Hickey: With second-string leaders at the helm, Northwestern risks return to Dark Ages

To understand the direction Northwestern football is likely heading, it’s imperative to understand the depths from where where the Wildcats came.

Save for its fellow purple-clad Wildcats at Kansas State, no program in the post-integration era of college football has experienced a greater turnaround than Northwestern.

Northwestern’s 1995 Rose Bowl season remains the most shocking bolt out of the blue in modern college football history. The Cats went from not finishing with a winning record in 24 years to winning the Big Ten. A college program that was toast in Chicago rapidly turned into the toast of Chicago.

There will never be anything like it again. Perhaps the only thing capable of producing an equivalent shock would be Rutgers winning the Big Ten this year. But that wouldn’t even exceed the surprise of Northwestern in ’95.

That’s in part because it’s nearly impossible to piece together such a long-lasting string of incompetence to rise from. Kansas, Indiana, Vanderbilt — even the weaklings of the college football world have had brief flashes of success when you pull out the long-view lens.

But given how Northwestern’s administrators have handled the fallout in the week since the program’s hazing accusations went public, it’s fair to wonder if the Wildcats are bound for a return to the Dark Ages. A time when winning a single Big Ten game was worthy of sending Dyche Stadium’s goal posts for a dip into Lake Michigan.

Northwestern has rarely known success without Pat Fitzgerald involved. And now it faces the prospect of replacing him with a duo that appears incapable of changing a light bulb without disaster ensuing.

1995: The ultimate turning point

Other Big Ten programs have individual seasons that are revered — Indiana in 1967, Illinois in 2007 — but rarely do they result in everything changing.

Everything really did change for Northwestern starting in 1995. It is a clear demarcation point.

Northwestern’s 26 seasons pre-1995

• Winning records: 2
• Seasons with an appearance in AP poll: 2
• Seasons to finish ranked: 0
• Big Ten record: 47-161-2 (.229 winning percentage)

An NCAA-record 37-game losing streak that endured from 1978-82 is the trademark feat of this era. In 1982, Dennis Green was named Big Ten coach of the year for finishing 3-8. And none of the losses were by less than 10 points.

That’s just how massive an accomplishment it was to upgrade from being the worst team in the country to merely bad. No other coach in the 50-year history of the award has won it with a losing record.

Northwestern’s 26 seasons post-1995

• Winning records: 14
• Seasons with an appearance in AP poll: 12
• Seasons to finish ranked: 6
• Big Ten record: 99-122 (.448)

Obviously that Big Ten record is not conventionally great, but it beats the heck out of what preceded it. And when you remove the precipitous decline of the past 2 years — a combined 2-16 in the B1G — Northwestern went 97-106 (.478) in league play in the first 24 seasons post-’95.

From 2000-2020, Northwestern split the middle, ranking 7th in the B1G with a .500 overall record in conference play. That’s quite an accomplishment given the program’s past.

A new crossroads

This is not the first time Northwestern has found itself at a crossroads.

When coach Randy Walker died from a heart attack in June 2006, the tragedy threatened to send the program astray. But the Cats had the perfect man in place to handle the unfortunate task that fell to him — Fitzgerald, an all-American linebacker for Northwestern in 1995 and ’96.

Fitz, a firsthand witness to what the program was and what it became, was a godsend.

It helped that Northwestern had an athletic director in Mark Murphy who recognized such. Just a year after appointing Fitzgerald as head coach, Murphy was hired in the role he still holds today — president and CEO of the Green Bay Packers.

Murphy knows what he’s doing, and Northwestern benefited from his vision for better than a decade.

Current AD Derrick Gragg and university president Michael Schill, on the other hand, look incapable of seeing more than 4 inches in front of their faces — probably because it’s unclear where they have actually lodged their heads.

Schill suspended Fitzgerald for 2 weeks on a Friday afternoon and fired him just 2 days later. Schill was aware of everything reported about the hazing allegations. The only thing that changed was a couple players going public to the Northwestern student newspaper.

An absolute failure of leadership.

But he may merely be the Tweedledee to Gragg’s Tweedledum.

