Sheriff Coffee
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and releases a statement. The rush to judgement by NW set their football program back ten years, IMHO.
Pat Fitzgerald settles with northwestern
- Thread starter Sheriff Coffee
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NittanyLion99
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NW should have brought in Louie Freeh to find out who knew what, and when.
Sheriff Coffee
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His statement says he knew nothing. I've never seen any real allegoation that he was told by anyone. My point is, other than the tried and true "he had to know..." nobody is claiming that he did.
I wonder if he wants to get back into coaching. He's been a lifelong Chicagoland resident and I wonder if he'd move to the SEC or West Coast to coach again.
Hard to believe that in this day and age he knew about it and allowed it to continue. I don’t think he is dumb. I am surprised he is not someone’s DC by now. He’s a good coach.
He had to settle this first. If he is interested, he will fill a job this fall or by January.
I can see that but if he didn't know, were there signs and he ignored them? Or he simply did not have good enough control of the program hence something like this happens because he is not in complete control or the perpetrators feel or know they can get away with it.
I look at it from the perspective of the victim and his parents. The parents entrusted their son to the leadership and guidance of a Pat Fitzgerald led football program and the result is their son gets hazed. I would not be a supporter of Pat Fitzgerald if I was the parent of one of the victims.
Nevertheless, he absolutely will coach again and it will be at the D1 level. Probably FCS to start and then if successful he will get a Power 4 job.
Sheriff Coffee
Well-known member
Yep. But those ‘kids’ are adults in the eyes of the law. They are free to do what they want with structured team events highly regulated. Instructed team events are up to them.
No way a coach can know anything. Terri years ago a PSU player got into a fight with a tow truck operator. It is what it is. I was pretty good as a kid but I had friends that got into **** fights, road in the back of speeding pickup trucks down dirt road at high speeds and even had a giant fireworks night they code named ‘operation light up the sky’. One friend passed out on railroad tracks and a hall dragged him home before the Amtrak came through at 2am.
Kids do dumb things even when they are adults.
And Joe knew all about Sandusky for almost 50 years and covered it up, right?
If NW could prove that they probably would not have settled. Considering the way the University President treated Fitzgerald, I think they needed something solid or they may have been paying punitive damages.
I am sure NW did not have the smoking gun hence there is a settlement. At the very least you can hold Fitzgerald accountable for recruiting those guys who did the hazing and hiring the assistants who knew about it. My overall point is you cannot simply absolve him of this entire fiasco. Even if you buy it completely that he had absolutely no idea then he needs to take some responsibility because the perpetrators were in his program and he recruited them.
If they were known for hazing when he recruited them, sure.
Even if they weren't. If you are the coach and you recruit players that don't have a record yet under your watch 10 players commit crimes do you keep your job and are not held accountable? Fitzgerald can't just say this is totally not his responsibility. He has to take some accountability.
Franklin has had 5 players arrested in the past 2 seasons that I can remember. Should he be fired over this?
Sheriff Coffee
Well-known member
Every program in the USA has had kids do stupid things. No way you can hold a coach accountable for what adults do. I mean, if your family member/friend got caught shoplifting, should you lose your job because "at the very least", you interacted with them? Should you get kicked out of school because your roommate got caught selling grass at a party? Should a mayor resign because a police officer let a hot chick out of a speeding ticket because she gave him her numbers?
The fact is, NW overreacted to unsubstantiated charges. Remember, NW negotiated a settlement with PF that was agreed upon. The former players embellished what happened to get the media involved, then NW fired PF to cover their asses.
This is different, Fitzgerald was running the program. The buck stops at the top. If everything was embellished and Fitzgerald knew nothing then that is different. Do we know that is the case here? No we don't. Maybe it was and that is why it was settled. I have my doubts but maybe the NW President, etc had zero evidence that anything happened of any substance. Maybe it was just one minor incident that was inconsequential or the whole thing was a big rouse by players who didn't like him to set him up to be fired. Probably somewhere in the middle of nothing to very little happened and something more serious and pervasive but not to the extent reported occurred.
