Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football

by Bacon, John U.

  “USC has sixteen thousand undergraduates,” Schapiro told me, “and most Big Ten schools have more than that. You’re not going to know them. Eight thousand students is all we have, which makes it a little different and gives us a smaller, more intimate campus.

  “People are always saying, ‘I’m going to this game or that game.’ You ask them why, and they say, ‘I don’t know much about the sport, but my suitemate is on the field hockey team, my fraternity brother is on the soccer team, or my church buddy is on the women’s lacrosse team.’ They’re going to support their friends. I think that’s more common here. The teams bring us together and give us something to cheer for.”

  This helps Northwestern establish a few tenets necessary to every vibrant learning community: a common identity, lifelong loyalty, and a happy campus.

  “Once in a while,” Fitzgerald told me, “I have to remind people around here: the current students, down the road, are your alums. And if they had a good time here and have good feelings about the place, that’s when they give back. If they didn’t, I don’t think they’re opening their wallets for you. President Schapiro has done a magical job bringing it all together.”

  However, Northwestern has already learned—just as Chicago did—that simply having a Big Ten football team doesn’t do much for your school. If it’s the laughingstock of the league, you might be better off without it.

  “We’ve made a commitment that athletics would be important,” AD Jim Phillips said. “Does that mean the tail’s wagging the dog? That won’t ever happen around here. I never lose any sleep wondering what my head coach is up to, and we’ll never be confused about why the athletic department is here. It’s to support the school’s educational mission.

  “It isn’t winning at all costs, but either you’re going to get into the game or you’re not. We keep score! We keep score of U.S. News rankings and Nobel Prize winners, too! Why would we accept any less than the standards of excellence the institution was founded on?”

  Northwestern’s renewed commitment to athletic success has convinced everyone the school belongs in the Big Ten, and can play with the big boys.

  “I don’t think anyone wants us to go D-III anymore,” Schapiro said. “We’re very happy in the Big Ten. When you look at our nineteen sports, we’re really pretty good. In the last nine seasons, our women’s lacrosse team has won seven national titles. We’ve won”—he pauses to do the math in his head—“one hundred and eighty-two games and lost just ten.”

  But even at Northwestern, football is the focal point.

  • • •

  That brings us back to Pat Fitzgerald. The support he enjoys is essential, but winning games is still largely up to him. That starts with finding the special class of players who can win in Evanston and value what Northwestern offers.

  “I don’t know what being Ohio State means,” he told me. “I never played there. I’ve never coached there. But I do know what being Northwestern means. And we know how to find the kind of people who will appreciate it.”

  Case in point: defensive end Quentin Williams. He was a tenth grader at Central Catholic in Pittsburgh when his mom died. His father, an urban planner, his brother, Nate, and he had to start making their own meals. One load was lifted when Nate, a linebacker, got scholarship offers from Duke, Virginia, and North Carolina, but he was captivated by Fitzgerald, the same way Fitzgerald had been captivated by Barnett.

  Two years later, Fitzgerald came after Quentin, who was not particularly big or fast but, he told me, “I was always taught that football is a team game. I was a captain in high school, and we won state our senior year,” all but defining Fitzgerald’s ideal recruit.

  Quentin was leaning toward Stanford until he asked his brother about Fitzgerald. “He couldn’t think of anything negative to say: ‘I love that man.’ ”

  Still, Quentin was the last Northwestern recruit to fax in his letter of intent. But by 2012, all his doubts had been erased. “This was the best decision I’ve ever made.”

  Going into his fifth year—which is strongly encouraged in the Northwestern program—Williams and his classmates wanted more. After Fitzgerald’s “welcome back” team meeting in January of 2012, receiver Demetrius Fields gathered team leaders Kain Colter, David Nwabuisi, and Quentin Williams together in the team room. “It was the first time in my career,” Williams recalled, “the seniors got together after Fitz left the leadership meeting. We were sick and tired of losing. We were sick of watching senior classes fall short. You could see it in our eyes that day. We didn’t care how long the meeting took. We were determined.”

