Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
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, there is a personal investment in the fandom from people who attended that school, who pour money into the institution, and who might see the players on their team representing the university and so also themselves in some part.
On top of all of this, football is the most popular sport in the US. It makes a lot of money for a lot of people. College football is now second to the NFL in overall sports revenues. Universities are often financially invested in major sports, so officials—and highly paid coaches, making literally a hundred times what they earned forty years ago—have some motivation to absolve players and move on as if nothing happened. The issue is so deeply rooted that Senator Claire McCaskill’s report on sexual assaults on college campuses, released in July 2014, found that “approximately 20 percent of the nation's largest public institutions and 15 percent of the largest private institutions allow their athletic departments to oversee cases involving student athletes.”[3]
This is not completely surprising. The power of football can stretch all the way into the courtroom too. In 2004, six Brigham Young football players (former and current) were charged in connection to the rape of a seventeen-year-old girl. Two went to trial and one of the other players testified against them, saying on the stand, “We knew we had done something that was wrong. We took advantage of a girl that we shouldn’t have.” After the jury acquitted the players, the prosecutor says, one of the jury members told her the players had suffered enough because “they lost their scholarships” and “they were kicked off the team.”[4]
V.
All of this together is paradoxical: there are cultural power structures that surround football players and protect them from having to answer for the violence they commit; but the very importance of the sport and our fascination with it means that we pay more attention to these power structures than