I thought I could never forgive Gary Barnett when he left. But after understanding why, I think it makes sense. He left for a better job... pure and simple. He had a tremendous case of "foot in mouth" disease by saying he wouldn't leave just weeks before he left. But I have gotten over that.

At the end of the day, he accomplished the impossible for a school like Northwestern. I'll be clapping for him and the members of the 1996 team on Saturday (13 years ago, I might have been throwing rocks).

This Saturday, during the Minnesota game, Northwestern will celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the 1996 Big Ten championship season. It will do so by bringing back 40 players from that great team– so often overlooked because of the team, and the season, that it followed.Also returning for the festivities: Coach Gary Barnett.Coach Barnett, in some ways, never really left NU, of course. His legacy, his mentality, stayed with the program, and it courses through the words and deeds of current coach Pat Fitzgerald, who will count among the 40 alumni of the 1996 team to return on Saturday. We have recently seen Coach Barnett at Northwestern practices, but the last time we saw him on the field for a Wildcat gameday was in Hawaii, nearly 13 years ago:

Has it really been 13 years since the end of Barnett’s era? A lot has happened in those 13 years. To Northwestern. And to Coach Barnett.

Some things haven’t changed. Some NU fans remain upset at Coach Barnett, at the events of 1998, at the scandal, his wanderlust, the way he looked around, the way he left.

It is time to put that aside and to recognize what Gary Barnett did for NU. We need to recognize his legacy and to thank him.

Next month will mark another anniversary of sorts. In December it will have been 20 years since Northwestern athletic director Bruce Corrie, after choosing not to renew Coach Francis Peay’s contract, brought Coach Barnett to Northwestern. The following month, January 1992, Coach Barnett addressed a Wildcat crowd at a basketball game and announced, “We’re going to take the Purple to Pasadena.” It would take Barnett three seasons to get the program in the place needed to make good on that promise. I would argue that no one else in the country at that time would have been able to do what he did.

Remember what Northwestern Football was like 20 years ago. Remember what greeted Barnett in December 1991:

"[Northwestern] flew Mary and me me out, and we met a group for dinner. . . as we talked to everybody it became apparent to me that no one had any idea about what it took to have a winning college football program. When Mary and I went up to our hotel room later, she said, “They don’t have a clue, do they?”It seemed incredible, but none of them had ever been a part of a winning team. If you haven’t seen it done, of course, there’s no way you can understand what it takes to pave the way to having it done. And these were the people who were going to have to pave the way!They were asking me questions about how I was going to cut spending– when Northwestern was already light years behind the other budgets in the Big Ten. . .

I did think Dyche Stadium was neat, and Bruce Corrie, the athletic director, took me up into the creaky old press box. I mean, it’s antiquated. When we got up there, somebody turned the power off and the elevator off and we were stuck for almost an hour. It was freezing, and there was no way down. We finally got out by crawling through a side window.

-- High Hopes, p. 81

That would be the only side window at Northwestern that Coach Barnett crawled through. He would spend the next three years knocking down walls instead, blazing a trail to winning football that NU had not seen in 20 years, and doing it with style and with integrity. Barnett’s program was strong and clean, and it set a standard.

Just as it did for Ara Parseghian, Northwestern held a special place in Gary Barnett’s life. However, like Coach Parseghian, Coach Barnett left NU amid tension: Parseghian tersely and famously uttered, “I’m restive” when asked about his chances for leaving Evanston, shortly before he did. And in 1999, then-athletic director Rick Taylor, whose style and priorities never quite meshed with Barnett’s, stated when announcing Coach Barnett’s replacement just one day after Barnett resigned, “the king is dead; long live the king.”

The head coaching careers of both men to whom Taylor referred, Coaches Barnett and Walker, would eventually end at the exact same time: Walker’s last game was the Sun Bowl in December 2005; Barnett’s (as head coach of Colorado) would be against Texas that same month.

Coach Barnett has since been in exile, for reasons both within and without his control. His legacy is complex, and so are the reasons for so much of the sentiment about him. But he is returning to the school that put him on the map, the school he put back on the map, and it is right that Northwestern show Gary Barnett the appreciation that he richly deserves. Barnett dared to give Wildcat fans high hopes, belief without evidence, and then he and his players provided the evidence, as well as the memories of a generation.

Thanks, Gary. Welcome back.

Gary has always had a problem with Foot-in-Mouth disease.