The 2026 Northwestern Essay #7--On Pat Fitzgerald and the Guardians of the Universe

Northwestern (4-1) faces off this week against Michigan State (2-4) in East Lansing.  The game starts at noon Eastern and can be seen on Peacock, which is the NBC streaming service.  

The subplot of this game is that the new coach of Michigan State is Pat Fitzgerald.  Pat Fitzgerald played for Northwestern from 1993-1996, which coincided with the renaissance of the Northwestern program and the trip to the Rose Bowl in January 1996.  Certainly in the modern era of Northwestern football, he is the most decorated player in the history of the program.  In 2001, he became an assistant coach at Northwestern.  In June 2006, Northwestern head coach Randy Walker passed away suddenly and Fitzgerald became the head coach.  He was Northwestern's head coach from the 2006 through 2022 seasons, amassing a record of 110-101.   His 110 wins are the most in school history.  At the time, it was widely believed that the only reason Northwestern was at all relevant was because of Fitzgerald--more on that in a bit.

Before the start of the 2023 season, Fitzgerald was fired by Northwestern in connection to an investigation of hazing in the program, hazing that was both physical and sexual in nature.  After being fired, Fitzgerald sued Northwestern and that lawsuit has settled under circumstances that suggest that Fitzgerald more or less won.  This opened the door for him to take the Michigan State job.  This game will be the first game in which Fitzgerald is facing Northwestern in his career.

Since this is the most relevant element of this game, I would like to give my thoughts on the Pat Fitzgerald Experience at Northwestern.  To do so, I want to discuss Lanterns.

I am not a Marvel guy and I have never been a Marvel guy.  There are a number of the Marvel movies that I have enjoyed (I particularly like the first Iron Man and Captain America movies) but there are also a number of the Marvel movies (even in the "good era" of Marvel movies i.e. the Infinity War saga) that I just never bothered to go see.  I am not interested in and not likely to see Doomsday in the theaters, especially because it is coming out on the same day as Dune 3 and that's a no brainer choice for me.  

It's also not really correct to say I am a DC guy, though if I had to pick I would definitely pick the DC side of the aisle.  Part of this is that many people who are DC people are really Batman fans, and I think Batman is . . . fine.  The most accurate way to say it is that there are two DC properties that I really care about.  The primary one that matters to me, and I think I am going to write about this in a future post, is Superman.  But the other one is the Green Lantern.  For whatever set of reasons, Green Lantern always captivated me, especially the gonzo space opera elements of the stories.

For those of us who are Green Lantern fans (there are dozens of us!), we have been eating good over the last couple of months.  Lanterns, which just finished its eight episode run on HBO, was really great (except for the last episode, which I have very mixed feelings about). It did a great job of providing its own interesting take on the mythos while still staying inside the broad boundaries of the world defined by the comics. It didn't shy away from the gonzo elements of Green Lantern but did not bury you in lore and spectacle (a problem with the Ryan Reynolds movie from 2011).  The acting (especially Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre) was great.

But the real key to the show is that way that it captured and demonstrated the real through-line of the Green Lantern stories.  Because multiple people have been Green Lanterns (six different humans as of the current comics continuity, plus all of the aliens), while there are definitely character-driven stories in Green Lantern it is not the focus of the series.  No, the focus of Green Lantern is on what it means to be a Green Lantern and the subjective experience for those who take on this job.

Imagine you wake up one day and are handed, completely out of the blue, this incredible job opportunity.  This job empowers you to travel, and we are not talking about going to LA once a month--you are now able to literally explore the entirety of the universe.  You are given this ring that let's you do basically anything, at least conceptually.  You are also given responsibility and a sense of duty to the people around you, which if you are the sort of person that is given this opportunity is a definite positive.  Moreover, you come to find out you were picked for this job because of your soft skills--depending on the framing, some combination of incredible willpower, fearlessness, and creativity. So you are probably not someone who was necessarily a big deal prior to this job opportunity, and this is a recognition of something about yourself that you always knew was there but never got noticed.

So, being a Green Lantern is great.  There is, however, a problem, and it is one that doesn't come into focus until long after you have become enmeshed in this job.  Your bosses, in the form of the Guardians of the Universe, are the most toxic managers imaginable.  They routinely keep obviously mission-critical information from you for no discernible reason.  You come to understand that much of the work you are doing on a day-to-day basis is the result of problems your bosses created but refuse to admit to (notably, as Lanterns explores, your unacknowledged predecessors the Manhunters). They spend a bunch of time undermining you in various ways and playing you off against other Green Lanterns, again for no clear reason.  They have on at least one occasion tried to replace you with essentially mind controlled drones.  It's a lot.

