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Corey Sobel

@csobelwrites.bsky.social

Author of The Redshirt. First Novel Prize finalist, IPPY Gold Medal winner, NPR Books We Love. Eid Ma Clack Shaw. https://corey-sobel.com/

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Ken Armstrong@bykenarmstrong.bsky.social · 2y ago

Thank you, @csobelwrites.bsky.social @wsj.com, for including "Scoreboard, Baby" in your five best books on college football. Quite confident this will be the only time that anything I've written will appear on the same list as a novel by Don DeLillo.

Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity By Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry (2010) 4. “A chain saw registers 100 decibels. A Husky crowd hits 135.” The violent connotations in Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry’s description of Husky Stadium’s obliterating noise are anything but incidental in this tour de force portrait of the University of Washington’s deeply gifted, profoundly troubled 2000 squad—a team that would win the Rose Bowl and featured at least two dozen players who were either arrested or charged with a crime while they were enrolled in school. The reporting in this book is dumbfoundingly good (down to little details such as how, when Husky Stadium was being built, astronomers were consulted to determine the stadium’s ideal axis for minimizing glare). College football’s ever-fraught racial dynamics are captured with disturbing accuracy (a black player says “football was the type of therapy poor people could afford”). And through a polyphony of voices that range from UW’s millionaire head coach to a little girl in Alaska who watches her estranged father play on TV, we get not only the story of a team and the institutional rot it embodied but a masterly illustration of how the problems plaguing college football are the same ones that perennially ail this country.
Corey Sobel@csobelwrites.bsky.social · 2y ago

For @wsj.com, I wrote about five fantastic #college #football #books. I genuinely think these works contain everything that led up to our current moment, and will help us make sense of the shitshow to come. 1/6 www.wsj.com/arts-culture...