WHAT WE NEED FROM FITZGERALD AND HUGGINS: TRUTHFUL NEWS CONFERENCES

The public would appreciate complete transparency from both deposed coaches, but as they hide behind attorneys and plot legal showdowns, we’re inclined to think they aren’t accepting bitter reality

     I speak for 335 million Americans and 8.1 billion Earthly inhabitants, excluding those connected to government or crypto, in pleading for absolute veracity in life. All we want is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth — the oath of authenticity if it isn’t too much to ask. That especially goes for any public figure dangled into the hot coals of scandal, such as Pat Fitzgerald, the former football coach at Northwestern.

     Through written statements and legal representation, he continues to insist that he wasn’t aware of hazing rituals in his program. His stance not only strains credulity, it’s farcical — if this in any way could be a laughing matter. Unless he quiet-quit his gig and cloned himself for all those practices, all those preseason camps, all those games, all those weeks and months and years with his team, how would he not know groups of upperclassmen were dry-humping younger players in a darkened locker room when they weren’t forcing freshmen to rub up against their naked bodies by the showers? He couldn’t have been oblivious when it happened often enough that 11 current and former players backed up the allegations of a victim — the one who finally tired of the abuse and e-mailed the university’s senior associate athletic director for compliance last Nov. 30, writing “NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL HAZING” in the heading.

     If Fitzgerald knew of the hazing, he deserved to be fired this week for gross and perverted negligence. If he didn’t know, he deserved to be fired for being a blind-and-deaf social fool in what are supposed to be more enlightened times. Such is the near-consensus among those in media, myself included, who have covered every imaginable disgrace in college sports. And I keep coming back to a warped, money-brainwashed culture that thinks wrongs are rights until the utter sickness of it all — in this case, sexually hostile initiation acts — is revealed to the outside from someone on the inside.

     Yet, unless he doesn’t comprehend the actual definition of hazing, Fitzgerald says he never saw or knew about these horrors at any point in his 17 seasons atop the program. “I had no knowledge whatsoever of any form of hazing within the Northwestern Football Program,” he wrote Monday night after he was dismissed by school president Michael Schill.

     What I would suggest, then, is that Fitzgerald stop hiding behind his high-powered Chicago attorney and stop focusing on legal threats involving the $42 million remaining on his 10-year contract. No one wants to hear him through his hired mouthpiece, Dan Webb, the Winston & Strawn heavyweight and former U.S. attorney. No, we want to hear from HIM, period. He must call a news conference and invite reporters from all points — do it at the United Center, if necessary — with the understanding he’ll stand there and answer every last question about the entire debacle. He owes it to himself and his family. He owes it to the players he recruited and their parents. He owes it to his Northwestern teammates back in the day. He owes it to the city where he grew up and led the Wildcats to a long-ago Rose Bowl, where he coached the academic giant on the lakefront and created periodic magic amid the Ohio States and Michigans and Penn States of Big Ten life. And, yes, he owes it to the place that gave him those opportunities.

     Just tell us what happened, Pat.

     The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

     But until we see the whites of his eyes and hear the candor in his voice, only his loved ones and friends — and he has many of both — are going to believe him. I understand, more than you know, how attorneys tell clients to shut up at the beginnings of a court standoff. Trust me: Fitzgerald has plenty to gain by talking and only will lose if he vanishes from view. Oh, he might squeeze more money out of his settlement by letting Webb cajole and deal, but at this juncture, from what I remember while columnizing about him in Chicago, reputation means much more to the man than a few more million bucks.

     So, attempt to reclaim that rep. Embrace transparency. And stop fixating on Schill’s abrupt change of heart, his decision to fire Fitzgerald only three days after suspending him for two weeks without pay. Certainly, the original cushy punishment was a humiliating judgment lapse that will haunt the president the rest of his administrative career — focusing too much on what Fitzgerald “didn’t know and not enough on what he should have known.” But the university, not a deposed coach, still determines who leads the program even if the boss was shamed by a flip-flop that started as a Friday news dump and cover-up ruse. Northwestern will not be reinstating the coach it dismissed when Schill belatedly concludes: “The head coach is ultimately responsible for the culture of his team. 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 … was broken.”

