A few good men in Northwestern

Pat Fitzgerald is in hot water up in Northwestern after some programmatic "hazing" was reported in the student newspaper.

My antennae went up recently when Northwestern suspended head coach Pat Fitzgerald for two weeks, getting ahead of a story published by the student newspaper shortly afterwards.

There were allegations of hazing which the school investigated before handing down the punishment. The two-week suspension demonstrated something serious had happened but nothing they felt was disqualifying or which called for a significant disruption to the coming season.

Now the term “hazing” tends to carry specific connotations that I suspected may not be adequate for describing this. Although Oxford’s definition definitely hints at the sort of thing I was wondering about:

The imposition of strenuous, often humiliating, tasks as part of a program of rigorous physical training and initiation.

So here’s the thing about football. It is, as this site insists upon, America’s War Game. Meaning it imitates war on a smaller scale and serves as an outlet for maintaining a martial culture without requiring an actual war. Rigorous physical training and initiation is a bar every team needs to clear in order to compete, particularly at a program like Northwestern trying to win games in the Big 10.

Teams are routinely trying to create the brotherly bonds and disciplines common to war amongst their football players as that’s a proven method for winning a physical and demanding game of 11-on-11.

I had another term in mind though which I thought might be relevant. Code red.

As in…