Pat Fitzgerald has been fired. (Supposedly).
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"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is sometimes hard to verify their authenticity." -Abraham Lincoln
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he has always come across as a stand up guy.. this seems very confusing to me.
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NfW did a quick designation of newly hired defensive coordinator, David Braun, to HC yesterday. He's had no coaching experience at the P5 level and his resume would not make him a candidate by any reasonable standards set by the rest of the conference he's going to be competing with. What it did do, apparently, is to avoid a wholesale coaching staff change. For now, everyone else stays. It's going to be a very tough job for Braun with all the players wanting Fitz back.
I'm still flabbergasted re the Fitzgerald firing. Now the Baseball Coach is gone. Obviously, there are young athletes sensitive, I won't say overly because that's not PC, to typical training activities that are embedded in sports culture. Harken back to the shit-fest that went down over treatment of Marine recruits at USMC east and west coast Bootcamps. A recruit died when all of it started so a different level of inappropriate training activity but, after that happened and HQMC thought they had addressed it, in came dozens of allegations that 18yo recruits were victims of abuse. It got out of hand with HQMC having no alternative but to address the long standing tradition of tough Drill Sergeants some of whom had no-shit psychiatric personality disorders and should have never been given the role assigned to them. All of that has died down with several measures put in place to insure Drill Sergeants were screened before being assigned that MOS and there were officers present during fielded training. It's worked out. Marine Boot Camp is physically and mentally difficult. There are ways to make it so without endangering recruits.
I'd like to see the investigation that led to Fitzgerald's dismissal. I'm sure it will get leaked as FOIA won't apply here but we're dealing with young athletes of a very different generation with cultures that I think most of us here would not want to deal with if we were coaching HS or CFB. Like training young USMC recruits to face the rigors of combat and stay alive doing it has many similarities to training football players in controlled mayhem on the gridiron. Slights, tough words or discipline to train football players to compete certainly can be interpreted by 18yo star athletes as demeaning or harmful. I suspect that's what happened here but have no inside information to back that up. But anyone whose followed BT football for a long time knows that what goes on to shape competitive athletes to win isn't a touchy-feely kind of training.Mission to CFB's National Championship accomplished. But the shine on the NC Trophy is embarrassingly wearing off. It's M B-Ball ..... or hockey or volley ball or name your college sport favorite time ...... until next year.
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I read that the hazing included situations where underclassmen were forced to submit to 'dry humping' as part of punishment for messing up in practice. There were also actions where those same people were required to submit to other actions while naked. I don't believe it was anything that could be considered criminal, but it was definitely degrading. I have no idea how this was supposed to make them better football players.
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As far as a permanent HC replacement, I'd say Paul Chryst deserves a phone call. He knows the Big Ten, and he knows that area of the conference. He could easily draw recruits out of Wisconsin to NW, and he'd have the talent rich Chicago area right in front of him. The man can coach."in order to lead America you must love America"
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