Initial Controversy and Firing
After initially suspending him two weeks without pay, Northwestern University has fired Head Football Coach Pat Fitzgerald. As the saying goes, “one door closes, another opens.” Enter Mike Kafka.
By now, whether you believe Northwestern acted rashly or reasonably, you know why: The Daily Northwestern reported details of the alleged hazing over the weekend, the internet got hysterical, and, inevitably, the Northwestern President reversed course and fired him even though the extent of what Fitzgerald is believed to have known never changed from the first penalty to the final one.
Fitzgerald’s Legal Battle
Fitzgerald has lawyered up and will likely sue the university for a laundry list of things, including wrongful termination and breach of multiple contracts, including the oral one Fitzgerald and his legal team argue the President of the university made when he and Fitzgerald agreed to the initial two-week suspension.
Smarter, more serious people, including the intrepid student journalists at Northwestern, will suss out the veracity of the allegations and the extent of the trauma and allocate culpability the way serious journalists do.
But, unless part of Fitzgerald’s legal strategy is to get his job back—and stay tuned, it just may be—Northwestern will need to find a replacement for the most accomplished head coach in that program’s history.
Mike Kafka: The Dream Candidate
So, for now, let’s allow ourselves the morally agnostic indulgence of thinking about who should be Northwestern’s next football coach.
Mike Kafka, the current New York Giants Offensive Coordinator and Northwestern alum makes too much sense here. Several outlets have already labeled him the “dream candidate,” and it’s hard to argue. A three-star, dual-threat quarterback out of Chicago’s Catholic League (the same league that produced Donovan McNabb), Kafka was Northwestern’s second-leading rusher as a creatively used run-first backup to C.J. Bachér in 2008 before becoming the Wildcats full-time starter in 2009. That year, a senior co-captain and second team All-Big Ten selection, Kafka threw for over 3,400 yards en route to an 8-5 season capped off by a memorable Outback Bowl performance, where he threw for 532 yards in a 38-35 shootout loss to Auburn.
Mike Kafka’s NFL Journey and Achievements
Selected in the fourth round of the 2010 draft by Andy Reid and the Eagles, Kafka spent two seasons in Philadelphia as a third stringer during Michael Vick’s renaissance/reputational rehabilitation tour. More importantly, he made a lasting impression on Reid, who, after a renaissance of his own in Kansas City, is now arguably considered the preeminent offensive mind in professional football since Bill Walsh. Reid’s standing is invaluable to Mike Kafka’s credibility.
After a grad assistant year at Northwestern, Big Red brought Kafka to Kansas City as an offensive assistant in 2017 and named him quarterbacks coach for the 2018 season. Kafka’s young charge, Patrick Mahomes—by dint of great fortune or great coaching or both—would become the best player at the most valuable position in American sports under Kafka’s tutelage over the next four years. Which made Kafka the most sought-after young prospective offensive coordinator in recent memory after the 2021 season.
Hired to be the Giants’ new OC under Brian Daboll, Mike Kafka turned in what was widely regarded as a spectacular performance, guiding the Giants to 11 wins as a play-caller and their first playoff win in over a decade. But the most potent fuel for Kafka’s skyrocketing head coaching stock, absent his ties to Reid, has been the resurrection of former first-round pick Daniel Jones. The young quarterback, with a dual-threat skill set not too dissimilar from Kafka’s own, had been all but written off. By pretty much everybody. But Kafka seemingly cracked the uncrackable, mentoring Jones into a serviceable, occasionally exceptional, NFL starter.
While Mike Kafka’s effect on Jones undoubtedly surprised some, it did not surprise Andy Reid; coming off his second, legacy-augmenting Super Bowl win, the future hall-of-famer made media rounds endorsing his former QBs coach as the solution to any number of head coaching vacancies.
Before the Arizona Cardinals hired former Eagles Defensive Coordinator Jonathan Gannon, Reid told Paul Schwartz of the New York Post that he’d recommended Mike Kafka to Cards’ owner Michael Bidwell.
