After offensive lineman Jordan McNair died of heatstroke five years ago at 19 during a mid-June practice at Maryland, the university responded in the following months by dismissing the coaches it deemed responsible for McNair’s well-being, including head coach DJ Durkin. And the NCAA, which governs college sports, tightened its rules again to safeguard against such tragedies, recommending strength and conditioning coaches report to medical officers rather than the coaching staff.
The football team at Northwestern, my alma mater — which saw a player, Rashidi Wheeler, die similarly more than 20 summers ago — has avoided such a catastrophe in the years since despite the dangerous, debasing hazing events during coach Pat Fitzgerald’s tenure that an independent investigation recently uncovered. That review found the incidents were marked by sexual abuse that was confirmed by upward of a dozen players to investigators and reporters.
So Monday, the university fired Fitzgerald, the most successful football coach in school history. He’s a man whose company I’ve been in. Whom I like. Who got me to stick out my purple-adorned chest now and then. Whose teams I ventured to see at least once a year. Who had to go, absolutely. Because too many of his players were said to be degrading teammates, not just verbally but physically. Because it’s embarrassing. It’s dangerous. (Did no one on the football team know that the parents of a Northwestern women’s basketball player filed a lawsuit that said she took her life several years ago because of hazing she suffered to get into a sorority?) It’s supposed to be the 21st century, and sports is supposed to be better than this. You know, teaching values and all that.
For the institution, changing coaches is the easy solution.
And it is hardly enough.
You know what’s hard to do? What the NCAA tried by tightening the screws on football practice: changing the culture. That is what needs to happen — not just at Northwestern but beyond.
The ugly behavior uncovered in Northwestern’s football program by the school’s investigation and reporting by the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, is still far too common in college sports. This isn’t a boys-will-be-boys thing. It’s a flesh-and-blood health and welfare problem, physical and mental.
It has roots in high school sports, where every year it seems there are stories such as the one that unfolded in 2019 at Damascus High in a Maryland suburb of D.C. There, junior varsity football players attacked a teammate with a broomstick. The National Study of Student Hazing has reported that nearly half of students said they were hazed at least once in high school.
Where does hazing, or bullying, gets its imprimatur? How about from the professional ranks? Almost 10 years ago, a particularly egregious case of intra-team harassment was uncovered within the Miami Dolphins that resulted in then starting lineman Richie Incognito suspended for what is often referred to as “conduct detrimental to the team.”
But college is where sports’ admittedly harmful behavior apparently gets cultivated. This is where it metastasizes. At schools large and small. State and private. At all levels of competition. Men’s sports steeped in testosterone for the most part. But women’s sports, too. The Harvard women’s hockey team coach just resigned amid allegations of hazing on the team.
Some observers seemed shocked that such behavior could occur at institutions such as Harvard and Northwestern, where athletics are thought to be an addendum to academics rather than a core activity. But the NCAA estimated 74 percent of its athletes get hazed.
It wasn’t even an anomaly at Northwestern. Two of its other teams in the early 2000s were found guilty. It isn’t uncommon anywhere or even that infrequent. Just this year, New Mexico State basketball suffered its own hazing scandal and ended its season early.
The NCAA has guidelines on hazing, but it has clearer rules restricting overzealous end zone celebrations.
“Hazing is a matter for local law enforcement and/or university leadership to address,” an NCAA spokesperson emailed me Monday. “NCAA best practices encourage athletics administrators, coaches and student-athletes to work together to develop anti-hazing policies which promote healthy team activities and avoid practices that humiliate team members.”
But criminalizing hazing, as with criminalizing so many things, hasn’t scared everyone straight. And we don’t need to turn college students into criminals simply because they play games. It’s just that it hasn’t mattered that hazing is against the law in just about every state now, with charges rising to felonies if someone gets killed. The problem is that hazing is so baked into the team sports ethos.
To be sure, even the athletes who suffer the brunt of being humiliated rarely speak up. Athletes aren’t as fearless as they’ve acted or as tough as we’ve celebrated. Why? Fear? Ostracization from the team? Being seen by coaches as weak and therefore not worthy of playing time?
Even players of color who have been subjected to racial harassment, as alleged in Northwestern’s case, are reluctant to point fingers. Indeed, just as the coronavirus was taking a hold of our lives, I received a screenshot from a friend. It was a message sent to football players at one of the 65 teams in that most elite plateau we call the Power Five encouraging them to be like tough field plants rather than cultivated house plants. A few Black players, who predominated the roster, took umbrage with the plantation imagery. But they refused to go public. They dreaded doing so would jeopardize their NFL aspirations.
But not coaching or not playing is ultimately what will threaten their futures in sports. Those who participated in and abetted what happened at Northwestern should face a similar fate as their coach, who said he knew nothing. Suspension of games and the paychecks they garner may be what really is needed to rein in this culture, which always seems to careen into sexual abuse and some sort of racial persecution.
Putting the coach in extended timeout should just be a start.