Purge-like masks before “dry-humping” them. Fitzgerald? He would make a “Shrek” clap to identify who would be abused next. Suddenly, Schill fired him and barely identified his own original errors, saying, “Upon reflection, I may have erred in weighing the appropriate sanction for coach Fitzgerald. … 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.”

     Months later, the president couldn’t speak quickly enough. “We asked Dave to support our student-athletes this season, and he has done an exceptional job,” Schill said. “Under his guidance, Northwestern’s football team has exceeded expectations on the field and excelled in the classroom. The turnaround he has led, under very difficult circumstances, is nothing short of phenomenal. I have had the opportunity to sit down with coach Braun in recent months, meetings that re-affirmed what I saw on the field and heard from people close to the program. I couldn’t be happier that he will permanently lead our student-athletes.”

     It may blur David Braun to receive instant calls from other programs. He’s still locked into the enormity of the now. “Has it sunk in yet? Honestly, it hasn’t,” he said. But soon enough, he might remember the day when athletic director Derrick Gragg disowned the pro-Fitzgerald t-shirts.

     “Extremely disappointed,” he said. “Inappropriate, offensive and tone-deaf.”

     And soon enough, he’ll feel charmed when a certain program calls. Why waste time at Northwestern after all those years at Winona State, Culver-Stockton, UC-Davis, Northern Iowa and North Dakota State? This is a fine time to leave what he shockingly created. Because what he produced — like Gary Barnett leaving for Colorado, the death of Randy Walker, the demise of Pat Fitzgerald — should be left alone before its downfall.

     ‘‘I’m waking up each morning full of gratitude,” he said.

     There’s so much more to spread.

     ###

     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.