I am not a football fan. I know basically how it works, but a game can’t hold my interest for more than a few minutes. Nevertheless, I have to say Armstrong & Perry write exciting accounts of football games.

This was an extremely good book. I was shocked, SHOCKED, by the ways in which these college football players got a free pass for… anything, apparently. We saw animal maltreatment and neglect, rape, attempted murder, domestic violence, theft, and more lies than anyone could count.

And just flat-out shittiness not only from players, but also coaches, university administrators, and even the actual courts. Many judges are clearly college ball fans. (And don’t have daughters or sisters, either, I guess.)

You think you know this stuff already. Ha! You don’t know the half of it.

There was one happy story. Many football players who would no way have qualified for admission to the University of Washington were admitted under “special circumstances”. Most just blew off any academics and never graduated. One of them—one!—made the most of the academic opportunity and blew off the football instead.

Maybe this book wouldn’t interest everybody. I thought it wouldn’t interest me much, either, but I was so wrong.
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This is an outstanding work of investigative journalism which succeeds by skillfully intertwining several distinct narratives all centered on the year 2000 University of Washington men's football team. The cast of characters is a mix of scoundrels, heroes, and the largely indifferent, but what makes this book so important (and such a compulsive page-turner) is that it's all true, it's well-documented, and it's completely disheartening. The real scandal revealed in these pages is the ruthless pursuit of success on the football field regardless of human consequences. At the end of the day, it's the critical institutions examined in these pages (the University of Washington itself, the King County Prosecutor's office, the Seattle Police Department, etc) that have failed most miserably. Where the institutional imperative trumps the individual values of the people who comprise the institution, everybody loses. ( )