A Timeline of Fitzgerald's Rise and Fall:

Monday, Northwestern University fired Pat Fitzgerald, its senior football coach, after it was found that hazing was going on in the football program.

In a message to the school community, university president Michael Schill said, “I know that not everyone will like my decision, and some people in our community may strongly disagree with it.” “In the end, I am responsible for doing what is best for the whole university, and this choice shows that. The damage done to our school is big, and some of our kids have also been hurt.

Fitzgerald was about to start his 18th season as the school’s head coach. He was tied for the fourth-longest tenured coach in Division I. The 48-year-old graduated from a school where he had a 110-101 record, including a 5-5 record in bowl games. Both his 110 wins overall and his 65 wins in the Big Ten are school records.

Fitzgerald was banned for two weeks at first for the hazing events, but the university changed its mind. After a 1-11 season, the team is in shock over the firing.

Here is a timeline of Fitzgerald’s time at Northwestern and the hazing scandal that ended his career there.

In June 2006, Randy Walker, who was only 52 years old, died suddenly of what seems to have been a heart attack. Fitzgerald is hired a 7 days after Randy’s death. Fitzgerald became the youngest coach in Division 1-A when he was 31 years old. He was a star defender at the school and worked for Walker as a linebacker coach. As a player, he took the team to its first Rose Bowl since 1949, and he is one of only two people to have won the Chuck Bednarik Award twice. This award goes to the best defensive player in the country every year.

Northwestern ends the season with a 9-4 record, which is the most wins the team has had since Fitzgerald’s last two years of playing. Before that, Big Ten teams had used the school as a punching bag for decades, and it hadn’t won nine or more games since 1903.

From 2012 to 2020, Northwestern will win five bowl games and 10 games three times. Fitzgerald was named Big Ten Coach of the Year in 2018, and two years later, the school was ranked 10th in the country at the end of the season.

According to the school’s report of the investigation, on November 30, 2022, the university gets a complaint from an anonymous email address about hazing in the football team. Maggie Hickey, a lawyer at ArentFox Schiff who used to work as an executive assistant for the U.S. attorney and inspector general of Illinois, is the outside detective that Northwestern hires.

December 2022: The accuser talks to the investigation team and says that hazing often happened in the locker room and may have started in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the team usually held training camp. Hickey’s team talked to more than 50 people who were involved with or used to be involved with the football program. They also looked at hundreds of thousands of texts and player poll data from 2014 and earlier.

In January 2023, ESPN writer Adam Rittenberg tweeted that Northwestern had started a probe into bullying claims. The school then confirmed the news to the public.

On July 7, Northwestern puts out a report of the study but doesn’t give any information about what they found. It found that the proof “largely supported” the complainant’s claims, but it didn’t find any specific wrongdoing by any football player or coach. But almost everyone in the program took part in or knew about the hazing actions.

According to the report, “The investigation team did not find enough evidence to believe that coaching staff knew about the ongoing hazing.” “They decided, though, that there had been many chances to find out about the hazing and report it.”

The report said that Fitzgerald was suspended for two weeks, starting right away. It also listed seven other requirements, such as ending training camps in Kenosha, putting in place a way for people to report hazing incidents anonymously, and having someone who doesn’t report to the football staff watch the locker room.

“When I heard that our football team was accused of hazing, I was very upset,” Fitzgerald said in a statement at the time. “I didn’t know about the alleged incidents, but I talked to university officials, and they told me I would be suspended for two weeks.”

“Northwestern football is proud of the fact that it turns out not only good athletes but also fine young men with good character,” he said. “We have high standards for our student-athletes and our program, and we will keep working to go above and beyond those standards in the future.”

The Daily Northwestern reported on July 8 that a former player told the school in late November 2022 that as a student, he was hurt by a hazing practice called “running.” It featured eight to ten upperclassmen wearing masks and “dry-humping” a player in front of his teammates in a dark locker room. The abuse was a penalty for making mistakes in practice, and it happened a lot during training camp and around Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were called “Runsgiving” and “Runsmas.”

“The carwash” was another hazing practice in which players stood naked at the door to the bathrooms, spun around, and rubbed up against people who were getting in. The player also talked about naked conversations between the center and quarterback between rookies.

After the school newspaper ran the story, President Schill sent out a note to the public. In addition to overseeing the program, Schill stated that Coach Fitzgerald “must be very careful to uphold our institution’s commitment to the student experience.” “I didn’t take that into enough consideration when I gave him a punishment, and it’s obvious that he didn’t keep that promise.”

Schill says that he just found out who made the accusations because the investigation is private. He called the family to apologize and tried to get in touch with the young man. Schill did talk to the young man the next day. Schill says he will talk to the school’s leaders to “evaluate next steps.”

On the same day, the “ENTIRE” Northwestern football team puts out a message in support of Fitzgerald: “Throughout his time as coach, Coach Fitzgerald has always put the health and growth of his players first, and we support his unwavering dedication to our team.” The letter says that the claims are “exaggerated and twisted” and that the people who made them wanted to hurt the image of the school, the players, and the teachers.

Fitzgerald is fired on July 10. Schill says he made the decision after a “difficult and complex” review of his original decision to remove the coach, which he says was his decision alone.

“Since Friday, I’ve been thinking about what we should expect from our head coaches, our faculty, and our campus leaders,” Schill writes. ” The ultimate authority over his team’s behavior rests with the head coach. We found that the bullying we looked into was common and not a secret within the school. This gave Coach Fitzgerald a chance to find out what was going on. No matter what, the Northwestern football culture, which was great in some ways, was broken in other ways.

Schill gives more information about the study, including the fact that 11 current or past college football players said that hazing had been a part of the program for “many years.” “Forced participation, nudity, & sexualized acts of a downward nature” were all part of the hazing, which was “clearly not a secret within the program. Others perceived the hazing as “causing significant harm with long-term consequences,” while some players believed it was a comedy.

Fitzgerald’s own message came out Monday night. In it, he said it was an honor to coach the team. He also says that the review “confirmed what I have always said, which is that I knew nothing about any kind of hazing.”

He hints at a possible case when he writes that the ban was part of a “mutual agreement” and that he was “surprised” that the agreement was “unilaterally revoked… without any prior notice.”

David Braun, who is the defensive coordinator at Northwestern, is likely to be named as the team’s acting head coach.