     Sure, Fitzgerald can ignore my good advice and sue for breach of contract, letting Webb confront a powerhouse lineup of school trustees known for getting their way. He can have Webb do his dirty work and say the university violated an oral agreement last week, when Fitzgerald said he was told he wouldn’t face penalties beyond the two-week ban. He can let Webb tell ESPN, “I cannot understand how you could terminate someone for cause when they admit that their own lawyer does not have any evidence that my client ever knew anything at all, about any of the alleged hazing behavior. If I present that to a jury someday, a jury is going have a hard time believing that you can terminate someone for cause when they didn't know anything about (the incidents).”

     And he can turn the conflict into made-for-TV semantics, with Webb saying, “Under Illinois law, an oral agreement is a contract. They had all the facts available to them. They thought the proper punishment was a two-week suspension without pay. That was their judgment. They made the decision. We agreed to go along with it, and we issued a statement to support them. So they've now breached an oral agreement and damaged (Fitzgerald’s) reputation enormously. And for no reason. This entire series of events by Northwestern, I cannot understand it.”

     All of it makes for more headlines and conversation. And Fitzgerald should know this: The public wants no part of a protracted standoff. Lawyers don’t interest us. The truth does, even if honesty costs Fitzgerald money. He’s the rah-rah family man who bleeds purple and ended every media session with a “Go Cats” signoff. To some, it remains unconscionable and irretrievably egregious that he would be privy to naked hazing. Until he addresses it with a microphone, in front of interrogators, we’ll believe the hazing stories are true.

     The same demand for out-front transparency is made of Bob Huggins, the former West Virginia basketball coach who, rather preposterously, is demanding to be reinstated. Never mind a double-whammy of fireable wrongdoing: (1) using anti-gay and anti-Catholic slurs in a radio interview; and (2) weeks later, a drunk-driving episode in which he slurred and mumbled and didn’t know he was in Pittsburgh or how he got there, with empty beer cans in his vehicle providing hints. On June 17, a day after his DUI arrest, the university received his resignation notice — “effective immediately.” In a statement, he said, “While I have always tried to represent our university with honor, I have let all of you — and myself — down.”

     That was that, right? Almost a month later, Huggins has lost all remorse and wants his job back. Absurdly, he says his wife forged his words in the notice. “I did not draft or review WVU's statement," he wrote Monday, the day Fitzgerald was fired. “This false statement was sent under my name, but no signature is included. ... I am employed by WVU pursuant to an Employment Agreement. I never submitted the notice required under the Employment Agreement to voluntarily resign.”

     He says he checked into a “world-class rehabilitation center” for his alcohol issues, longstanding and well-known in the college hoops community. “It is clear that WVU did not handle the situation appropriately,” Huggins wrote. “More importantly, the basketball program is in need and I have a strong desire to conclude my career as the head basketball coach for the program that I love. I hope to meet with WVU in the near future to resolve this situation.”

     The school is firing back with a trademark musket, telling all that Huggins had his wife send the resignation document because he doesn’t use e-mail. And that his attorney that day was plagued by a computer breakdown. Consider it the 21st century version of a dog eating one’s homework. But if the document doesn’t include Huggins’ signature, as he claims, might he weasel out of the resignation and keep his job? In that state, where he’s beloved as a native son whose teams won in March and created an identity beyond John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” he thinks anything is possible.

     His hubris is staggering. His disregard for his serious mistakes is beyond arrogant. Like Fitzgerald, he refuses to accept his fate. Surely, Huggins would have been fired had he not resigned. This situation, too, is about money. He is forcing the school to fire him, which would lead to a bigger severance package.

     Once, it was honorable to fess up to one’s sins. Now, the trick in Big Sports is to deny and conquer bureaucracy. It’s a good guess that neither will succeed in his ultimate legal goal. But the fact they’re defiant enough to try … it’s all you need to know about coaches empowered by decades of popularity. Bob Huggins thinks he’s big enough in West Virginia, from Morgantown to Shady Spring, to overthrow his resignation and carry on. Pat Fitzgerald and his lawyer think they can maintain he never knew about hazing, while being fired for cause, though numerous witnesses say he did know.

     The dignified exit strategy is to move on.

     For now, the honest exercise is to speak up.

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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.