It's time for Fitz to clean house

It was fitting that Illinois drove the final nail in Northwestern’s 2022 season by hammering the Wildcats 41-3 on Saturday.

The Illini, in their second year under head coach Bret Bielema, are heading to a bowl game. The Wildcats, in their 17th year under head coach Pat Fitzgerald, are heading into an offseason of uncertainty, soul-searching and, hopefully, drastic change.

Illinois has now won the Land of Lincoln Trophy over Northwestern two years in a row, by the cumulative score of 88-17. The Illini beat the Wildcats in all three phases, with talent that, for the most part, is lesser than Northwestern’s, even if it didn’t look like that on the field.

The Wildcats turned the ball over six times to become the team with the most turnovers (31) in the nation. They often looked like they were going through the motions, rather than playing in a rivalry game. The loss was their 11th straight, the program’s longest losing streak since 1989.

Fitzgerald, a coach that often looked like he was going through the motions this year, too, is known for being loyal to coaches and players throughout his career in Evanston, at times to a fault. But now it’s time for him to be loyal to something else: Northwestern. He needs to do the right thing for the program and clean house.

It needs to start at the top, with replacing both of his coordinators. After that, everyone and everything is fair game. Fitzgerald needs to evaluate and make decisions on position coaches, as well as his strength and recruiting staffs. He needs to re-evaluate his roster and look at where he can add key pieces in the transfer portal to make the team more competitive immediately.

In short, Fitzgerald must look at the entire operation like it’s his first day on campus. He needs to blow it up and start over because something is very, very wrong.

Fitzgerald has hinted the last couple weeks that he knows that changes are necessary to get the program back to competing for championships. He said that he would be evaluating his program “at a macro-level” this week, though you have to think that he’s made up his mind on some things already.

Fitzgerald said that he doesn’t need to change the program’s culture, just their results.

“I don’t think we need to flip a culture, I think the culture is strong,” he said. “I think we need to flip winning and [do] what winners do. I haven’t had a chance to sit back and exhale, but going into the last month of the season, turnover battle, making explosive plays and eliminating explosive plays, making tackles, breaking tackles, fundamental football.”

Keep in mind that Northwestern's implosion this year came at a time when the Big Ten West was abysmal, probably the worst it will be. Purdue won the division with a 6-3 league record. Nebraska and Wisconsin both hired new head coaches over the weekend. The additions of Matt Ruhle and Luke Fickell, respectively, will likely make things tougher in the division.

Recommending that Fitzgerald fire some of his assistant coaches is not something we take lightly. We’re talking about these coaches’ livelihoods, the means by which they support their families. They are good men who have had success in their careers.

But offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian and defensive coordinator Jim O’Neil have earned their pink slips over the last two seasons as the Wildcats fell from No. 10 in the AP poll at the end of 2020 to most likely the worst program in the Power Five this season.

O’Neil has been the fans’ whipping boy for the entirety of his two years on campus. He got off on the wrong foot when Michigan State’s Kenny Walker III took the first snap against his defense 75 yards for a touchdown in the 2021 season opener and never seemed to recover.

The Wildcats had trouble stopping the run (111th in the nation this season) and teams repeatedly victimized them for big plays. His “star" five-DB alignment seemed to be the exact opposite of predecessor Mike Hankwitz’s bend-but-don’t-break, Cover-4 system.

The last straw may have been against Iowa, when the worst offense in the nation scored all four times they had the ball in the first half to build a 20-0 lead and exceed its per-game averages for both yards and points. The Hawkeyes went on to a 31-13 win, and even the relentlessly positive Fitzgerald failed to find a single positive after that game. He may have made up his mind about O’Neil right there.

O’Neil, some 30 years younger than Hankwitz, proved himself to be an outstanding recruiter during his time on staff, which was a big reason he was hired in the first place. Several commits told WildcatReport that his presentations comparing their skills sets to individual NFL players a resounding impact on their decision process.

