Pat Fitzgerald brings a program with momentum to Minneapolis this week for the game tomorrow between his Northwestern Wildcats and the Gophers. Fitzgerald, 35, is coaching a 4-0 Northwestern team and dating back to the start of the 2008 Big Ten season the Wildcats have won a league best nine road games.
Northwestern was on any list of the nation’s worst football teams for much of three decades before Gary Barnett took over as head coach in 1992 and players like Fitzgerald started arriving in Evanston. Fitzgerald was a superb linebacker on Northwestern’s Big Ten championship teams in 1995 and 1996. His heroics helped send the Wildcats to their first Rose Bowl since 1949.
Fitzgerald, who is in the College Football Hall of Fame, became an assistant coach with the Wildcats in 2001. No one could have known then that at age 31 he would succeed head coach Randy Walker after Walker died form a heart attack in June of 2006.
Fitzgerald didn’t have to come home to take the job. A native of the Chicago area and member of the coaching staff who once had been the Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year, Fitzgerald bled Northwestern purple like few people ever will. It may have taken the Northwestern administration five minutes to figure Fitzgerald was the perfect fit to succeed Walker. The passionate Fitzgerald might have needed all of five seconds to say yes.
If a have not football program like private school Northwestern, with limited resources including facilities and fan following, ever hired the right coach it’s Fitzgerald. He’s demonstrated he can coach and because of his passion is much less likely to wander off to a highfalutin job some place else.
Fitzgerald, who has coached the Wildcats to four bowl games in the last five years, has a 31-23 record. He is the first Northwestern coach in almost 50 years to be eight games over .500!
The Fitzgerald era has been characterized by efficient but underrated quarterbacks and the team’s ability to win close games. The latest project, new starter Dan Persa, leads all Division I quarterbacks in completion percentage at 80.2. The Wildcats have won two of their four nonconference games by five points or less.