Deny, Litigate, Act the Victim

Politics? Nah. College sports

Pat Fitzgerald

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Northwestern University president Michael Shill says former football coach Pat Fitzgerald knew of the hazing within the football program. Hazing is a polite word for what allegedly occurred. If you don’t want the gross details, skip a few paragraphs.

What a former player has alleged and what other players have confirmed is this, as related by The Athletic:

• One former Northwestern football player said the hazing methods centered around a practice called “running,” in which underclassmen were restrained in a dark locker room and dry-humped by upperclassmen wearing “Purge-like” masks. The player said the tradition was especially common during training camp and around Thanksgiving and Christmas, which the team deemed “Runsgiving” and “Runsmas.”

Oh, yuck.

Let’s skip, if we can, wondering what kind of kid would find this sort of behavior normal. A weak, follow-the-leader kid, a deviant kid, a kid with some big-league emotional issues? Maybe just your basic D-1 “student-athlete’’ on full scholarship.

The larger point here is Fitzgerald denies knowing anything about it. He’s taking legal action to keep his job.

If that sounds familiar, it is. Several hundred miles to the south and east, Bob Huggins is doing essentially the same thing. Huggins now claims he didn’t resign from his job as WVU’s basketball coach. His lawyer sent a letter to the school Friday, demanding that Huggins be reinstated. If he were not, Huggins would sue.

Well, OK. A few things.

Thing 1: In the Fitzgerald case, the investigation concluded knowledge of the hazing was “widespread.’’ The investigators were not, however, able to ID individual perps, or to say for sure if Fitzgerald were aware of what was happening.

Thing 2: Huggins’ contention that he didn’t resign is seemingly refuted by, well, by an e-mail announcing he’d be resigning. The catch? It was written from his wife June’s e-mail. Apparently, Huggs doesn’t use e-mail.

That prompted this incredulous response from the school, per The Athletic:

“Are you asserting that Mr. Huggins never resigned?”  the letter from West Virginia vice president and general counsel Stephanie Taylor read. “Is it your position that Mr. [James] Gianola, the longstanding lawyer for Mr. Huggins, engaged with the University on June 17 without the knowledge or authorization of Mr. Huggins? And then Mr. Huggins’ wife submitted his resignation without his knowledge or authorization? 

Well, yeah. Evidently.

Nancy Zimpher, photo UC

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Coaches have been kings as long as there have been coaches and kings. You know: We want a school the football team can be proud of. When Nancy Zimpher, the UC president, won a power struggle with Huggins, the basketball coach and DUI recipient, who was seen as the evil one?

It wasn’t the basketball coach.

Ignorance is not a defense. If Fitzgerald didn’t know about the hazing, he should have. Apparently everybody else did. And how is it that Huggins, career-long master of his domain, didn’t know his wife was writing such a life-altering e-mail?

We don’t know the whole stories. Here’s what we do know:

A couple coaches who are looked upon as leaders and who influence the lives of impressionable young adults are setting examples that would get even a politician fired.

Deny, deny, deny. Double down on the denials. Isn’t that the way we do things now?

Litigate. Act as if you’re the aggrieved party. Nobly suggest that your biggest concern is for your “kids,’’ the players under your command.

What kind of commander doesn’t know what his troops are doing? What sort of general preaches discipline while wantonly not practicing it?

I don’t know what you’re talking about, says Pat Fitzgerald.

What e-mail, says Bob Huggins.

Coaches like Fitzgerald and Huggins perpetrate the belief that coaches who win and make money for their universities play by a different set of rules. I’ve always liked Huggins because I saw the good things he did for his players and the community. A good heart, a troubled soul. But not a king. Just a basketball coach.

Fitzgerald reportedly earned a $5 million-plus salary last season, which is a lot of money for a guy who has yet to take any responsibility for what apparently occurred right under his nose.

His salary was endowed. Northwestern calls Fitzgerald the Dan and Susan Jones Family Head Football Coach. The bucks stop with him. But not, evidently, the buck.

What’s being taught here?

HEATHEN PRINT MEDIA TAKES ANOTHER HIT. The NYTimes announced it won’t have a sports page anymore, at least not one written by Times staffers. The job now goes to writers from The Athletic, the sports website the Times bought 18 months ago. Times editors called the change “an evolution in how we cover sports."

The paper "will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues," according to the email sent to staffers, and focus "even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large."

Well, la-dee-dah.

I, for one, would be thrilled as a reader and fan to know my paper would no longer cover the actual teams I root for, but rather how they “intersect’’ with “society at large.’’

On the opposite coast, the LA Times is doing similar things. From my fellow Substack-er and retired sports columnist Mark Whicker:

The Los Angeles Times on Sunday announced it was abandoning game stories and box scores to allow their writers to use their talents in a “magazine” format. A more truthful approach would have been to explain that (A) the Times was moving to earlier deadlines, thanks to printing complications and (B) the Times just didn’t want to spend the money on travel anymore.

I’ll limit my OG damage here and say only that sports sells papers, in a way no other section of the paper ever has. Maybe not at the New York Times, but certainly at the Enquirer or the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis, say, or in any small-market outpost where the interest in the local teams is high.

Trusting the Yankees coverage to a national guy will assure one thing: Yankees fans will no longer get in-depth, well-sourced reporting on their team. Because that kind of reporting takes an everyday-ness that only a beat writer can manage.

The LA way isn’t unworkable. I argued for years at the Enquirer that so-called “game stories’’ were obsolete, especially in baseball. Anyone who wanted to know what happened the night before saw it all the night before. A few years back, the Enquirer did change its approach. You now get more Why? and less What. This is a good trend.

Regardless, what the Times is doing is just another example of my industry’s slow death. It’s the only reason I’m glad I’m old.

(BTW, The Athletic isn’t exactly thriving, either. It isn’t killing newspapers the way its beyond-arrogant creators promised it would. Last month, The Athletic laid off 4 percent of its newsroom.)

HOMERUN DERBY. . . This might be heresy to baseball fans, but I still don’t especially like the Homerun Derby. Even with the streamlining of a few years back, it’s still a lumbering, laborious three-hour event in which the same thing happens over and over.

And with the way ESPN did it Monday night, you never saw the majesty of a 440-foot blast, just a split-screen of little kids in pink, working the outfield like ants at a picnic. If MLB wants this to work. . .

Make it mandatory for the top 2 HR hitters in each league to appear. Pick four more that the fans want most to see. There’s your 8. It wouldn’t include Mookie Betts or Adley Rutschman.

Give each guy 20 swings. That’s it. Not 3 minutes, not extra time, no timeouts. Twenty swings. Don’t emphasize the more-swings-is better way. Allow hitters a decent amount of time between pitches. (And the TV network a decent amount of time to replay the glorious trajectory of a 450-foot blast.)

Reward big bombs with an extra point, not more time in the batter’s box.

Solve ties with sudden death. Or with the number of 440-plus bombs.

Last night felt like musical chairs. And even with all that freneticism, it still occupied all of prime time. If you can shorten games, you can shorten the HR Derby.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Heaven help me, I’ve always liked this tune. In fact, I like the entire album side on which it appears. The Bee Gees did good work on this soundtrack.