By Joe Ruklick –
First of two parts –
This Summer’s football practice marks three months of fierce dedication by Northwestern University’s football Wildcats. Amid heat, annoying injuries, and ferocious rivalries, players are looking toward the this season’s schedule certain that last season’s success proved the Purple are capable of seizing the Big Ten Conference championship.
The 2017 Wildcat season boosted the University’s reputation as an expertly managed Big Ten institution. The ’Cats won seven conference games and lost only two. Overall, the team was 10-3 and won the eighth postseason bowl game under head coach Pat Fitzgerald. The team finished with eight straight victories, one of them in the Music City Bowl, where Northwestern nipped Kentucky’s Wildcats, 24-23.
For Northwestern graduate and College Hall of Fame member Fitzgerald, it was a season during which affection for the coach expressed by students, alumni, and fans burgeoned just like fireworks over home Ryan Field.
Long admired for its endowment’s size and for its hefty wealth, this year Northwestern concluded a winning fundraising effort which yielded $3.75 Billion. Billion, with a B. Donated dollars support academic programs and projects along with new lakefront practice structures and fields, as well as conditioning facilities for varsity athletes and students in a gem of a student athletic complex.
Football is big time at Northwestern, and fans cite Fitzgerald’s success as provenance of the University’s fundraising bonanza. Recruiters no longer lament the University’s high academic standards as an excuse for losing prospectives players to other schools. Now recruiters do not pursue below-average high school student-athletes. They stress Northwestern’s academic rigor and emphasize the University’s high student-athlete graduation rate, team grade point average, and graduate school attendance.
Pride in Fitzgerald’s success on the field enhances recruiting. Wheaton North High School’s towering six-foot-four quarterback Clayton Thorson, a senior, and Glenbard North alumnus and star running back Justin Jackson chose Northwestern because their promise as student-athletes was commensurate with Northwestern’s standing as an exemplary university. Its financial power makes available to students the very best faculty, coaches, labs, and professional structures and facilities, as well as extensive academic research programs and premier golf courses and tennis courts.
In July, Jackson was honored with an alumni award for new graduates. It elevated him to the pantheon of the finest student-athletes in Northwestern’s history. On the field, he gained more yards during his career than any running back at Northwestern.
Jackson and Thorson personify the quality of Northwestern students, and their legacy in recruitment of future athletes will remain an exemplary Northwestern tradition. Some Northwestern followers remain dubious about Northwestern’s success under 13-season head coach Fitzgerald.
Continued next week
