INDIANAPOLIS — Northwestern interim football coach David Braun tried to portray the job description for the kind of defensive assistant he wants to hire, someone who won’t be cowed by recent hazing allegations and related lawsuits that currently dog the program.
“We’re in a difficult situation,” Braun said Wednesday during a session with reporters at Big Ten media days. “It’s going to take a special person to say, ‘I’m going to leave my job and I’m going to run to the fire.’”
Braun didn’t realize at the time, but he could’ve been describing himself.
He was named defensive coordinator in January, and what was already a “whirlwind” process of adjusting to the move from North Dakota State has since become a hurricane.
In the last three weeks, an investigation of hazing allegations within the football program has exploded into a full-blown scandal that also has enveloped the baseball and volleyball teams, fueled at least five lawsuits by former players and cost baseball coach Jim Foster and football coach Pat Fitzgerald — Braun’s boss — their jobs.
“I thought I was running to my ultimate dream job I hoped to be in until Coach Fitz retired,” Braun said. “Honestly, I didn’t think I was running to the fire.
“I’m leaning on my faith a great deal,” he added, choking up momentarily. “I truly believe in my journey and my family’s journey, that the Lord has marked my steps from a standpoint of putting me in situations that have prepared me for this situation.”
But there’s no preparing for a situation like Northwestern football’s current maelstrom, and it showed at key moments this week.
It was evident in some of the comments Braun offered in defense of the school’s reforms — and the people entrusted with that makeover — vacillating between artful dodging and naiveté.
It also showed in what wasn’t said — and who wasn’t there to say it.
Rutgers and Indiana coaches and players could show up at Lucas Oil Stadium and just talk football. But given the stakes, Northwestern’s media days sessions required more.
The three players scheduled to appear backed out so that questions about the scandal wouldn’t “distract” from a football season that borders on a lost cause anyway (though don’t try telling Braun that).
NU President Michael Schill hasn’t faced public questioning — except for a sitdown this week with The Daily Northwestern — since his statements justifying why he initially suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks, then had a quick about-face and fired him three days later.
Former athletic director Jim Phillips, now Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner, declined to address the Northwestern situation during his conference’s media days aside from saying that he never “condoned or tolerated inappropriate conduct” and that he made “health and safety of all student-athletes” his highest priority.
Current AD Derrick Gragg has limited his exposure to interviews with ESPN and Big Ten Network, during which he familiarized us with the phrase “legal complexities” when asked about the absence of high-ranking NU administrators in front of a microphone or camera.
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Nor would Gragg dig into the ugly details of allegations made to an independent investigator.
“We’re not discussing the report and the process,” Gragg said. “And I want to be careful about what I say on the record regarding whether it’s the report or the process.”
Gragg did tell ESPN that all NU teams will attend mandatory anti-hazing seminars. But he didn’t elaborate on how that differs from the policies and measures they already had in place — which clearly failed.
Say this for Braun: At least he sat on the podium and took the heat for 45 minutes — and it’s not even his mess.
“If I’m going to ask our players to stare this thing down, take on this adversity and come together, it was absolutely critical that I showed up and stared this down and started to pave a roadmap for how we’re going to move forward,” he said.
That roadmap, however, was pockmarked with statements that seemed misguided at best, tone-deaf at worst.
Braun is trusting reforms to the people who — if any of the allegations are true — don’t deserve that benefit of the doubt. He said he’s relying on “perfect alignment” between the administration, coaches and players to ensure compliance.
He later walked back that lofty standard, acknowledging: “To think that you’re going to have full control over 100 adolescent young men, or for that matter an entire program and all the pieces that go into that, isn’t realistic. You’ve got to lean into making sure that you feel like you’re populating your organization with the right people.”
Some of the Northwestern upperclassmen tasked with helping reform the culture may have been involved in or were passive about the alleged hazing. Braun had no issue with that contradiction.
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“I can’t speak to what happened prior to my arrival; I can only speak to my experiences,” he said. “And everything I’ve experienced gives me great conviction that I’m rolling with a group that will take this thing head on and come together to do something really special.”
He took a similar tack with associate head coach Matt MacPherson and strength coach Jay Hooten, whom former players have accused of witnessing or participating in hazing rituals.
“Since I arrived on Jan. 16 of this year, I have seen nothing but a (supportive) coaching staff,” Braun said. “And the two names that you mentioned are guys that have rallied around our players and been there for them. I have full confidence in the men that are in that facility right now.”
In fact, Braun singled out the strength and conditioning staff for helping retain players who might have bolted for the transfer portal.
While Schill expressed affection for Fitzgerald in the statement announcing his firing, even he said the former coach had plenty of opportunities to know what was going on in his locker room.
Braun didn’t have to throw his predecessor under the bus, but he went out of his way to heap praise on him.
“I’ve admired Coach Fitz for a long time, and everything that I’ve experienced since I arrived aligned with everything I believe him to be,” he said. “What you see is what you get. And he’s a man that stood for the holistic development of young men and prioritizes family, things that I admire and look up to.”
What would the former players levying claims of abuse say to the assertion that Fitzgerald stood for “holistic development”?
Braun seemed to grant amnesty in his mind to any alleged transgressions that occurred before his hiring. He said he purposefully hasn’t read the full report by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey that the university commissioned in December.
“I’ve read the executive summary,” he said. “And then there’s things that have been brought to my attention that I absolutely had to know.”
In this case, the devil is in the details.
Hickey interviewed 50 people currently or formerly associated with the football program and reviewed “hundreds of thousands of emails and player survey data dating back to 2014,” according to the summary that was made public. However, “due to confidentiality, the specific findings (were) not detailed.”
But former players have elaborated on the allegations in public statements and media reports.
Former quarterback Lloyd Yates, who has filed a lawsuit against Northwestern, described one punishment ritual called “running.”
“We would get ambushed by, you know, 10 different guys, and then they would come hold you down,” he told the Tribune. “They would put you in the doggy-style position and proceed to dry-hump you. Guys would take turns, and it’s just a very degrading, dehumanizing, embarrassing act.”
According to Yates’ lawsuit, the “Shrek Squad,” a group of upperclassmen wearing horror and animal masks, “would go around to various Northwestern football players’ dorm rooms and torment their victims. The ‘Shrek Squad’ would then pick players up and ‘run’ them.”
CBS college football analyst Rick Neuheisel, the former coach at Colorado, Washington and UCLA, told the Tribune: “It’s certainly a behind-the-scenes look, and it’s not the look that we want. None of us are proud of any of that stuff that’s going on there. That’s ridiculous and should have been stopped long, long ago. And I hope that they’re making the necessary steps to getting it stopped forever.
“That being said, it’s up to the kids that are on that Northwestern team ... to say, we’re going to change the narrative, we’re going to find a way to have the kind of season that we’ll be proud of.”
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Neuheisel said he advised Braun to trust himself — sound counsel for someone who described himself as a “people pleaser.”
Braun has to lead this reform and follow his instincts. He comes off as earnest and no-nonsense. And his hands are clean — certainly cleaner than anyone else tasked with making over the program.
He hit the mark when he said he has to be “fiercely intentional about making sure that I’m observing everything ... at meals, in the weight room, walking around the facility.”
“How do you build trust? How do you develop culture?” Braun said. “It’s time. It’s getting to know one another. If that’s one less hour of film for me, maybe someone else has to pick up the slack. But the more I can be with our players, the better off we’re going to be.”
Braun was asked if he considered turning down the interim job and the mind-bending pressure on and off the field that comes with it.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I hope I’ve been raised in a way that I’m the guy that people can count on, that I’ll stand in the fire with them.
“I’ll run to the fire.”