Backtracking

 These are not the fun days at Northwestern University, where a successful football program and its revered coach have been found lacking. And it doesn't help when the president of the university, in his own oopsie way, has been found lacking, too.

An explanation is in order.

It seems a whistleblower came forward not long ago with a sordid tale of the sexualized hazing of freshman football players. These included something the whistleblower called "running," which apparently involved a freshman being held down while eight or 10 upperclassmen had their way with him in a "sexualized" way. You can interpret that any way you want, and you'd likely be right.

In any case, it was characterized as a regular occurrence, which of course is profoundly dismaying for an institution that prides itself on its integrity. And so the university leaped into action, suspending longtime head coach Pat Fitzgerald, canceling preseason practices in Kenosha, Wis. (where some of this sick stuff allegedly took place) and appointing a locker room monitor independent of Fitzgerald and his staff.

Oopsie.

Oopsie, because yesterday Northwestern president Michael Schill sent out a letter to the NU community saying that, um, they might have jumped the gun a bit. And not because they found the allegations false or punished Fitzgerald too harshly.

No, sir. Now Schill thinks Coach's punishment wasn't harsh enough.

"In determining an appropriate penalty for the head coach, I focused too much on what the report concluded he didn't know and not enough on what he should have known," Schill wrote. "As the head coach of one of our athletic programs, coach Fitzgerald is not only responsible for what happens with the program but also must take great care to uphold our institutional commitment to the student experience ... 

"Clearly, he failed to uphold that commitment."

Also clearly?

That Schill should have given all this a few more seconds thought.

But because he didn't, he comes off as a vacillating twit who rushed to judgment because oh my God our football program is infested with pervs and I have to do something fast. This seems not only to have sprung from an urgency (panic?) to blunt embarrassing publicity, but as a reaction to the lightning judgment of social media, which has never met a knee it wouldn't jerk.

I could be way off base about that. But I don't think so.

Either way, the backtracking is not a good look. That Schill got it absolutely right here only slightly mitigates the fact it took him two swings to do so.

Yes, a college coach is responsible for everything that happens in his program. He sets the tone, he establishes the culture, he's the cop who punishes any deviation from that culture. 

So if Fitzgerald didn't know about the alleged hazing, he wasn't doing his job. And if he did know, and didn't properly address it, he wasn't doing his job, either.

That should have dawned on Schill sooner rather than later. But you know what they say.

Haste makes waste. Or oopsie.