Saint Patrick and the Northwestern Wildcats
Northwestern University head football coach Pat Fitzgerald is intense. At least, that’s what his players say. His program is run his way and players are expected to deal with it. From the program’s academic goals (he expects his players to succeed as students at one of the premier academic universities in the United States) to his thoughts on social networking (don’t, ever), Fitzgerald asks that his players make the school proud. Of course, he also wants to build one of the best football programs in the nation, too.
Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago, does not seem like quite the right place for a powerhouse football program. The town is a mix of gentrified urban land, rows of tree-lined streets that never even needed to be gentrified, and other areas that cry out desperately for help. Amidst this melange, along the shores of Lake Michigan, lies Northwestern University. Geographically, the university is a microcosm of Chicago, lounging along a large portion of the lakeshore, reluctantly creeping west. Unfortunately, geographic similarity has not exactly translated into attention for the Evanston campus.
Asking the average Chicagoan about football will usually yield some sort of response about the Bears. Pressing, asking about college football, one finds that Notre Dame is a very popular university (especially among the city’s large Catholic population). The University of Illinois, too, garners a great deal of attention.
Northwestern, for a long time, was left behind, bereft of the currency of Division I legitimacy: media coverage. Rodger Sherman, a Northwestern student who also covers NU football for SB Nation‘s Sippin’ on Purple, says the program’s profile is on the way up, though.
“It’s growing,” Sherman said. “We have a beat writer for every [Chicago] newspaper now.”
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Fitzgerald inherited one of the Big Ten’s less-known programs after his predecessor, Randy Walker, died in 2006. He’s orchestrated a quick turnaround, though; Northwestern’s return to relevance has come with three consecutive trips to bowl games and some more consistency, which has caused media interest in the team to rise.
Sherman said prior coverage of Northwestern had a certain element of novelty to it, rather than coverage because the program mattered.
“The big story is they were really bad for so long and then out of nowhere they won the Big Ten and went to the Rose Bowl [in 1995],” Sherman said. “That’s not going to happen every year.”
Long periods of obscurity mixed with the occasional good year may have been the standard in the past, but steady growth and a keep-calm-and-carry-on mentality is the norm at Northwestern now. The program’s 2010 game against Illinois at Chicago’s Wrigley Field lent it the national spotlight for the novelty of the site, but, then, so did Northwestern’s victory against then-13th-ranked Iowa.
Of course, they don’t always win against big powers: No. 5 Wisconsin thoroughly dismantled the Wildcats in a 70-23 blowout at Camp Randall Stadium in NU’s final 2010 Big Ten game. Still, while the program careened into and out of the Top 25 in 2010, the Wildcats’ football program was at least able to attract Division I kingmaker ESPN to give some of its games prominent billing.
Of course, all of this has put a great deal of pressure on Fitzgerald to not only succeed on the field, but also to have his players stand up under the scrutiny they bear as the public face of the program to the football-consuming public. Consequently, Sherman said Fitzgerald has developed something of a reputation as a control freak.
“He runs a tight ship – almost comically tight.”
This attitude doesn’t seem to turn away high-quality recruits, though.
Sherman said recruits know what they’re getting into, and Fitzgerald’s strategy may actually have some benefits.
“I get the sense that Pat Fitzgerald knows that if Northwestern is going to win, they’re going to have to market themselves as a completely clean institution,” he said. “We can’t compete with Ohio State, but Fitzgerald has a chance to make Northwestern the premier location for these smart, good football players. He’s really selling this strict mentality.”
To gain the respect of the notoriously fickle Chicago sports media, Fitzgerald must not only coach the team to victories, but also must avoid any hint of impropriety while doing so. These constraints would seem to handcuff him, but his perseverance thus far proves that cynics should at least consider his program’s success.
Sherman acknowledged the similarities between Fitzgerald’s image of Northwestern and Stanford’s recent success. Stanford vies for national attention with the likes of USC, perhaps college football’s flashiest program. It is a story tailor-made for the sports media: plucky, intelligent students upstaging the pre-pros at the Iowas, Michigans and USCs of the world. So too does Northwestern offer an easy story for national writers: the little, smart program that could. It is incredibly patronizing, but Fitzgerald and the Wildcats don’t mind. In fact, any positive attention (no matter how patronizing it may be) for a program that once struggled for relevance in its home market is beneficial.
Growing up in Northwestern’s shadow on Chicago’s North Shore, one notices things like the fact that Northwestern’s fans are, by and large, either alumni or current students. A strong town-gown divide in Evanston has exacerbated local ambivalence to NU football, but excitement among the students and even in the Chicago area is slowly growing.
Sherman said he was “caught off guard when the student section was nearly full” on a recent weekend before Northwestern began classes.
What is particularly refreshing and unique about Northwestern, even as their national popularity grows, is that Fitzgerald’s famous strictness hasn’t relented. Only once during his tenure has a player run into trouble with the law. That player, Jeff Radek, possessed a BB gun in his dorm room contrary to a local ordinance prohibiting BB guns. Fitzgerald dismissed him from the team.
This kind of incident, Fitzgerald’s no-nonsense making-football-players-into-men mentality, is what makes the program both respected and unique. It is easy to extol the virtues of a man who is so strict but who also cares deeply about his players and his program – and Northwestern’s program is Fitzgerald’s, make no mistake. Where many coaches seem to resign themselves to simply dealing with inevitable transgressions by players, Fitzgerald’s attempts to nip transgressions in the bud are refreshing.
It’s difficult to be flashy in Evanston. For Fitzgerald, that is an advantage. There is no Northwestern swagger to tackle, no star players taking payments in the way that caused USC’s spectacular fall from grace. Northwestern is the modestly successful yin to USC’s yang. Nonetheless, the humble types rarely get attention.
It’s easy to overlook Northwestern for the storied tradition of Notre Dame. It’s easy to forget that Fitzgerald’s program mirrors the idealized spirit of Chicago in its unassuming, intelligent, no-nonsense way. However, if Fitzgerald continues to successfully grow his program, it isn’t difficult to see Northwestern football seizing the Chicago spotlight sometime soon.
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