You don't appear to be using navigation controller at all, so I'd wager that self.navigationController
is nil
.
You could use an unwind segue. So in your root view controller, add a method like so:
@IBAction func unwindToRoot(segue: UIStoryboardSegue) {
print("successfully unwound")
}
Then in your scoreboard scene from which you want to unwind, you can control-drag from the button to the "exit outlet":

When you let go, you can pick the unwind action:

This achieves the "pop to root" sort of functionality, but is not contingent upon using navigation controller.
If you want to perform this unwind programmatically, rather than doing the segue from the button to the exit outlet, do it from the view controller icon to the exit outlet:

Then, select the segue in the document outline and give this segue a unique storyboard id:

Then you can programmatically perform the segue, using the same identifier string:
performSegueWithIdentifier("UnwindToRoot", sender: self)