The landscape of college sports in America has changed drastically in just the last decade.

The College Football Playoff, launched in 2014, finally brought that sport into the modern era of deciding its nationa champion on the field instead of a ballot. The NCAA women’s basketball tournament made significant branding and budgetary fixes in 2022 to establish some sense of equity next to the men’s tournament. The evolution of the transfer portal across different sports has given college athletes unprecedented freedom of movement, and revamped the way coaches build rosters.

But the most seismic change in college sports is that, starting in 2021, athletes can now get paid through name, image, and likeness (NIL) endorsement deals.

One of the most underrated and overlooked byproducts of college athletes making real, over-the-table money is that college athletes now have real, at-the-table power. Their voices will carry more weight when they speak up. They can better afford to use their coveted talent as leverage when dealing with the college athletics power structure of coaches, administrators, boosters, and organizations like the NCAA. Pre-NIL, it was more likely that a college athlete who was, for example, being mistreated by a coach would keep quiet in fear of losing their position on a team, or losing their scholarship — which may very well have been their only source of food and shelter and what allowed them to get a college education.

That doesn’t have to be the case anymore.

Players possessing more power means coaches can be held more accountable. Gone are the days of sideline tyrants like Bob Knight and Woody Hayes running their teams like drill sergeants whose charges are powerless to push back.

Well, those days aren’t entirely gone.

On July 10, Northwestern University fired football coach Pat Fitzgerald after an investigation into allegations of systemic and sexually inappropriate hazing in the Wildcats’ program during the coach’s 17-year tenure. Around the same time that the hazing allegations made headlines, additional accusations of racism in Fitzgerald’s program were made public.

Fitzgerald’s firing came about three weeks after the University of West Virginia announced that men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins was resigning following a DUI arrest. Huggins had already been given a three-game suspension and had his salary reduced as punishment for using homophobic slurs in a radio interview earlier this year, and the DUI arrest was apparently the last straw. (Huggins later challenged the exit by claiming he did not actually resign; the Basketball Hall of Fame inductee is currently lobbying to get his job back.)

Fitzgerald and Huggins are two high-profile examples of coaches behaving badly; of powerful people who wield a lot of influence failing to effectively lead and keep their programs in good standing. How did they fail so spectacularly, and what would forgiveness look like in their cases?

Leadership is a heavy responsibility. It’s even heavier when you’re leading teenagers and young adults, potentially shaping their minds and their futures. That is part of the job for a big-time college coach, whose players are typically between 18 and 23 years old. The job also comes with the high expectation to win games, impress boosters, recruit new players, re-recruit current players so they don’t leave in the transfer portal — and do all of that with cameras and microphones in your face quite often. It’s enough pressure to corrupt and collapse the most well-intentioned individual.

On being a leader, Prophet Muhammad (the last messenger of Islam) said, “Every one of you is a shepherd and is responsible for his flock. The leader of people is a guardian and is responsible for his subjects.”

In a khutba transcribed for the Premium Times of Nigeria in 2019, Muslim imam Murtadha Gusau said, “Leadership is about teamwork, as no one can alone accomplish anything without followers and for sure Allah’s help. And the important one is that effective leaders are those who are servant leaders. Good leaders are good followers, humble, piety, truthful, simple and they realise that success only comes from Allah, the Almighty.”

Gusau also noted that effective leaders “model what they (preach) and demonstrate integrity in how they behave. There is consistency between their values, their vision, their standard and their behavior.” Some of this was covered in a recent Muslim Sports Talk piece about role models in sports and society.

It’s clear that Pat Fitzgerald and Bob Huggins fell short in these areas — if not throughout their coaching careers then at least near the end. If the worst accusations against Fitzgerald are true, then he failed by cultivating and overseeing an environment in which players were sexually harassed and abused by their teammates, and in which players were subjected to racist treatment by coaches. With Huggins, the two incidents leading to his downfall did not necessarily victimize his players. But on a bigger scale, at worst he put people’s lives in danger with the DUI. And on a smaller scale, he just plain embarrassed himself and the university with his words and actions. Huggins displayed textbook examples of how not to lead by example.

What’s next for the two disgraced coaches? Eventually, and especially if they hope to coach again, forgiveness.

“We have not created the heavens and the earth and everything in between except for a purpose. And the Hour is certain to come, so forgive graciously.” (Quran 15:85)

Islam encourages man to forgive (and let Allah judge), which doesn’t mean man must forget. Failed leaders such as Fitzgerald and Huggins can be forgiven for their wrongdoings, but one can still expect those wrongdoings to follow them if they seek future leadership opportunities. And those actions will always be part of their legacies when the stories of their careers are told. It will be hard or potentially impossible for them to bounce back professionally, but the chance remains for both coaches to learn, grow, and change themselves to become better.

If they were to accomplish that, and pass those lessons down to another set of athletes they’re tasked with leading, that would be an epic victory.