Northwestern has fired football coach Pat Fitzgerald amid a hazing scandal involving current and former players, the school announced Monday.

Fitzgerald, the Wildcats’ head coach since 2006, was initially suspended for two weeks on Friday after an internal investigation into allegations of mistreatment of former players by other members of the team. After continued backlash Monday, however, Fitzgerald was dismissed.

“Since Friday, I have kept going back to what we should reasonably expect from our head coaches, our faculty and our campus leaders,” University president Michael Schill said in a statement. “And that is what led me to make this decision. The head coach is ultimately responsible for the culture of his team. The hazing we investigated was widespread and clearly not a secret within the program, providing Coach Fitzgerald with the opportunity to learn what was happening. Either way, the culture in Northwestern Football, while incredible in some ways, was broken in others.

“There is no doubt that Coach Fitzgerald has had a tremendous impact on our institution, well beyond the football field. For nearly thirty years, he has given himself to Northwestern as a student-athlete, assistant coach and head coach, and he has positively impacted the lives of hundreds of young men. His players have almost all graduated and represented the University with distinction.

“Over the last two days, I have received hundreds and hundreds of emails describing how he has transformed the lives of current and former student-athletes. However, as much as Coach Fitzgerald has meant to our institution and our student-athletes, we have an obligation — in fact a responsibility — to live by our values, even when it means making difficult and painful decisions such as this one. We must move forward.”

According to The Daily Northwestern, the school’s student newspaper that initially broke the story, Schill said in an email to the university community on Saturday that he might have “erred” in initially suspending Fitzgerald for only two weeks after the investigation found that hazing allegations were “largely supported by evidence.” The allegations included coerced sexual acts and a “culture of enabling racism” within the team.

Fitzgerald denied any knowledge of the allegations, and vowed any form of hazing would not be tolerated going forward.

“Northwestern football prides itself on producing not just athletes, but fine young men with character befitting the program and our university,” Fitzgerald said in a statement released Friday. “We hold our student-athletes and our program to the highest standards; we will continue to work to exceed those standards moving forward.”

Members of the Northwestern team released a statement Saturday in support of the coach, calling the allegations “exaggerated and twisted.” However, Schill said Monday that 11 current or former Wildcats players had come forward to confirm the hazing took place, was “systemic dating back many years” and included “forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature.”

Fitzgerald was a two-time All-America linebacker and two-time Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year at Northwestern in the mid-1990s, arguably the school’s most decorated player. Including his time as a coach, he had spent 27 of the last 30 football seasons with the Wildcats.

Fitzgerald joined the Northwestern staff in 2001 and was elevated to head coach in the summer of 2006 after the sudden death of Randy Walker. He went 110-101 as Wildcats head coach, including five bowl victories and Big Ten West championships in 2018 and 2020.

However, his teams have slipped on the field in recent years, going 3-9 in 2021 and 1-11 in 2022. The Wildcats will enter the 2023 season on an 11-game losing streak.

Schill said athletics director Derrick Gragg will announce an interim coach in the coming days. The Wildcats open the 2023 season Sept. 3 at Rutgers.