Northwestern fires football coach Pat Fitzgerald amid hazing claims - ESPN

Northwestern has fired coach Pat Fitzgerald amid allegations of widespread hazing within the football program, university president Michael Schill announced Monday.

«The head coach is ultimately responsible for the culture of his team,» Schill wrote in an open letter to the school community. «The hazing we investigated was widespread and clearly not a secret within the program, providing Coach Fitzgerald with the opportunity to learn what was happening. Either way, the culture in Northwestern Football, while incredible in some ways, was broken in others.»

The firing of Fitzgerald comes after the school announced Friday that he'd be suspended without pay for two weeks this summer following the conclusion of a university-commissioned investigation into allegations made by a former Northwestern football player. The school said the investigation, which began in January and was conducted by an outside law firm, did not find «sufficient» evidence that the coaching staff knew about ongoing hazing — though there were «significant opportunities» to find out about it.

The school then reversed course Saturday night after The Daily Northwestern published a story detailing allegations from the former player who described specific instances of hazing and sexual abuse. The report also indicated that Fitzgerald «may have known that hazing took place.»

That led Schill to write an open letter to the university community in which he said that he "may have erred in weighing the appropriate sanction" for Fitzgerald and acknowledged focusing «too much on what the report concluded (Fitzgerald) didn't know and not enough on what he should have known.» Schill went on to say that he planned to speak with university leadership, members of the