“We’re just trying to go 1-0 every week.”
This line — and any variation of it you can think of — has become a type of mantra for Northwestern football in Pat Fitzgerald’s tenure. The sentence is simple yet powerful, optimistic, but perhaps naive. The overarching message: in the face of adversity, keep your head up, eyes on the task at hand, and never look back.
Fitzgerald became notorious at press conferences throughout the latter half of the 2016 season for brushing off questions about the team’s struggles early in the campaign. When faced with the task of evaluating how far his team had come since starting 1-3 (with a particularly repugnant loss to Illinois State sprinkled in), Northwestern’s head coach chose to focus only on the present, preaching to his players to never become too fixated on the past, lest your focus on the immediate future be clouded.