David Braun earned the gig at Northwestern, where down is up, and everything just might be OK

Take off that “interim” tag and make it disappear. Bury it underneath Ryan Field. Punt it into Lake Michigan.

David Braun has earned this. It’s his show now in Evanston, where down is up and everything just might be all right.

Northwestern is promoting Braun, 38, making him the school’s head football coach — no qualifiers — after his four months of “interim” work that can’t be lauded enough. Whether or not Braun wins as often as predecessor Pat Fitzgerald did, he’ll get a chance to try. That alone is the single biggest upset of this college football season.

Braun was brought aboard by Fitzgerald in January to be the Wildcats’ defensive coordinator. It was the first job of any kind at the FBS level for Braun, who’d never been a head coach at any level, either.

By July, Braun found himself being pressed into emergency duty as interim coach, Fitzgerald having been fired amid a hazing scandal that effectively eliminated other staff members who’d been around the program for years from consideration for the role. Perhaps the best thing said about the little-known Braun at the time was that he hadn’t been tainted by the scandal. The thought that he might actually field a decent team never occurred to most looking in from the outside.

The Wildcats — 4-20 over the last two seasons — had been expected to struggle in 2023 under even the best of circumstances. Then Fitzgerald was jettisoned, details of alleged abuse kept coming to light, lawsuits started being filed and, goodness, how decimated and demoralized could one team be? Would Northwestern beat anybody?

Before the opener at Rutgers, Braun said publicly, “I am extremely confident in my ability to lead, to inspire, to meet people where they’re at, to pull people together for a common purpose.”

Then the Wildcats were uncompetitive in a 24-7 loss, and it seemed silly when Braun insisted after that game the team would win plenty of games.

“People are going to tell us otherwise,” he said, “but we’ve got enough talent on this team.”

Is it true? It’s still hard to say. The Wildcats have yet to be favored in a Big Ten game, and when they’ve been bad this season, they’ve been all but unwatchable.

But the answer doesn’t even matter, because a 5-5 record — with three upset wins in the Big Ten — has spoken so loudly that Braun went from future answer to a trivia question to program savior. And there are two chances remaining, at home against Purdue on Saturday and at Illinois a week later, to add to those five wins and achieve bowl eligibility.

We might look back someday and say Northwestern would have been better off searching harder for its next coach, finding someone who’d been there and done that before, someone with deeper ties in the coaching and recruiting communities. But it would have been wrong for Northwestern to do that. The place was reeling. Braun threw both arms around a seemingly impossible situation and didn’t let go.

In their most recent, a lopsided win at Wisconsin in which they scored touchdowns on their first three possessions, they looked like the real deal. Frankly, it was hard to believe — but this whole thing has been that way. And Braun’s readiness for the challenge of a career has been a revelation.