  “In 2011,” Colter added, “we had tons of talent. But for some reason, we just threw away too many games we should have won. We noticed we weren’t close enough as a team. You play harder for guys you know and respect. So in that meeting, we decided that was the main problem, so we were going to start working as a team, eating as a team, doing everything together to get closer.”

  The idea was to make their attitudes contagious. “Take the team by the hand,” Fitzgerald told them. “It’s your team. Show them how to do it.”

  Being contagious didn’t necessarily mean being polite—or even liked.

  “We had to call some people out sometimes,” Williams said. “It wasn’t fun, but it was necessary.”

  We journalists often write about coaches who “have” their teams—when their players are following not just their rules and playbook, but buying their philosophy.

  Michigan’s Brady Hoke had his team from his first team meeting in 2011. O’Brien had fought to keep his team through the off-season, and despite the NCAA’s best efforts, he had succeeded. Meyer still didn’t feel that he had his team, but he was working on it.

  But at Northwestern, not only did Fitzgerald have his team, but, in a real sense, the university did, too. Most of the players had declined schools like Stanford, Georgia Tech, and Virginia to wear the purple. They knew what Northwestern offered—and they had decided that’s what they wanted.

  The question remained: Would that translate to another 6-6 season, capped by another bowl loss—or worse? Or would that create something better, even historic?

  • • •

  Just like the university it hosts, Evanston doesn’t have that much in common with the rest of the Big Ten college towns. This might seem irrelevant, but, unlike pro teams, who up and leave one city for another whenever they get a better offer, college teams are forever married to their schools and their towns. How this love triangle interacts, and what accommodations each party makes for the others, tells you a lot about all three.

  Because the Wildcats wouldn’t kick off until 7:00 p.m., central time, I went searching on another perfect fall Saturday for the best of Evanston’s five bars (yes, five) to watch the early Big Ten games.

  Matt Albers, an Ann Arbor native, former Michigan State hockey player, and Evanston transplant, suggested we meet at the Bluestone bar and restaurant on Central Street, just a few blocks from Northwestern’s Ryan Field. It’s a nice spot, with dark wooden walls, tables, and chairs, brightened by a big picture window, with a park just down the street, but because it lacked the grit of Ann Arbor’s Brown Jug, or State College’s Rathskeller, or Columbus’s Plank’s Café, the Bluestone felt more like a chain bar. They don’t blast college fight songs or even rock and roll, but pipe in Norah Jones’s mellifluous voice.

  They have the complete collection of Big Ten helmets on a shelf over the bar, but the walls were plastered not with Northwestern frames or even Big Ten pennants, but banners taken from golf flagsticks around the country and the world, more than a hundred.

  I had stumbled upon something I’d never before seen: a golf bar, unattached to a golf course. It turns out the owner is a friend and occasional caddy of Luke Donald’s, a Northwestern alum who became the world’s top-ranked golfer in 2011. It says something that the only bar close to Northwestern’s stadium is based less on the football team than an English golfer. But Donald married a cla
ssmate and still lives here, which says something, too. The place grows on you.

  Albers loves Evanston and the Wildcats, as do his wife and kids, who are big fans of the teams and Coach Fitzgerald. “I have such respect for him, and what he does,” Albers said, expressing a universal sentiment. But part of the Northwestern experience is undeniably foreign to a man who grew up in Ann Arbor and graduated from Michigan State.

  “Last season,” Albers reported, “Northwestern’s basketball team could have gone to the NCAA tournament for the first time ever if they’d won their last game. So my friends went early to Buffalo Wild Wings, thinking it was going to be packed. Before a big game at State, every bar within five miles of campus is packed. But we were damn near alone! Maybe three or four tables of people, max.”

