Lincicome: Welcome back to the scandal party, Northwestern

The general agreement, voiced and lamented, is that Northwestern is better than this when obviously it is not. It is just another jock factory when it comes down to it, just not a very good one.

Scandals happen in the best places and, let's all agree, Northwestern is one of the best places, a bit of a consistent pushover where muscles matter, with the occasional success more an aberration than an expectation.

The best football coach Northwestern has ever had is fired and the baseball coach is likewise sent packing not for losing games, which is the way it is usually done, but for reasons vague and vain, because Northwestern is better than this.

As college sports scandals go this one will be buried in the general pile of misdemeanors, somewhere between Ohio State's trinkets for tattoos and Bob Knight's abuse of furniture. Coaches have lost jobs for being bullies and for either ignoring or encouraging misbehavior. So, welcome back to the party Northwestern.

As we know, scandals have happened in Evanston before, point shaving, betting, perjury, and being both a witness and a reporter at the time, I shook my head and sighed, Northwestern is better than this.

And here we are again, more confusing than the usual college crimes of illegal recruiting and booster payoffs, proxy testing, cushy classes, the usual. This is something a bit more convoluted, very Northwestern come to that.

A personal note here. I worked in the college bookstore as a student at The Ohio State University (just Ohio State then) and one of my jobs was to distribute text books to athletes, free of charge and brand new, some so fresh that not all the pages were cut apart. I would collect them back at the end of the semester and invariably the books with the uncut pages would be as I had passed them out, never opened and never read. Still, I think the Buckeyes won titles every year I was there.

None of this is meant to diminish the harassing of athletes by their friends, some sort of misguided bonding business, mindful of the military, and none of it seemed to work after all; that is, the harshly bonded still lost football games, baseball games, too, with a lout in charge.

It is possible to be both decent and demanding, though examples of successful coaches who were so do not leap immediately to mind.

My favorite college coach was Bobby Bowden, folksy and caring, yet academic scandals at Florida State cost Bowden victories that dropped him behind Joe Paterno on the all-time win list.

And Paterno. There's another "humanitarian" who had his own pedestal, since removed so Penn State will not be reminded of Paterno's negligence in the sex abuse scandal involving one of his assistants.

Lou Holtz was another favorite of mine but everywhere he coached he left behind sanctions. The coach in my college days, whom I covered for the school paper, Woody Hayes, left Ohio State in disgrace after punching another teams' player during a game.

Gary Barnett, for whom Pat Fitzgerald played, and who took the Purple to Pasadena had his own anxious moments at Northwestern involving four of his players indicted for lying to a federal grand jury about gambling and point spread shaving.

"A societal problem," said Barnett, "not an athletic problem."

Later at Colorado, Barnett had even more egregious problems, none of them athletic, leaving Northwestern to be better than him.

Not that Pat Fitzgerald would or will ever join the ranks of great college coaches, but he was good enough for Northwestern and should still be if not for the knee-jerk bungling by school president Michael Schill and athletic director Derrick Gragg.

Coaches should know what is going on in their programs, just as college presidents and athletic directors should know what the folks who work for them are up to.

Fitzgerald has said he did not know about the hazing that included naked "dry humping" in a dark room, whatever that might be. Maybe not. Maybe so. There is a punishment somewhere between dismissal and acceptance and I suppose Fitzgerald's lawsuit will put a dollar value on it.

It is all very seedy and creepy. And as we know, Northwestern is better than that.