Fitzgerald: Union push unified Northwestern
No matter how this season unfolds, Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald insisted there is no more unified team than his Wildcats.
For that, he credits the players' push to unionize.
Fitzgerald said he's "proud of the maturity" his players displayed as the story unfolded.
As the Big Ten opened its annual two-day media event on Monday, some big issues hung over the college landscape.
A four-team playoff system to determine a national champion is being implemented and the conference would love to be represented in it. Ohio State, for one, hopes to be in the picture after going 24-2 overall and 16-0 in regular-season conference play in its first two years under coach Urban Meyer.
There's the push by the five power conferences - the Big Ten, ACC, SEC, Big 12 and Pac-12 - for autonomy to make their own NCAA rules.
And, of course, there's the union movement. At the center of it is Northwestern, with former quarterback Kain Colter leading the push to form the first one for college athletes.
"As I look back and reflect upon the experiences that our young men went through and our entire football program went through, that's what jumps out to me is their maturity," Fitzgerald said. "As we visited throughout the whole offseason, I believe there's no more unified football program in the country. We've been through more since probably January than most, and it's been nothing but a positive and nothing more than unifying in our locker room and throughout our entire football program. So I think we're a leg up from that standpoint.
"And as I look at where we go in the future, hopefully that will just be something that we can draw upon."
Fitzgerald said he has talked to Colter "a handful of times, especially at graduation" in recent months. Asked if they discussed the union movement, Fitzgerald laughed and said, "No."
A regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled in March that Northwestern's full scholarship players can bargain with the school as employees. Players voted in April on whether to form the first union for college athletes, but the result is not known because the NLRB impounded the ballots pending an appeal by the university and a possible court fight. Northwestern urged the NLRB to overturn the ruling this month, holding up the football program as exemplifying the university's integration of athletics and academics.
"This was a little more than Xs and Os," linebacker Collin Ellis said. "This is life. This is, 'What do you value?' "
What could have been a divisive issue for the football team had the opposite effect, Fitzgerald said.
"As you look at (players' comments), it was nothing negative about anything about our program," he said. "It was the maturity they showed to shed light on some things that maybe they had heard about what may be happening at other institutions."
Players who would have assumed more vocal leadership roles in training camp stepped up sooner. One was quarterback Trevor Siemian.
He made his feelings clear in the spring, saying he did not support unionization.
"It helped people connect in different ways than they had," Siemian said. "On a higher level, I think. We were talking about some things that have a significant impact on the landscape of college football. I'm 22, and talking to 17 and 18-year-old freshmen about things that probably weren't brought up in a (high school) locker room. We're connecting all over the place. In that sense, doing it, you get to know people more, get to know what makes them tick."