Sheriff Coffee
Well-known member
I don't agree at all. You are suggesting that everything that goes bad in an organization is a fireable offense at the CEO level. So if he should be fired, why not the OC? DC? AD? President of NW?
Football players are no choirboys. They grew up pampered, privileged, and rewarded for contained violence. This is, and creates, a distinct personality type. We ask them to hone behaviors and skill sets that are rewarded on the playing field; these behaviors would result in them being arrested if they did them at a party, date, or marriage. My point is that these kids are edge cases where universities are on a razor's edge between grey guys that do a lot of charity work Sunday>Friday and a guy that would tear your head off and hand it to you on Saturdays.
That has resulted in every major program suffering big setbacks on a weekly basis. CJF, perhaps one of the nicest major college coaches, has been sued several times and players tossed in jail. GA has had a nightmare. TX, USC, tOSU....and lets not even talk about Michigan.
At some point, the HC has to be given some level of grace based upon his track record. Fitz has run one of the best programs in the nation, both in terms of elevating football and representing the University. The kid who got razed hired a lawyer who knew the deep pockets were afraid of bad PR so he made up some stories. The university president used PF as a scapegoat because he didn't want the kids ' attorneys to continue to denigrate NW. Regardless of the fairness of it all, he damaged PF to minimize the damage to NW. Don't forget, PF and the University had already agreed on a line of action including PF being suspended for a period of time. Only when the attorney started to make stuff up (racial, sexual, and PF knew about it) did NW fire PF. None of those turned out to be true but, hey, the kids and their attorneys made a hell of a lot of money.
And that is the way the system works. I sued a company and won a big settlement. I won because I realized the win was in getting the senior executives embarrassed in front of their shareholders. Other than that, they'd be covered with insurance anyway. But when they learned their personal jobs were at stake, they settled on a number that nobody predicted (more than twice what the mediator predicted)
Well if it is all made up then this makes NW look like idiots. Not sure the whole thing is fabricated and absolutely nothing happened. Something happened just how serious? Serious enough to suspend him at first. If it was minor and everything else was made up then he shouldn't have been fired but not sure that is the case here. They did settle with him so maybe he was able to prove all his accusers lied. I don't know. I do think he has accountability in all of this. He runs the program. Yeah, I get the argument that he can't know everything but that is life. If Drew Allar makes a few good plays and drives us to a game winning FG to beat ND then the can't win the big game label for James gets lifted a bit. But he didn't, so the criticism of James intensified. Fair? Maybe maybe not but that is life.
Sheriff Coffee
Well-known member
I agree with all of that. But reality is secondary to corporations when it comes to the optics. They want and need to protect their brand at any cost. And when I say cost, I mean both in terms of humanity and monetarily.
You said earlier that the buck stops with the head coach because he hired and recruited the team. Why doesn't the buck stop at the President of the University? Because the President had a scapegoat. He negotiated and finalized a deal with PF for PF to take some heat. When the media turned up the heat, he moved from "the buck taker" to pulling the scapegoat parachute. Why? Because he could.
PF had to sue and spend two years of his life out of football to defend an impeccable coaching career. But hey, the president is still the president, and NW is opening a new stadium even if their team is no longer competitive. And PF walks away with a nice monetary reward that will be paid by the students in their fees, and some will come out of NWs $15B endowment.
Can’t remember the circumstances, but, if a player went to Fitzgerald and he did nothing then you are 100% right that he has responsibility. However, him not knowing what was going on is also certainly possible.
As we all know , he could still be held responsible, lack of institutional control. I’m actually surprised the Paterno family never sued PSU. Maybe they could not sue as a result of Joe’s death.
You make a good point about canning the school president. If you do that though then you have to can PF as well. Canning the president for this just wouldn't happen because it is perfectly reasonable to think the school predident had no idea but perhaps Pat did know or should have known since he runs the football program. I know it is not a clean argument because if you use the business analogy and there is an embezzling scam going on in the finance department even if not that big of an impact you can argue the CEO and CFO should be canned.
I agree the school president was out to protect the NW brand and himself. He probably got pressured by alumni, board, whomever to can Pat.
At the end of the day I'm not buying that PF is totally clean from this. Given the settlement he probably should not have been fired but he has some responsibility in it.
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