At a certain point, you ask yourself the question--why are these folks like this?  Why are they doing all of this?  And you come up with two qualities that the Guardians possess that are the engine that generates all of these problems.  The first is that the Guardians absolutely refuse to admit that they are wrong, ever.  Errors are for lesser beings and the Guardians are definitely not lesser beings, so if something went wrong it must be either someone else's fault or inevitable but in any event certainly not their fault.  The second problem is that, to repurpose a phrase, the Guardians Insist on Themselves.  They are absolutely convinced that they are absolutely necessary within their particular context.  And since, in the case of the Guardians, their "particular context" is "the universe as a whole," they see themselves as the irreducible protagonists of reality.  You, despite your significant powers, are seen as pawns to be used and discarded as part of the Greater Project, which really boils down to the Guardians themselves doing what they want to do/think is best.

The catch with that second piece is that the Guardians are so powerful that they have made themselves actually the protagonists of reality.  They define the rules under which everyone operates, and those rules position themselves in the center of things, and so the Guardians are always going to be at the center of things.  As a result, you as a Green Lantern are just stuck.  It is impossible to imagine a version of this job without the Guardians.  So long as you want the job (and, remember, the core of the job is awesome) you have no choice but to accept the Guardians and their bullshit. It is the price to pay for being a Green Lantern, and this reality is the core tension.

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I would never purport to speak for Northwestern fans in general.  I will say that, circa 2017 and later, my relationship to Pat Fitzgerald was very similar to the relationship a Green Lantern has to the Guardians of the Universe.  Pat Fitzgerald very intentionally made himself the protagonist of the reality of Northwestern football.  He never, ever, admitted that he did anything wrong or took any responsibility for anything.  Many of the problems and frustrations with being a Northwestern fan were caused by Fitzgerald's decisions, directly or indirectly.  And yet it was fun to be a Northwestern fan, and so I just accepted the inevitability of Fitzgerald as our coach and definer of reality.  The only option was to stop being a Northwestern fan, and I didn't want to do that.

And, then, he was just taken off the board suddenly and without warning.  Critically, reality did not collapse.  2024 was rough, but Fitzgerald had seasons at the end of his time that were worse--his last four seasons were 3-9, the weird COVID year (albeit with a trip to the BigTen championship game), 3-9, and 1-11.  Since then, we have had two winning seasons out of 3, and we appear to be on the way to another one this season.  We are more interesting and it is more fun to follow the program in the post-Fitzgerald era than in the period immediately before Fitzgerald left.  And we are the same sort of program we were under Fitzgerald--we have not become some sort of weird outlaw program that is unpleasant to be a fan of.  

Again with the caveat that I don't speak for all Northwestern fans, for a guy that was there for so long and was so important to the program, I think Northwestern has basically moved on from Fitzgerald.  I assume this game means a lot of Fitzgerald, but I don't think it is going to be particularly meaningful for Northwestern and Northwestern fans.  This is a big game because Northwestern is relevant in the BigTen race and we need this win before we head into the really tough part of the schedule.  And it will be weird to see Fitzgerald on the other sideline doing his schtick regarding the other team.  But Fitzgerald doesn't really matter anymore.

Part of the lack of concern is that it is abundantly clear to me that Fitzgerald has not changed one bit from his time as Northwestern coach.  He hired back the offensive coordinator he had at the end of his NU time, who was frankly not very good; Braun instead went out and hired Chip Kelly who has materially changed the NU offense.  The Michigan State Fitzgerald experience is going to be very similar to the Northwestern Fitzgerald experience, save for the fact that I cannot imagine he is going to be able to establish himself as the Center of the Universe the way he did at NU.  I suspect Fitzgerald will have at least one surprisingly good year where Michigan State upsets a bunch of people.  But this year has been very bad for Michigan State, in pretty much the same way that the late Fitzgerald-at-Northwestern seasons were bad.  Eventually, he will get fired, because that's what happens to football coaches.  Unless of course he is still encouraging/looking the other way when weird hazing happens during pre-season camp, in which case he will fired more quickly (hopefully).

Either way, I think Northwestern fans have moved on.  Maybe Fitzgerald wasn't the protagonist of reality like he thought he was.