Pat Fitzgerald, College Football's Luddite King, Has Done It Again
Last year, I wrote this piece on Pat Fitzgerald at his absolute nadir.
That Pat Fitzgerald was surly and he was lashing out. At that time, his team had been outscored 106-6 in the last 12 quarters of football they played, including a 20-0 loss to home Iowa that will go down as one of the absolute worst “football contests” ever devised. They followed up this medieval rock fight with a 34-3 comprehensive beat-em-down at the hands of Indiana.
That version of Pat Fitzgerald was worth writing about because all of his worst characteristics came out. He was visibly unhappy, his gesticulations on the sideline were all the more frustrating to endure as his team punted nine times a quarter, and his steadfast self-assuredness was an insult to a fanbase that was being asked to watch some of the lousiest theatre ever created cruelly masquerading as college football.
All of what I wrote there I still stand by. But if I am going to spend time getting off 360 windmill slam jams on a clearly depressed and despondent Pat Fitzgerald, I should spend at least a comparable amount of time describing what he’s like when everything is clicking.
This year’s Northwestern team is Pat Fitzgerald’s best team ever. You don’t need to add any qualifiers to that sentence. Yes, this season is incomprehensibly stupid. Yes, the Big Ten West is even further down than normal this year. Yes, Northwestern didn’t have to play any of the good teams from the other side of the conference. Yes, we were spared the seemingly inevitable non-conference loss. All things considered, Northwestern has one of the five best defenses in the country and maybe the best secondary in the nation. The offense probably still sucks, but with Peyton Ramsey and Ramaud Chiaokhao-Bowman developing legitimate chemistry and an offensive line made of bear-men hybrids, they seem to do just enough that their elite defense carries the day.
A winning Pat Fitzgerald, for those on the outside, is far more annoying than he is when he loses. The beginning of Fitzgerald’s pyrrhic war on Cellular Phones began when Northwestern was marching to the Big Ten Championship by inventing new and progressively more deranged ways to drag every game to overtime.
When Pat Fitzgerald is winning, he takes shots.
The latest beef between Northwestern and the inexecrable Joey Galloway is a classic entry into the Pat Fitzgerald heat check canon. Apparently, on some well-hidden ESPN talking head show where the assorted hosts spray spit on each other while debating whether Justin Fields is “low key nice with it,” “a bucket,” “a problem,” or “built different,” Galloway made a riff referring to Northwestern as a “bunch of Rece Davis’s” as an attempted slam on Northwestern’s supposed lack of athleticism. (Editor’s note: reading this controversy online gave me brain damage)
The comment is, above all else, evidence that football guys are not and never have been funny on purpose. Naturally, Pat Fitzgerald seized on the moment, using it as bulletin board material to turn his already angry defense into a group of near rabid, frothing at the mouth killers who put Wisconsin into a stranglehold for 60 minutes. He also reminded everyone that Northwestern Gets Media by making a Social Media Moment out of taking the time to dunk a rotten pumpkin on Joey Galloway’s head in the post-game interview.
This is Fitz at his swashbuckling best. A regular person might look at this and see Fitz as a pretty big weirdo. They aren’t wrong. But Happy Fitz, it must be admitted, rules, and kicks mondo ass.
And, to the rousing applause of Old College Football Newspaper Guys and to the pained chagrin of the Bolshevik Wing Of College Football Twitter, Happy Fitz ain’t goin away any time soon. Northwestern is as likely as any team in the country to make the leap from “consistently good” to “good enough often enough to be considered a genuinely top-flight program.”
(A quick aside on that Bolshevik wing. I will not defend Pat Fitzgerald’s actions during the unionization effort at Northwestern. He should have done more and definitely shouldn’t have tried to snuff out the union once it began to get real traction. That said, national reporters who parachute in to get off C- dunks on Fitzgerald are virtue signaling. When fans of Florida whose coach reaches climax by thinking about hosting 80,000 people-sized super spreader events paint Fitzgerald as a Big Bad of college football, it’s embarrassing. I don’t pretend to know what’s in Pat Fitzgerald’s heart, but he’s clearly well-intentioned if perhaps uninformed.)
In an earlier iteration of Northwestern, the Wildcats realized that the inefficiency they could exploit was that the top flight of teams didn’t yet realize that power runs and I-formations were dumb ways to try and score points. The Randy Walker/Kevin Wilson era of Northwestern decided that if they were going to win with a talent deficit, they had to be the first team to score 60 points.
Now, though, that paradigm has shifted. When you look at the best teams in college football, they are far more defined by their offense than their defense. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Alabama, who used to try and win games 14-10 but now are more comfortable winning 45-31. Ohio State, the best team in the country this year, just got tuned up for 500 passing yards by Mike Penix. The other top teams, whether that’s Notre Dame, BYU, Clemson, or Florida, are all offensive juggernauts with defenses that, while often still incredible, are not the engine that drives the team.
Northwestern represents the counter punch to these kinds of teams. Whether it’s through Mike Hankwitz’s hold over The Old Magic, a cult-like devotion to The Fundamentals, or from being Just That Damn Good on defense, Northwestern has found a formula to make every game look the exact same: a stuttering, difficult to watch prehistoric war of attrition where the winner is the team who wins on the margins of the margins. It is becoming difficult to argue that such a strategy can’t work. Northwestern is undefeated with the least skill position talent in the Big Ten.
The only thing that is stopping Northwestern from hopping into at least the Notre Dame tier of college football is recruiting. If Northwestern begins cheating/cheats more/cheats better/cheats differently/has cheating become irrelevant due to legal maneuvering, they can start to threaten the big boys. Assuming they keep up their current scouting efforts, they will have the juice to genuinely compete. You need bag men to be elite and you always have. Northwestern certainly has alums with enough money and financial know-how to create one of the most sophisticated bag men systems in the Midwest. If the alums with means ever learn about the sport of football and/or realize that cheating is Cool, Northwestern will have it made.
The fact that this is happening at Northwestern is due to the efforts of one person and it is not talked about nearly enough. Northwestern should never have turned into a decent college football program. If Pat Fitzgerald didn’t come through Evanston, either as a player or certainly as a coach, it wouldn’t have. It’s quite possibly the best rebuilding job in the sport’s history. And Fitzgerald has been a part of it for 25 years now.
So forgive him if he indulges himself in a monologue about how MKUltra was never ended and the CIA instead pivoted from hallucinogenic drugs to Pay To Win Cell Phone Games and to protect his team he makes each player break their cell phone with a hammer when they sign their letter of intent while a 20-year-old Daily Northwestern reporter struggles to see the connection between that story and her question of “what went through your mind when Graham Mertz threw his third interception the other day.”
He’s more than earned the right to dunk.
Dunk away.