Will sacking O’Neil cause any decommitments from Northwestern’s 2023 class, the highest rated of Fitzgerald’s career? It’s possible. But it’s a risk they’ll have to take because it’s time to move on.

As much flack as he has taken from fans and media, at least O’Neil can say his unit improved from last season. It’s even gotten better in the last few weeks. But Northwestern's average points per game allowed in either of his two seasons was worse than any full season since 2010.

Bajakian's offense, on the other hand, has only gotten worse. Northwestern ranked 128th out of 131 teams in scoring this season at 13.8 points per game. Once a team hit double figures the last few weeks, it felt like the game was over.

You can chalk up the poor performances against Purdue and Illinois at the end of the season to having to start quarterback Cole Freeman, a fourth-string walkon, due to injuries. But the truth is the Wildcats couldn’t do much with Ryan Hilinski or Brendan Sullivan behind center, either. The Cats scored more than 13 points just once since September, and that was when they had an extra week to prepare and threw a couple of wrinkles and a new starting quarterback (Sullivan) at Maryland.

The Cats put up more than 500 yards of offense against Nebraska and Duke to start the season, but then never hit even 400 yards again. They reached the 300-yard mark just once over the last five games.

Unlike O’Neil, Bajakian’s career in Evanston started with a bang, a 43-point explosion in a 2020 season-opening win over Maryland. But even with grad transfer quarterback Peyton Ramsey at the helm that season, the offense was mediocre at best, and only got worse over the next two years, going from 24.7 to 13.8 points per game.

To put those numbers in perspective, previous offensive coordinator Mick McCall’s final Northwestern team, in 2019, scored 16.3 points per game. He was fired at the end of the season.

You can say that Bajakian hasn’t had a bona fide quarterback to run his system, but that’s at least partially on him, too. He hasn’t done well recruiting or developing quarterbacks.

He couldn’t turn transfers Hunter Johnson (the No. 2 quarterback in the 2017 class) or Ryan Hilinski (No. 3 in 2019) into serviceable QBs. He also wasn’t able to land any of his top high school recruiting targets since he’s been in Evanston.

His first commit, Carl Richardson, was added just before signing day, and he was passed over in favor of Freeman over the last two weeks. Sullivan, Bajakian’s second recruit, has shown some promise but is a long way from a finished product. Jack Lausch, another very late recruiting addition, got his first real action in garbage time on Saturday night.

If Fitzgerald makes the move to replace Bajakian, he should also consider shuffling his staff and hiring a full-time quarterbacks coach. Something needs to be done to address the most important position on the field because in three of the past four years the play at the position has been subpar. The Wildcats also haven't been able to recruit and develop a solid Big Ten signal caller in-house since Clayton Thorson, who arrived in 2014.

With success in both college (Central Michigan, Cincinnati, Tennessee and Boston College) and the NFL (Tampa Bay), Bajakian was a good hire. It just hasn’t worked out for either side.

Firing both coordinators will mean Fitzgerald will have his work cut out for him this offseason. But he's done it before: in 2008, he brought in both Hankwitz and McCall after he fired DC Greg Colby and OC Garrick McGee left the program for Arkansas.

How far Fitzgerald will go beyond the two coordinators is anyone’s guess. But that’s a good place to start.

It’s incredible how quickly Fitzgerald’s program has unraveled. He looked to be at the height of his powers in 2020, when he captured his second Big Ten West championship in three years and the highest final ranking for the program since 1995.

But since then, the Cats have won just four of 24 games, including two of 18 contests in Big Ten play. That’s just not enough of a return on investment for the $270 million the athletic department spent on the Walter Athletic Center, and the $800 million it will soon spend to raze and rebuild Ryan Field.

To whom much is given, much is expected. Fitzgerald has been given just about everything he needs to compete with the big boys. It’s time for the iconic coach to act like a big boy and make the changes necessary to meet those expectations.