Scoreboard, Baby
A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity
The most harrowing book I have ever read about college sports.
If winning is everything, what are we left with?
The University of Washington’s march to the 2001 Rose Bowl answered one of sport’s most enduring questions: If winning is everything, what are we left with? Scoreboard, Baby exposes the rot beneath a celebrated season — and the ruins left behind, showing how a community’s blind embrace of a football team compromised judges, prosecutors, police agencies, a proud university and the media.
The book grew out of the authors’ 2008 Seattle Times series on the 2000 Huskies, a team whose players were under investigation for crimes including domestic violence, rape, robbery and the shooting of a drug dealer. It updates and expands that reporting and follows how players, coaches, university administrators and faculty, the media, fans and donors, judges, police and prosecutors all helped the team pursue glory on the field, whatever happened off it.
The title comes from a phrase coach Rick Neuheisel once used to rebut criticism of his team, while he was coaching Colorado; he later coached the Huskies. The authors took it as the book’s theme: the attitude that winning trumps all other considerations.
University of Nebraska Press (Bison Original) · September 1, 2010 · 400 pages · ISBN 978-0-8032-2810-8
Released as an e-book on November 21, 2010.
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