“He’s very intelligent, a great human being,” Reid told Schwartz. The quarterback will love him. He’ll challenge him to be even better than he is now. He’ll do a great job and challenge the team. The guys will respond.”
Former pupil Mahomes echoed.
“Coach Kafka is a special person and special coach,” Mahomes told reporters at this past Super Bowl Media Day. “If he gets hired [in Arizona], he’ll get that place turned around.”
If the Northwestern administration’s looking for an endorsement with Big Ten ties, here’s this from Chad Henne, who was not only coached by Mike Kafka as Mahomes’ backup, but played with him, too, when Kafka spent a pre-season as Henne’s backup in Jacksonville.
“I think it’d be awesome [if he became a head coach],” the former Michigan star told reporters at the same Media Day before the Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl. “He can relate to players; he’s obviously been in those situations before. I can’t say enough about him. I loved my time with him….”
Comparisons and Parallels with Previous Scandals
Northwestern’s rebuild will be the toughest in the Big Ten since Penn State reached into the pros and charged then-Patriots Offensive Coordinator Bill O’Brien with leading Penn State out of the nuclear blast radius of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
The parallels are striking. The scandals themselves are categorically similar, and while what happened at Penn State was more unconscionable by several magnitudes, the allegations coming out of Evanston are gross—and disturbingly weird—all the same. O’Brien was mentored by Bill Belichick, Kafka by Reid. The coaches—and their coaching trees—will be fodder for comparison and debate until football ceases to entertain us.
O’Brien did an admirable job at Penn State. He didn’t stay for long but his impact on that program will always be remembered as positively affecting that program’s trajectory in its darkest hour. After seeing what O’Brien was able to accomplish at Penn State—over such a short time—the NFL came calling.
The difference here is that, for Mike Kafka, it’s already been calling. Kafka doesn’t need to do much more to prove he’s ready; he just needs to not disastrously screw up that which the NFL ecosystem perceives him to have already built. He was already a near-miss for jobs in Arizona, Carolina, Houston, and Indianapolis this past offseason, and it’s hard to see his stock dropping unless the Giants offense and Daniel Jones seriously regress.
Which begs the question: why pass up on a present NFL opportunity—or jeopardize a future one—by taking a Northwestern job where winning is inherently harder in any given normal year, to say nothing of how hard it’ll be coming off a bizarrely homoerotic, possibly homophobic hazing scandal?!
The possibility that Mike Kafka has a similar amount of feeling for his alma mater as Fitzgerald is reason enough for Northwestern to push hard for him.
Say what you will about Pat Fitzgerald, that guy had serious loyalty to his school. You don’t give 30 years (combined playing at coaching) to one place without that place occupying a sizable portion of your soul. He took his teams—Northwestern teams—to two Big Ten Championship games. Forget that they had an easier path in the Big Ten West. It’s impossible to argue that Nebraska doesn’t have superior talent year in, year out. How many times have they played for a shot at the Rose Bowl (or a playoff berth) in December, in Indianapolis? Fitzgerald could’ve had any number of higher profile gigs—either at bigger football schools or in the NFL—ages ago; he preferred to be THE guy at Northwestern. Maybe that led to whatever complacency may have contributed to the scandal we still see unfolding before us. It’s certainly not unprecedented in big-time college football to see beloved coaches become TOO big, TOO comfortable.
Whomever succeeds Fitzgerald will not have that luxury. Not at Northwestern. Not for a long while.
Considerations for Northwestern’s Next Coach
But they will need someone who, like Fitzgerald, will not treat Northwestern as a stepping-stone job. In many ways Bill O’Brien was an unassailably great hire for Penn State immediately post-Sandusky. The results speak for themselves: Big Ten Coach of the Year right out of the gate; he celebrated the players who stayed by recognizing their commitment with names on the backs of the jerseys—a break with tradition at precisely the right time, a master stroke! He said and did all the right things—and was gone the second the Texans called him after the 2013 season. Of course, O’Brien was not a Penn State guy (although, ironically, he played football at Brown, just like Joe Paterno). Which, at the time he was hired, was maybe the job’s biggest pre-requisite; every Paterno protégé was adjudged radioactive, fruit of the same poisonous tree.
