The University of Washington’s run to the 2001 Rose Bowl was a heady time for a city high on its hometown team. But off the field, the Huskies’ football program was deeply troubled: More than two dozen players were arrested or charged with crimes during their time at the university in Seattle, and leaders in the athletic department seemed unwilling—or unable—to do anything about it.
In Scoreboard, Baby, published this week by the University of Nebraska Press, Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry, reporters at The Seattle Times, expand on their award-winning 2008 series that exposed the damage wrought by the Huskies’ last great season. Through scores of interviews and a meticulous review of public records, they have produced a disturbing portrait of a program, and a university, that won everything on the field but lost sight of its values along the way.
The characters and conflict at the heart of this story will sound familiar to anyone who follows the churn of big-time college football, whose new season kicks off this weekend: Talented athletes from tough backgrounds struggling to stay afloat academically. An athletic director determined to lure, and keep, an ambitious coach by offering eye-popping pay. And fans in an otherwise mild-mannered city whose passion for winning blinded them to the program’s many missteps.
What stands out is the unlikely backdrop for such rabid enthusiasm: a prestigious public university that pulls in more federal research dollars than any other in the country. Yet, however familiar the underlying conflict might seem, there’s an added layer of tension and tragedy to the narrative that makes Scoreboard, Baby a particularly distressing tale—and one that should be required reading for anyone linked to university life.
The story opens six months before the start of the Huskies’ 2000 season, with a shooting at a drug dealer’s house near the university’s campus. A bloody fingerprint at the scene was later matched with the linebacker Jeremiah Pharms, who eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of robbery. Then we meet Jerramy Stevens, a talented tight end, accused of raping a 19-year-old fellow student outside a fraternity house. Stevens’ arrest was big news, and a lengthy police investigation followed. But prosecutors ultimately declined to bring charges for lack of sufficient evidence. He went on to have a stellar season, and sportswriters lauded him as one of the nation’s best players.
Those two incidents were only the start of the Huskies’ off-field troubles. As they defeated their opponents week after week, leading to a near-perfect record, several more players had run-ins with the law. On at least one occasion, a player competed with an arrest warrant pending. Few people seemed to notice.
Through reviews of legal depositions, court transcripts, police and forensic reports, and more than 60 interviews, the authors explore in compelling detail many of those crimes and allegations—and the authorities’ handling of them. (See a Q&A with the authors.) In doing so, they highlight a pattern in which players misbehaved, often violently, but were rarely disciplined: not by coaches, and only gently, if at all, by the authorities.
Turning Over a New Leaf
Officials at Washington say things are different now: Athletes are held accountable for their actions. “What has changed are our expectations of the students we recruit to our programs,” Norman G. Arkans, a university spokesman, said in an e-mail. “What has also changed is our tolerance for misbehavior and, if it occurs, our response to it.”
It is the authors’ insistence on taking the story off the gridiron—and, at many points, off the university’s campus altogether—that is the book’s real strength. Conversations with friends, relatives, neighbors, and many others linked to the players or their actions show how those misdeeds quickly snowballed.
Those accounts also broaden the story to include a variety of colorful supporting roles: A judge who liked to talk football when dishing out lenient sentences to players. The best friend of the alleged rape victim, tormented over having left her alone and possibly drugged at the frat party. The academic tutor who helped a football player win a scholarship to study abroad—and later quit in frustration over the athletic department’s apparent reluctance to support athletes with academic ambition.
When Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Perry published their series in 2008, the university had already undergone a change in leadership designed to right the ship. But while the new athletic director, Todd Turner and the new head football coach, Tyrone Willingham, helped clean up much of the mess, they produced losing seasons that didn’t sit well with fans. The desire to win eventually won out: By the time “Victory and Ruins” hit newsstands, Mr. Turner was on his way out. Mr. Willingham left a year later. In their place came a new coach and an athletic director willing to spend even more money to try to regain the team’s place at the top of the Pacific-10 Conference.
Mark A. Emmert became Washington’s president more than three years after many of the events of the book took place. In just a few weeks, he’ll leave Seattle to start his new job as president of the NCAA. Two years ago, in response to the authors’ newspaper series, he had this to say: “You do not have to give up your values to be competitive in sports. ... You can win, and you can win properly.”
Only time will tell if Mr. Emmert and other leaders in higher education decide to heed the many warning signs the Huskies’ 2000 season produced. They’re up against a visceral desire to win, an impulse Rick Neuheisel, then the team’s head football coach, once summed up after a hard-fought game. Maybe his guys played dirty at the end. Maybe they piled on. As far as Mr. Neuheisel was concerned, he said, only one thing mattered:
“Scoreboard, baby.”
