Written By John P Roche and Julie Martin
Directed By Jean De Segonzac
Rollins is contacted when the son of one of her old friends from Atlanta goes missing in NYC after having taken a visit to Hudson University football team. After having located the boy (now in jail after having assaulted a patron of gay bar he had stumbled into while drunk), she begins to suspect that he was a victim of a cruel prank by the Hudson University football team as payback for having chosen another school. Further investigation reveals a history of abuse, prejudice, and hazing among applicants to the team.
Tropes
- Berserk Button: For Cedric, insinuating that he's gay.
- Call-Back: Benson's gun-ho behavior from the previous episode is referenced, having taken Barba's warning to heart, she tells Rollins and Amaro not to come back without decisive evidence of abuse to avoid having a narrow-victory repeat of last time.
- Career-Ending Injury: Cedric's attempted suicide breaks his neck, killing any chance of a sports career.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Cedric Jones is taken to the team's gym where two cheerleaders blindfold him and Ty, a gay male cheerleader, was the one servicing him. All because he signed with Georgia Tech and not Hudson U.
- Driven to Suicide: Cedric does this in prison by hanging himself, but ends up becoming a Bungled Suicide due to staff intervening in time.
- Downer Ending: The detectives bend over backwards to prove mitigating circumstances to convince Cedric's victim to go easy on him. They actually succeed and the man drops the charges, but Cedric is Driven to Suicide while in prison and injures himself to the point he will never play sports again.
- Flawless Victory: Coach Becker boasts that Hudson University is close to an undefeated college football season.
- Hates Being Touched: Cedric pushes Amaro away, screaming he's not gay.
- Innocently Insensitive: During Cedric's drunken binge, he ended up in a gay bar and punched a guy out thinking he was going to give him AIDS.
- Irony: Olivia and Fin are actually against Rollins spending so much time on the case, since there's overwhelming evidence that Cedric lost his temper and attacked the victim because said man was gay and he was "afraid of catching AIDS". Olivia even comments that it feels wrong that they are being the "reasonable ones" for once, from her perspective.
- Off the Wagon: Even with a meeting at Gambler's Anonymous, Amanda is back to gambling her money away.
- "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization: The team believes that because Cedric "enjoyed" himself with Ty it doesn't count as rape.
- Soft Glass: Averted when Eddie punches the mirror in the interrogation room to show he feels no pain from all the years of being hazed and raped by the team.
- There Should Be a Law: Cedric was tricked by two female cheerleaders into putting on a blindfold so they could pleasure him, only to have the male cheerleader, Ty, do it instead. Rollins thinks this is the mitigating circumstances they were looking for to prove why Cedric was in a bad state of mind when he attacked a later man who came onto him, but Olivia points out that technically swapping partners when blindfolded is not illegal in the state of New York since Cedric had already consented to sex, but not specifically with who. Technically there is a law, "rape by coercion", but Olivia specifically states such a law does not exist in their jurisdiction.
