THE WHITES WHO RUN RACIST HAZING ARE RALLYING HARD FOR PAT FITZGERALD

As Northwestern’s dire season starts, those who support the fired football coach don’t care much about hazing that may have caused problems in the past — isn’t this Blacks vs. Whites in Evanston?

     Please understand. I’m a columnist who is loathed at Northwestern, a reporter who showed the school was minimizing the amounts given to a parent after her son died on a football field. I’m the one who sat inside a house in Pittsburgh and heard parents used a unique personal course — home study — in preventing their son from a marijuana-infested lifestyle that had him suspended from NU’s program.

     One night, after his NFL career failed, the same Hudhaifa Ismaeli worried when a janitor asked why he was spending overnights in the journalism building while working on nearby sewer pipes. The janitor called the police, wondering if the chemicals had rotted his brain again. More than 10 years later, at 31, Ismaeli eventually figured life out and received an education degree from the school.

     By then, in 2006, Pat Fitzgerald was beginning a career as NU’s head football coach. He made it, even big for a few years when he won games he shouldn’t have won at all. But Rashidi Wheeler — who had crumpled of bronchial asthma on a too-hot preseason test — did not make it past 22. Nor did Ismaeli make it to the big league, though Fitzgerald would call him “the best athlete I’ve ever been around.”

     It it because they’re Black? Aren’t the Blacks the ones accusing Fitzgerald and his program of the worst hazing? Now, Fitzgerald’s departure as coach continues to be criticized by his former teammates from that 1995 team, which went to the 1996 Rose Bowl. They want the immediate firing of university president Michael Schill and athletic director Derrick Gragg, saying their lack of due process has “left a welcome mat out for the weaponization of sexual harassment, hazing, and racism allegations” at the school.

     What?

     This goes fully against the grain of what the hazed students have said, many of whom are Black, that White hazers on teams engaged them to perform humiliating and dangerous actions. As Schill said, he terminated Fitzgerald “for his failure to know and prevent significant hazing in the football program,” saying, “The hazing we investigated was widespread and clearly not a secret within the program, providing Coach Fitzgerald with the opportunity to learn what was happening. Either way, the culture in Northwestern Football, while incredible in some ways, was broken in others.”

     Nothing seen since July 10 has changed my mind, when Schill fired Fitzgerald after 11 current or former student-athletes told attorney Maggie Hickey about the hazing allegations. Black players have shown up en masse at news conferences and spoken of the stories, which Schill said involved “forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature” ongoing in the football program for several years. Multiple lawsuits said older players engaged younger players by “dry-humping” them in the locker room, or freshmen were forced by underclassmen to rub against them by the shower. White players fired back nasty letters, including the 86 signed by ex-Northwestern athletes, including many of Fitzgerald’s former mates. They do not appear to realize the year is 2023, not 1995. Whatever happened then can’t happen now, as the players nullify the last 28 years as socioeconomic clutter. They say Schill and Gragg displayed “a clear failure of unbiased and principled leadership” and that both should be fired if they don’t “positively support our athletic programs with due process” while abandoning “foundational legal ethics.”

     What, they want hazing to be allowed? In about six weeks, why have we not heard a word that Northwestern’s hazing was wrong from these people? Players appear to think it’s right, with nothing coming from captain Rob Johnson, Keith Lozowski, Ryan Padgett, Tucker Morrison, Graham Gnos and others from the 1995 team. And nothing from other former Fitzgerald teammates who write openly to Chicago newspapers. This just makes the school look even worse, and at recent practices, interim head coach David Braun wasn’t concerned why some staff and players wore “Cats Against The World” t-shirts — with No. 51, Fitzgerald’s number at Northwestern — during the sessions.

     “All my energy and intention is to go in to make sure this staff and these players have a head coach that has their best interests at the forefront of his mind," Braun said. “I have not put any of that energy into considering the potential of censoring somebody's free speech.”

     Free speech? Braun is employed by a university whose athletic director, Gragg, already has said he is “extremely disappointed” about the t-shirts. “Neither I nor the University was aware that they owned or would wear these shirts today. The shirts are inappropriate, offensive and tone deaf,” Gragg said. “Let me be crystal clear: hazing has no place at Northwestern, and we are committed to do whatever is necessary to address hazing-related issues, including thoroughly investigating any incidents or allegations of hazing or any other misconduct.”

     How about getting rid of those staff and players? That might remind them who’s in charge of this troubled place.

     With the season starting a week from this Sunday against Rutgers, in faraway New Jersey, Northwestern can’t afford buffoonery. As it is, the program shouldn’t carry on in support of Fitzgerald when he already is serving as a parent volunteer at Loyola Academy, the high school where two of his sons attend. He has said nothing, other than hoisting his legal backing into veteran attorney Dan Webb. His former players do the talking, and their weekly bantering isn’t helping much.

     As I’ve said weeks ago in this column, Northwestern has little to do with the football majesty of the Big (Whatever). Starting next year, the programs of USC, Washington and Oregon — all ranked in the top 15 this season — will be joined by UCLA in the top 30. Whatever odd look in Evanston won’t happen as it did under Fitzgerald in the last decade. Even if they hire a fine, young coach, who? Winning three or four games a season is an instant karma-killer.

     I’ll repeat what I said: Aren’t Northwestern and Rutgers at the end of the road for this conference? If I’d said in June that Stanford and California would be gone from the soon-to-be-singed Pac-12, would you have believed it? Why wouldn’t this finality bring the end of the Wildcats and Scarlet Knights, as one continues to be a top-10 academic?

     For now, I’m startled and stunned. The claims get considerable credit on ESPN, which continues to place Michael Wilbon as a “Pardon The Interruption” co-host even as he appears on the university’s Board of Trustees. The site had NU listed above all Monday morning. I guarantee he doesn’t mention them on the show, whenever that may be.

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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.