  Then things turned stranger. “Ten minutes into the game, a bunch of people show up, and a girl takes the microphone, and she says, ‘It’s time for Harry Potter Trivia!’ ”

  I cannot do justice to the expression on Albers’s face.

  “Harry fucking Potter? Are you shitting me?

  “If there was a home opener at Michigan or Michigan State and there was no school, it’d still be sold out. At Northwestern, if a big game fell on the same week as final exams, they would be studying. Okay, that’s what they should be doing—but it’s still strange!”

  We were soon joined by Roger Williams, forty-one, a former all–Big Ten wrestler at 177, and Jack Griffin, a Northwestern teammate who won the NCAA title at the considerably lighter 118. They both now work in Northwestern’s development office.

  “How bad was it?” Williams asked rhetorically, of Northwestern football’s Dark Ages. “Before my senior year, 1994, they never charged students to go to the games, and we could come and go as we pleased, all game.” Even at that, most students rarely bothered to leave the parking lot.

  For years, when Northwestern was losing, Griffin recalled, “The students would start that stupid chant, ‘It’s all right! It’s okay! You’re gonna work for us someday!’ I hated that chant, but we’re past that now.”

  Williams nodded vigorously. “Any question about Northwestern leaving the Big Ten—or getting kicked out—all that ended in 1995. We expect to win every game now, and that’s what we’re thinking when we take the field.”

  Their confidence was well deserved and hard earned. What President Schapiro, Jim Phillips, and Pat Fitzgerald had accomplished was nothing short of heroic, but their stated goal wasn’t a Big Ten title or perfect season, but something far more modest: their first bowl victory since 1949. But, if that trio of leaders was replaced by less committed or talented people, or if Michigan and Ohio State made it impossible to keep up in the arms race, individual heroics could be rendered irrelevant. Northwestern would either have to quit being Northwestern, or quit being in the race.

  What would Northwestern be like today if it had left the Big Ten during the dark decades?

  “Without Big Ten football?” Griffin asked. “We’d be a top-notch research institution.”

  Nothing wrong with that, of course. But the belief that you don’t need big-time football—which Chicago proved—should not be confused with the belief that you don’t need something special to attract freshmen and unify the campus—which Chicago also proved.

  The question is, could the ’Cats keep their cake and eat it, too? Northwestern is the Big Ten’s smallest school, with only about eight thousand full-time undergraduates, plus some eight thousand graduate students, who are far less likely to attend the games. The next smallest, newly joined Nebraska, has nineteen thousand undergrads, and the rest have somewhere between thirty-two and fifty-seven thousand total students, dwarfing the little engine that could.

  This creates a particular challenge for Northwestern, even in Chicago. “Of the twelve current conference schools, ten have more alumni in Chicago than we do,” Athletic Director Jim Phillips told me. “We’re eleventh right now, ahead of only Penn State, whose alums are mostly in the East. And that gap between us and the others will only grow in the years to come.”

  Leave it to a Northwestern athletic director to spin that as a positive. “We try to embrace this,” Phillips said, “and stay connected with all the Big Ten fans in the city. It’s not that we want you to dismiss the school that you went to—but you can have your second-favorite team. And we want that to be us!”

  It seems to be working. By almost any measure—season-ticket sales, corporate sponsorship, revenue, website hits, and hours of community service—it’s all going in the right direction. Since Phillips took over in 2008, Northwestern’s attendance has grown 60 percent. In 2011, they set their attendance record against Michigan with 47,330 fans, two hundred more than capacity. Even the students go to the games now, usually leaving their tailgates to head to the stadium in the middle of the first quarter.

  “They want to win,” Albers chipped in, “but if they don’t, the pride is still in the school, not the team. If Michigan loses, my dad [a distinguished neurologist at U-M Hospital] is still grumpy on Monday. It ruins his week—and he spends it talking about how they should have gone for it on fourth down.”

  Wildcat fans don’t want to be the University of Chicago, but they don’t want to be Michigan, either. Like Goldilocks, they think they’ve got it juuust right. But their contentment should not be confused with complacency.