Gragg, like Schill, has cowardly avoided holding a press conference to discuss the firing of the most beloved figure in program history. In the meantime, he’s also fired the only major hire of his 2-year tenure, baseball coach Jim Foster.

Foster lasted all of 1 season, finishing 10-40 before getting canned for widespread allegations of player mistreatment. And it’s not as if the evidence came in from out of left field.

One of Foster’s players at Rhode Island died following a team workout in 2011. The school settled with the player’s family for $1.45 million.

It’s impossible to imagine former Maryland coach DJ Durkin getting another head coaching job after a player died of heat stroke on his watch. There are lines that don’t get crossed these days.

Yet somehow Foster’s resume popped out at Gragg.

And now this is the guy in charge of hiring Fitzgerald’s replacement?

Yikes is an understatement.

Second-string leadership

Northwestern should not be in this position.

Schill was not the school’s first choice as president — and as we are seeing, for good reason. That title was supposed to be held by Rebecca Blank.

Blank, the chancellor at Wisconsin’s flagship campus in Madison, was appointed as Northwestern’s president in July 2022. Unfortunately, cancer intervened. She had to step away from her elected position to fight that battle and died in February.

That left the school turning to Schill as backup president. A former University of Chicago Law School dean and 7-year University of Oregon president would seem up to the task, but thus far he’s faltered under fire.

Gragg is also a second-string hire.

When Jim Phillips was hired as commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2021, lieutenant Mike Polisky was promoted to the top spot.

Polisky’s tenure lasted all of 10 days. His promotion to AD created a near-revolt among some female students and faculty members.

Northwestern cheerleaders previously went to Polisky with allegations of racist behavior by their coach and sexual harassment by fans at various alumni events. The cheerleaders felt he did not take their complaints seriously enough to apprise Phillips of the issue.

Though Polisky was cleared of any Title IX violations in his handling of the complaints, the backlash to his promotion made his tenure untenable.

That left Northwestern turning to Gragg, whose prior experience as an AD at Eastern Michigan and Tulsa made the Big Ten a mighty big leap.

To be fair, it’s not as if that hasn’t worked before. Murphy was hired from Colgate before a successful tenure in Evanston. But the fact Gragg’s first major crisis already begat a second crisis is not an encouraging sign.

To make things even more complicated, Northwestern is already approaching a major crossroads.

With higher academic standards than its peers, it’s far tougher for Northwestern to add talent via the transfer portal than most. It does not feel coincidental that the on-field struggles of the past 2 years have gone hand-in-hand with the portal turning into a free-for-all.

And then there’s the timing with the planned renovation of Ryan Field.

Construction on the $800 million project is supposed to begin after this season. Faculty members are now calling on that project to be delayed. And the namesake Ryan family, which has donated nearly a half-billion dollars to the program already, has long been seen as attached to the hip with Fitzgerald. (Or vice versa, perhaps.)

The Ryans have yet to make a public statement. But with Fitzgerald preparing a breach of contract lawsuit against Northwestern, it’s fair to speculate which side of the fence they reside on. (It’s probably Fitz’s.)

What happens next?

The Ryan Field renovation issue could get thorny. But if worse comes to worse, there is a lakefront stadium a few miles down the road that may becoming available on fall weekends around 2030. It would even allow the title of “Chicago’s Big Ten team” to be geographically accurate.

Finding a replacement for Fitzgerald shouldn’t be as tricky, even though it won’t be easy. Shaking well-manicured hands will be a huge part of this role. But there are coaches capable of preventing Northwestern from falling back into the abyss of the 1970s and ’80s.

Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson should be the first-through-10th calls. Tulane’s Willie Fritz, another winner at a prestigious university in an urban setting, is also worthy of pursuit. Maybe former Stanford coach David Shaw, so long as he figures out how to refresh his offensive approach in his upcoming season away from the game.

There are undoubtedly others, too.

But do you trust Gragg and Schill to reel them in?

The next 2 decades of Northwestern football could hinge on their ability to do so.

Best of luck, Wildcats. You’ll be needing it.