Scoreboard, Baby

Among the players staring for the University of Washington football team that won the Rose Bowl Game in 2001 were “student-athletes” who’d been arrested for rape, assault, battery, armed robbery, hit-and-run accidents, and a variety of other lesser felonies and misdemeanors.
As early as the second game of the season, three of them were in danger of being snatched out of the locker room on outstanding warrants.

In Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity, Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry demonstrate dramatically and in convincing detail the ways in which the coaching staff, the athletic department, the University administration, and various judges, prosecutors, and police officials in Seattle enabled those young men to continue playing football despite the rap sheets they were developing and the lives they were ruining and endangering. Winning football games was more important than the administration of justice, and for many of the players, such concerns as academic integrity never came into the equation at all.

Readers in various other cities where college football is king can decide for themselves whether what was going on at the University of Washington ten years ago is representative of football programs at D-1 schools throughout the country. Armstrong and Perry believe conscientious investigators today are likely to find the same crimes, cover-ups, and hypocrisy they found in the University of Washington program.