The grotesque Northwestern University football hazing scandal is an almost too-perfect case study in how cultures of harm are allowed, even encouraged, to flourish in the world of big-time US college football.
The details of how younger players were subjected to abusive hazing, brilliantly reported by the university’s student paper, The Daily Northwestern, are appalling, including the disturbing practice of “running”, in which first-year players who had made mistakes in practice would be subjected to “8-10 upperclassmen dressed in various ‘Purge-like’ masks, who would then begin ‘dry-humping’ the victim in a dark locker room”. In another hazing practice, “freshmen were forced to strip naked and perform various acts, including bear crawling and slingshotting themselves across the floor with exercise bands.” The Daily Northwestern’s report catalogs additional forms of hazing as well. Collectively, these allegations were supported both by an independent report by law firm ArentFox Schiff and by subsequent reporting from ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg and WildcatReport.com’s Louie Vaccher.
As if the hazing itself were not enough, we also have the role played or not played by coach Pat Fitzgerald (annual salary: $5.7m). The Daily Northwestern’s report indicates that their source “believes some players interpreted Fitzgerald … as knowingly ‘encouraging’ the hazing to continue”. Rittenberg noted that he had a screenshot of a whiteboard in the middle of the locker room that made explicit reference to the hazing practices, something that would presumably have been difficult for a head coach to miss. Yet the independent investigation said that it was unable to confirm the coach was involved and so he was initially given just a two-week suspension during the summer offseason by the university’s president.
Of course, what that rationale fails to acknowledge is the fact that a head football coach has the responsibility of ensuring the healthy culture of his team and the well-being of all players therein. Even in the unlikely event he did not know about the hazing, allowing it to flourish under his watch is an unforgivable failure of responsibility, a reality later acknowledged by the university’s president, who responded to the Daily Northwestern story first by saying he would look back into the punishment and then ultimately by firing him on Monday.
This brings us to that president, Michael Schill, and what seems for all appearances like an attempted cover-up. On Friday 7 July, the university announced that it had received the results of an independent investigation into hazing. Without providing almost any detail about what had occurred, the school indicated that it would briefly suspend the coach and implement a few other new safety mechanisms, no doubt hoping the story would drift away. Yet, what became clear after the Daily Northwestern’s report is that Northwestern and its president had the same information at hand when the president – and he explicitly admitted as much – personally decided on a two-week penalty, despite, in his own words, having “corroborating evidence that hazing had occurred”. This was a failed cover-up that played out in plain sight thanks to the intrepid reporting of a school newspaper and its conscientious and courageous reporters.
Given the information available – and, as we have shown, there is plenty – it is clear that coach Fitzgerald and president Schill both deserve to lose their jobs. There is no pleading ignorance here, not in a Big Ten conference that has seen one despicable scandal of spectacular abuse and cover-up after another.
Still, to focus on the responsibility of a couple powerful men – and even to broaden it to the dozens, but probably more reasonably hundreds who have participated in this culture at Northwestern – is simply insufficient. Because the real story that emerges from Northwestern is not confined to Northwestern at all: it is that, like it or not, hazing remains a significant part of the culture of college football.
In 2016, the NCAA revealed that 74% of “student-athletes” reported having experienced hazing. Players we spoke to who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal indicated that hazing does remain a significant feature of the sport’s culture.
A recently-graduated former SEC player told us, “Every team usually has two methods of hazing, one done by staff and coaches (either singling individuals out to make examples of them, or deterring people from being injured with uncomfortable alternative workouts), and the other is through encouraging/turning a blind eye to self policing by the team (basically encouraging bullying/hazing to maintain the status quo).”
Although he was fortunate only to have received what he characterized as “mild” hazing – “the most obvious instance was freshman skits, where freshman are basically expected to serve as entertainment during fall camp – he did hear many stories of more significant hazing cultures at other schools. “I know several universities that had normalized physical hazing that involved naked teammates going after and wrestling other naked teammates, whether or not they were game for the horseplay,” he told us. He added, “I know that one school had a tug of war punishment where people often had their hands torn up/ankles twisted.”
