Scoreboard Baby

Scoreboard Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity is a work of sports history by Seattle Times journalists Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry. It concerns the notorious 2000 football season of the Washington Huskies, whose success on the playing field was underscored by the fact that its best players were routinely committing acts of domestic violence and other serious crimes. Armstrong and Perry track an extensive list of illegal acts, including sexual assault, child neglect, misuse of weapons, armed robbery, drunk driving, drug use, fleeing the scenes of other crimes, and lying to police. The book includes and expands upon a compilation of articles that Armstrong and Perry published in the Seattle Times in 2008, as the story was belatedly unfolding. The journalists also document the complicity of the Huskies’ coaches, who minimized and covered up their players’ behavior while the team enjoyed success in the eyes of its fan base. The book is an unsparing critique of the college sports industry, which exalts and rewards its top players and administrators without holding them accountable.

Perry and Armstrong begin their book with the story of the Huskies’ promising shift into the spotlight at the turn of the twenty-first century. The college football team of the University of Washington enjoyed a record-breaking year and was publicly celebrated as one of the industry’s most exciting up-and-coming teams. Unknown to most, however, the team was rotting from within. An entire complex of corrupt prosecutors, university staff, lawyers, police, judges, and sports journalists either chose not to believe, or outright denied, that many of the Huskies players were committing crimes. Years later, even as the journalists documented this already highly substantiated criminal evidence, very little had made it to court or into public consciousness.

Armstrong and Perry allege that many people collaborated to systematically cover up the top Huskies players’ crimes. For example, crimes that became known to the university and local prosecutor were usually met with neither disciplinary nor legal action. Instead, these authorities offered perpetual “second chances” to student-athletes who showed few signs of remorse. Serious crimes that by no means deserved a second chance still elicited the sympathy of administrators whose duties included responsibly enforcing policy and ensuring ethical conduct. The players created thousands of dollars in property damage and hurt multiple innocent people without facing justice.



In their analysis, Armstrong and Perry focus on four players who committed especially reprehensible actions: Curtis Williams, Anthony Vontoure, Jeremiah Pharms, and Jerramy Stevens. While they committed crimes, they were protected – the writers argue, even enabled – by Huskies head coach Rick Neuheisel. Coach Neuheisel allowed them to continue playing even though he had almost complete knowledge of their conduct outside the public eye. Even the many sports journalists who saw straight through the team’s veneer of accountability refused to acknowledge it. Armstrong and Perry attribute this to the journalists’ competing motivations: they were desperate to balance their field’s norms surrounding journalistic integrity with their fears about publishing any coverage that was not energetic and optimistic. Many suspected that if they produced negative coverage, their future access to the inside of the industry would be compromised. Moreover, few sports journalists are knowledgeable or interested in the nuances of the sports-adjacent legal world. Even the public records of player arrests, therefore, rarely made it into print.

Though most of the book is an excoriating takedown of the players and their enablers, Armstrong and Perry also highlight individuals who demonstrated great conduct. These include player Anthony Kelly, who later won a Mary Gates scholarship and traveled to South Africa; a freshman named Marie, who reported being sexually assaulted by Stevens; and the detective who worked on Marie’s case, Maryann Parker. Parker’s investigation was impeded by the head prosecutor of King County, Norm Maleng; though he was never charged with obstruction or forced to comply with Parker’s demands, Marie later won a civil settlement against Stevens.

In their epilogue, Armstrong and Perry report that the 2000 season represented a milestone in sports history. No longer could players get away with blatant crimes, and no longer could their greedy managers protect them. This season made clear “the community’s collective complicity.” Scoreboard Baby goes to show how little popular success really means in the modern world where appearances are easily fabricated.