  “Losing used to be okay,” Griffin said. “Not with the coaches or the players, but the students and alums became numb to it. The losing streak had almost become a badge of courage. But they expect more now, and they care about winning. We’re ready to take the next step. Since Fitz’s class, we’ve shown we can do it here. In basketball, we’re ready to go from the NIT to the NCAA tournament. In football, we’re ready to win bowl games.”

  And therein lies the rub: Once you start caring, you’ve put one foot on the treadmill. When you get a taste of winning, you want another, and before you know it, you’ve got both feet on it, and you’re running.

  • • •

  We settled in for the noon game, Penn State at Virginia, which had problems of its own.

  UVA’s new president, Teresa Sullivan—who had been a popular provost at Michigan—had been the target of a coup attempt by board member Helen Dragas, a real estate developer. She felt Sullivan had been dragging her feet on changes Dragas wanted, changes that would run the very university Thomas Jefferson had founded more like a corporation, Dragas’s stated goal. Dragas’s changes included cutting the budgets of unprofitable programs like classics and German, and pursuing something she called “strategic dynamism.”

  Dragas had broad support among the other board members, who included executives and lawyers from Wall Street, General Electric, a coal company, a nursing home, a beer distributor, and the son of conservative televangelist Pat Robertson. Many were UVA alumni, but few had any professional experience in higher education.

  The Huffington Post’s analysis of the board’s e-mails concluded, “Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories, wanted the school to institute austerity measures and re-engineer its academic offerings around inexpensive, online education, the e-mails reveal. Led by Rector Helen Dragas . . . the board shared a guiding vision that the university could, and indeed should, be run like a Fortune 500 company.”

  Dragas and her biggest ally in the pursuit of “strategic dynamism,” a former Goldman Sachs partner and hedge fund manager named Peter Kiernan, based their vision of the University of Virginia not on deep research, respected studies, or conversations with academics, but by gleaning from several recent columns in popular publications.

  “Reading a few op-eds and articles in the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chronicle of Higher Ed does not qualify you to make definitive judgments about hugely complex issues such as the promise and perils of online learning,” said John Arras, director of the UVA Bioethics Program. “We are dealing here for the most part with a bunch of amateurs who think they know
everything, but really know very little about the academic culture and what makes us tick.

  “A successful real estate empire is not at all like a university. These people are talking about cutting classics—Greeks and Romans, the foundations of Western thought—because it’s not profitable enough.”

  Tal Brewer, the chair of UVA’s philosophy department, took a longer view. “There is this sort of shift in the zeitgeist,” he said, characterized by “adoration of the business mind as capable of bringing clarity, organization, and efficiency to any kind of institution. . . . I just think that’s a deep mistake. . . . What’s happening at other kinds of institutions around the country is now coming home to roost in higher education.”

  The shift is not only happening in other institutions, but other universities.

  “I don’t think necessarily the boards of visitors in the Virginia public institutions are the worst example,” said Robert Kreiser, of the American Association of University Professors. “Texas is the place where this has gone to the extreme, where first [George] Bush and now [Rick] Perry have been filling the boards with political appointees who are favorably disposed to a view of higher education which is very corporatist and not understanding of what the academic mission should be about.”

  Texas governor Rick Perry has since taken it further, letting the billionaire-oilman-turned-University-of-Texas-business-school-teacher, Jeff Sandefer, gather data on Texas A&M’s professors to determine who’s making money for A&M, and who’s losing it. Sandefer then listed their results in black or red ink and divided the faculty members into five categories: coasters, dodgers, sherpas, pioneers, and stars. According to the Austin Statesmen, he has also concocted a list of recommendations to reform the school: “Award bonus pay to teachers based strictly on student evaluations, put more emphasis on teaching productivity and less on research, split budgets into separate amounts for research and teaching, and treat students like customers.”