I wonder if Dr. Gragg has a letter ready to go in the drafts

[phatcat]

I will just say this...when you look at our "academic P5 peers" - and for the purposes of this conversation I will include Duke, Vandy, and Stanford...no one is exactly crushing it right now. Correlated with NIL and the Transfer Portal? Shrug. Maybe.

Excluding the Harbaugh era at Stanford, I will say that Fitz has, by far, led Northwestern to run circles around its academic P5 peers over the past 10-15 years.

Obviously where we find ourselves now scares me as much as anyone, but before we fire Fitz I'd love to get the Vandy AD, president, and boosters all in a room and ask them what they learned from their situation since Franklin left.

I really, truly think the answer is for Gragg to ask Ryan for a blank check and then force Fitz to take the two best coordinators we could literally buy in December...and we could contract a search firm to start doing that dirty work behind the scenes right now.

How about he sets aside 25M from the overpriced stadium fund and they use it for 5 years to split between the coordinators ? Do we really need an 800M monument if the team is ass? While he's at it, another 25M fir NIL for five years

 

[freewillie07]

For those of you coming to reality please note that the seeds of this disaster were apparent even in 2019. "This won't happen again." But then it did. No changes just doubling down. Arrogance in under-performance. 3 of the last 4 seasons have been dumpster fires. Thats a trend not an anomaly.

I'd like to see each coach re-interview for their job during the bye week with Gragg. Give him concrete metrics that demonstrate improvement. Give me a player development plan. Then evaluate at the end of the season. I would interview players confidentially. I'd bet the staff doesn't listen.

I may not fire (I would) Fitz but I can make him a figure head leader and only trot him out for B1G media days. If he can find another job or hates hit; he can quit.

Very much disagree. People like to lump 2019 in with the past two seasons but it was fundamentally different.

We thought Hunter Johnson would be great. He was not. But we at least had a solid backup in TJ Green. But then he suffered a season-ending injury against Stanford.

So basically, we were rolling out Aiden Smith, who really had no business being a starting Big Ten QB, and yes we lost. But, thanks to Hank, we were STILL more competitive than today, with one of the best QBs in his recruiting class in Hilinski.

24-15 loss to No. 11 Wisconsin
13-10 loss to Nebraska
24-22 loss to Purdue

Those were all pretty competitive games, at least, that gave NU a shot at 6-6. I believe NU would have made a bowl with Green at QB.

By contrast, we just got curbstomped by one of the worst Wisconsin teams in years. We are in a very bad place and it starts with losing Hank and adding JON.