But “locker room hazing” was not the only issue. He was also aware of “a pretty common history of coaches encouraging disputes to be ‘settled,’ which often involves supplying boxing gloves to players.” In fact, “Coaches often said that if there weren’t any boxing gloves available, that they would provide them.”
Unfortunately, although he told us that, “I definitely feel bad for people that are put through painful instances of hazing that are damaging to their person, but I don’t see any way to fix the issue when it’s so deeply ingrained into football culture. Similar to hazing in fraternities, anyone that comes forward (barring an egregious abuse of power where lives were at risk), the person(s) who speak up will have the industry and peers turn against them.”
Unsurprisingly, this was exactly what happened in the Northwestern case, as a letter was distributed on the day of the Daily Northwestern story that vehemently denied the allegations on behalf of “The ENTIRE Northwestern Football Team”.
The consequences of hazing can be devastating. The Daily Northwestern story’s informant noted, “I’ve had friends reach out to me in the middle of the night having very suicidal tendencies.”
Tragically, this is not nearly as rare an occurrence in the world of college football as one might hope or imagine. In our interviews for The End of College Football, multiple players told us that they or others they knew experienced suicidal ideation and even actual attempts on their life as a consequence of experiences of abuse and hazing in the sport. One former Power Five player told us of his attempts to cope, “There wasn’t a day where I wasn’t getting absolutely drunk or high out of my mind. It escalated to harder drugs, like just anything. And I used to kind of joke about it, but I was like, get so drunk so you don’t really feel the pain of the day, physically and mentally. Because I’ll be walking, morning workouts. And seeing a car drive by, it’s like, man, I wouldn’t have to go to practice if I just jumped in front of his car real quick. Like that was a more attractive idea than going.”
Another former college football player detailed his own experience with violent hazing: “it [the hazing] was like you get ‘jumped into’ a gang. At my former school, there was a big culture and tradition surrounding getting jumped by your teammates and things like that. And this was done on the last day of fall camp for the freshmen. And all the seniors would go into your dorm rooms and essentially jump you, beat you down to the ground. And that right there was my moment of, oh, this is violent, this is manipulative. I’m just here to play football and then now I’m getting beat down by 10 dudes in the dorm room. And that’s something that the coaches said they didn’t know about because it came out eventually my junior year that someone told. And they said they didn’t know about it. But my position coach was there for 25 years.”
In another case, a different player explained of a situation where a “strength and conditioning coach” would torment a teammate: “He would show up and find something to fuck with [redacted teammate No 1] about. He would just make it seem like he couldn’t do anything right. Whenever he did something good, he would just break him down. There was a time where he said he would fight him.” This escalated to the point that, “I didn’t know he had multiple suicide attempts, until finally he had to quit and he’s like ‘hey guys, I just gotta walk away. I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore.’ And he’s like ‘yeah, I was in the hospital last night because I attempted suicide.’”
Still, despite this damning landscape, there may be some room for optimism. Multiple players we spoke to who had no apparent incentive to defend a toxic and abusive culture suggested that things may be improving.
A current Big 12 player told us that he had seen hazing “early on when I first got into college” and that it was “seen more as something that everybody went through as a younger player as some sort of initiation”.
But, as his team in college has progressed, “I could tell that these hazing and bullying incidents got less and less and that there is more of a light shined on the effects of such acts and the mental health side of players.”
Likewise, another former Big 12 player told us, “It was my belief that football had moved past hazing, and it is my belief that hazing has no place in a locker room.”
Perhaps there is room then for some optimism that there may be a more humane future for college football ahead. But, until then, we have Northwestern and the clear evidence that hazing is not simply an artifact of a more brutal past.
It is college football’s present. But it shouldn’t be.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is Associate Professor of Sociology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-hosts of The End of Sport podcast and co-authors of The End of College Football: Exploitation and Harm in the Academy and on the Gridiron (UNC Press, forthcoming 2024).
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
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