Reviews and press

Reviews

What the investigative reporter Ken Armstrong and the higher-education correspondent Nick Perry have done, first in an award-winning Seattle Times series and now in Scoreboard, Baby, is lay out — in hard-boiled style and with the verve only real storytelling can supply — exactly whose lives were mangled in the course of the University of Washington’s historic 2000 season.

Two Seattle Times reporters meticulously recount the legal and moral misadventures of the University of Washington’s 2000 Rose Bowl–winning football team.

Scoreboard, Baby is the definition of a page-turner, cleverly constructed to keep the reader engaged with half-a-dozen genuinely compelling plotlines at a time.

Scoreboard, Baby is a terrific work of investigative reporting and a vital public service. I finished it at once infuriated and enlightened.

This is a world-class job of reporting and a cautionary tale about our sports culture.

The great fraud of ‘student-athletes,’ higher education and big-time football has never been detailed better than in Scoreboard, Baby.

A remarkable book ... uplifting because of the superb investigative reporting it contains, depressing because of the unpunished criminality.

Investigative journalism at its most revealing.

One that should be required reading for anyone linked to university life.

If you care about college athletics, read this book, and don’t let this happen at your school.

A page-turning tale that reads like a novel, but is tragically true.

Winning football games was more important than the administration of justice.

To read it without being affected by its evidence of the human toll sports take for our amusement is at best delusional.

It’s the dogged reporting of the day-by-day devils in the details that makes Scoreboard, Baby so compelling.