justifying to myself and any Virginia Tech fan who would listen that Warrick deserved to be on the field despite having been arrested late in September 1999 for grand theft. In collusion with a store clerk at a Tallahassee Dillard’s, he and FSU wide receiver Laveranues Coles stole hundreds of dollars’ worth of merchandise. After they both pleaded down to misdemeanor petty theft, Coles was kicked off the team (he was already on probation for an earlier incident). Warrick, easily the most famous person on the team, an integral part of the offense, and without a prior record, was only suspended two games. I had no problem with any of this, mainly because I paid almost no attention to it. I kept my eyes on the prize of a football championship and my trust in FSU’s coach, Bobby Bowden. But I was also 100 percent sure it was fair that Warrick was playing.[1]
Over the past decade or so, I’ve suffered through the years of mediocre FSU football, always believing my team could do it, then watching sadly as they collapsed once again. Don’t bring up the name Chris Rix around me. I am still sad over the way Xavier Lee’s potential never matched up with his play. And I remember the name Drew Weatherford because I am apparently a masochist who likes to continually cause myself pain by reliving the later 2000s.
But then the 2013 season happened. FSU once again had a defense. And an O-line. And, most famously, we had Jameis Winston at quarterback.
Winston was the No. 1 quarterback recruit in 2012. He redshirted during the 2012–13 season and came out of the gates blazing in 2013. In the sixth week of the season, No. 5 FSU marched into No. 3 Clemson’s stadium and put up more points than any other opponent ever had in Death Valley. Winston had 444 passing yards, three touchdowns, and a lot of serious Heisman chatter.
He was a damn good football player. And I was still a damn good fan, telling anyone who would listen about my team’s brand-new quarterback who was going to take us places.
Then, suddenly, my fandom crashed headlong into my work, which often interrogates the intersection of sport and interpersonal violence. Only a few days apart in November 2013, the Tampa Bay Times and TMZ both made public-records requests to the Tallahassee police department (TPD).[2] It turns out that what they were looking for would usher in one of the highest-profile college football sexual assault cases in years: a female student had reported to the TPD in December 2012 that Jameis Winston had raped her.
My fan playbook failed me. I wanted so desperately to have some way to make sense of the team I loved being piloted by a potentially violent player, one apparently shielded from consequence by his team, the university—my university—and the local police. I needed a new playbook. So, I decided to write one.
II.
This is not a book about Jameis Winston. This is not even a book about football players. This is a book about the intersection of college football and sexual assault, and the people and systems that ignore, minimize, and even perpetuate this violence; the Winston case just happens to be a thorough and high-profile example of what that intersection looks like. And it happens to involve the school and team I’ve loved my whole life.
In the late summer and early fall of 2013, I was watching two college football sexual assault cases play out, one at Navy and another Vanderbilt. Four Vanderbilt football players had been arrested and charged that August with raping a fellow student. As that was playing out in Nashville, there was a trial up the road in Annapolis of three Navy football players who had been charged with abusive sexual conduct or aggravated sexual assault. The majority of media interested in the cases were local newspapers and TV stations, while national sports media were more focused on whether a famous college quarterback, Johnny Manziel, had gotten paid for his signature and if he would get punished for it. (That story died quickly and he never was censured.)
Then, in mid-September, I began working on a piece for the Atlantic about college football recruiting practices and how they used women. In that piece I argued that treating women like prizes creates an atmosphere wherein women’s consent takes a backseat to what football players feel they are owed. I brought up the Navy and Vanderbilt cases, and mentioned a couple of other ones I had found.
I became interested in trying to understand both the reasons these cases did not make the news and also if they were part of larger historical patterns. I started to find mentions of, links to, and footnotes about previous football players accused, and some found guilty, of rape, dating back to the 1970s. To keep track of it all, I started a list online of every allegation or case I found, a list which continues to grow to this day. To keep tabs on it all, I created Google alerts relating to sports and interpersonal violence, including “football rape.” And I have been keeping tabs ever since.
III.
Football teams create playbooks, in which they draw up the plays they will use on the field. A page in the book looks like the measured lines on a green football field, offensive and defensive players sketched onto it using symbols like circles and triangles or Xs and Os. The movement of the players, the routes they are to run on the field, are represented by lines tipped with arrows pointing the direction they should move if everything in the play goes as planned. Coaches and players memorize these playbooks. Each individual play is given a name, the intricate detailed performance boiled down to a word or phrase. The plays can be communicated in a matter of seconds from coach to player, sideline to field, quarterback to the offensive line, on and on. It is the complicated made simple. If all goes well, the large amount of work that goes into a single play suddenly looks like a natural flow of bodies moving in unison that result in the movement of the ball down the field or the successful stop of the other team’s offense, a seemingly obvious outcome despite it all happening in an unscripted and chaotic setting where so many things could have taken place instead.
Playbooks are why teams work, how they move information quickly, and how they become successful on the field.
This book is about a different kind of playbook—the one coaches, teams, universities, police, communities, the media, and fans seem to follow whenever a college football player is accused, charged, and/or convicted of sexual assault. When these cases break, it often feels like everyone involved is following the same script, making the choices that mirror other cases, doing the exact thing we’ve come to expect based on whatever has transpired before. It is as if our society has its own collective Xs, Os, and lines tipped with arrows drawn on pages we all have access to, read through, and have memorized. The plays are popular narratives we all know about athletes or women who report sexual violence against them, and they are the familiar responses of the people in charge, the seemingly natural patterns and progressions that these cases take. Everyone plays their part, they run their routes, and the nuance and detail of complicated cases is suddenly flattened in a way that makes how we react to it all seem normal or natural; each case is so easily boiled down in a society that often minimizes the complicated reality of sexual violence.
This book unpacks the societal playbook piece by piece, drawing attention to each X and O, and explores the possibility of destroying the old plays and replacing them with ones that will force us to finally do something about this issue.
IV.
There are plenty of reasons we often talk about sexual assault when it involves a sports star: players are high profile, and because of the money invested in them or their teams, people can feel a certain ownership over them; players are held in high esteem by fans or hated by fans of rival teams, and so their off-the-field behavior is either a shock or evidence of what we already knew; players in legal trouble are often not able to play, so that could have an effect on the team; many athletes are African American, especially in football, and because of the racism that exists independently and around the world of sports, the US media as well as the legal system often focus on crime when the perpetrators are black. At the collegiate level,
