INDIANAPOLIS — Pat Fitzgerald will coach Northwestern in its first Big Ten championship game appearance in the title game’s eight-year history this weekend. He said Friday that he believes his program will be a regular visitor to Indianapolis in future years.
“I have 100 percent confidence that this is going to become a consistent thing for our program,” Fitzgerald said in a news conference previewing the championship Friday afternoon. “I look at us as a program that has been built on a bedrock, not on sand. We’ve been doing things the right way for a long time.”
Fitzgerald is in his 13th season as a head coach and 19th season as a coach at his alma mater, which was at one time the perennial doormat of the Big Ten conference. He said he has heard from a long list of former players from the 1970s and 1980s who “didn’t have the support [the current team] has right now.”
Between the state-of-the-art $270 million Walter Athletics Center that opened in August to the 58 busloads of Northwestern students planning to make the trip from Evanston to Indianapolis this weekend, Fitzgerald said the state of Northwestern’s program has changed dramatically in the 20-plus years since he helped lead the team to a Rose Bowl game as a player.
Fitzgerald said he is a big fan of the championship game format that the league adopted in 2011. He said the large stage and the reward after winning the West Division means more to a program that doesn’t have a 100,000-seat stadium (Ryan Field has a capacity of 47,130) or a large student body, as Northwestern’s undergraduate enrollment is is just shy of 8,300 students.
Northwestern (8-4) enters Saturday’s game against No. 6 Ohio State as a large underdog. When asked about the gap between his team and the Buckeyes, Fitzgerald didn’t shy away from pointing out the obvious differences.
“We’re nowhere close to Ohio State,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re never going to be close to Ohio State. We’re very different — the size of our school, the location. We just want to be the best us. We know who we are.”