Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity

The adjectives associated with the University of Washington’s 2000 football season—mystical, magical, miraculous—changed when Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry’s four-part exposé of the 2000 Huskies hit the newspaper “explosive . . . chilling” ( Sports Illustrated ), “blistering” ( Baltimore Sun ), “shocking . . . appalling” ( Tacoma News Tribune ), “astounding” (ESPN), “jaw-dropping” ( Orlando Sentinel ).   Now, in Scoreboard, Baby , Armstrong and Perry go behind the scenes of the Huskies’ Cinderella story to reveal a timeless morality tale about the price of obsession, the creep of fanaticism, and the ways in which a community can lose even when its team wins. The authors unearth the true story from firsthand interviews and thousands of pages of the forensic report on a bloody fingerprint; the notes of a detective investigating allegations of rape; confidential memoranda of prosecutors; and the criminal records of the dozen-plus players arrested that year with scant mention in the newspapers and minimal consequences in the courts. The statement of a judge, sentencing one player to thirty days in jail, says it “to be served after football season.”