But had he been part of the “Penn State family,” a Paterno acolyte, would he have bolted Happy Valley so quickly?
It’s hard to know; the being an alum thing isn’t dispositive. Exhibit A: Jim Harbaugh. Each off-season Harbaugh’s rumored to be everything but Michigan’s coach the next season. Fitzgerald though, while presenting as similarly ambitious and maniacal, was no philanderer; his unshakable commitment to Northwestern was perceived as a given. Lifetime contract? Where do I sign! It was hard not to see him as on the path to becoming Northwestern’s version of Joe Paterno. The tragic irony of their similar un-doings hits with force.
But Northwestern is not the same as Penn State. They’re fundamentally different. The academic standards for players make winning much more difficult. It’s going to take someone who knows how to recruit to Northwestern and how to be competitive there.
As a short-term fix, a one-year bridge, David Shaw or Ken Niamatalolo, the former head coaches at Stanford and Navy, respectively, would be interesting and reasonable. Both won at prestigious institutions with rigorous academic standards. David Cutcliffe is the only coach in the modern era to have any modicum of sustained success in Duke’s similar environment. The former quarterback whisperer at Tennessee and Ole Miss legitimized an historically moribund Blue Devils’ program for about a five-year period in the mid-2010s.
Any one of these three would be a great bridge to someone more…”dynamic and energetic” (read: younger), with the experience and credibility to convince 18-22 boys that they can come to Northwestern, win, and get more than a fair shot at the NFL. With Gen-Z, if your guy comes with an endorsement from Mahomes, that should be all recruits need to hear to buy in.
This is not Iowa State’s Matt Campbell, nor Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson, nor Eastern Michigan’s Chris Creighton, who’s bound to one school by name and another by contract and neither of them are, or will be, Northwestern.
Chances are Northwestern won’t officially appoint a new head coach until after this coming season, during which the team will presumably be led by an interim, perhaps one of the one-year bridge candidates proposed above. Until an interim is named, David Braun, the defensive coordinator this past year under Fitzgerald, is leading the program, and, in theory, he could be the interim. Though, the whole “buck stops here” rhetoric notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine any parts of the body (Fitzgerald’s staff, for the metaphorically challenged) surviving beyond the 2023 season now that the head’s been severed.
A Glimpse into the Future
In the meantime, Fitzgerald’s legal team, per the Chicago Tribune, seems poised to pursue multiple causes of action, including breach of contract claims and potentially defamation. In theory it’s possible some sort of negotiated settlement could see Fitzgerald “win” his job back, but acrimony borne of legal disputes usually results in that being an unworkable outcome.
A hefty monetary settlement is much more likely for Fitzgerald, especially since Northwestern fired him “for cause,” despite the fact that their own attorney’s investigation found no evidence Fitzgerald was aware of the hazing. If Fitzgerald’s attorneys can prove he was fired for cause after public pressure instead of new evidence, Northwestern could be on the hook for the remainder of his contract ($40 million), plus sizable damages for harm done to his reputation.
But all that’s at the end of what’s likely a long road ahead. Think of how long it took for Kevin Ollie and UConn to settle; Ollie was fired in 2014!
Ollie’s back in coaching now, just as Fitzgerald will be—richer and in a job that will never be as meaningful to him. These dark ironies bring to mind the words of perhaps the most celebrated German-language novelist of the 20th century who once wrote, “There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, just not for us.” If Kevin Ollie and Pat Fitzgerald were to ever have a conversation, maybe that sentiment is shared between them, in a dark but honest moment.
So but if not with them, then where does that hope reside and who, pray tell, might be the source of that hope? If you haven’t caught on already, he shares a last name with that darkly brilliant German writer.