The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game

by Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva

Overview

In this book, Nathan Kalman—Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America’s favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty—five in—depth interviews with former players from some of the country’s most prominent college football teams, Kalman—Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation. Through the stories of those who lived it, the authors examine the ways in which college football must be understood as a site of harm, revealing how players are systematically denied the economic value they produce for universities and offered only a devalued education in return.

By illuminating the plantation dynamics that make college football a particularly racialized form of exploitation, the book makes legible the forms of physical sacrifice that are required, the ultimate cost in health and well—being, and the coercion that drives players into the sport and compels them to endure such abusive conditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469683461
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/19/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nathan Kalman—Lamb is assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick and author of Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport. Derek Silva is associate professor of sociology at the University of King’s College and coauthor of Power Played: A Critical Criminology of Sport.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The End of College Football, like a great game, hooks you early and doesn’t let up. Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva take us behind the scenes of one of America’s favorite pastimes, showing how athletes are exploited and abused by a system that purports to elevate and revere them. Knowing the toll this sport takes, I will never see a tackle the same way. Every college football fan should read this searing exposé.”—Victor Ray, author of On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care

“This sobering account, largely centered on the voices and experiences of the athletes themselves, exposes the exploitative and structurally coercive nature of big-time college football. It is an urgently important book that should have fans, players, and leaders in higher education questioning the moral sustainability of college football.”—Adia Benton, Northwestern University

“Kalman-Lamb and Silva tap into the best traditions of ethnography and provide a powerful yet accessible indictment of the wider system of NCAA football. A must read for the thinking sports fan.”—Jules Boykoff, Pacific University

“A significant contribution that deepens our understanding of the political economy of US collegiate athletics. By laying bare the racialized exploitation of so-called 'student-athletes' in big-time college football, the authors' research makes a strong case that the college sport industrial complex may not be 'fixed' without the abolition of capitalism itself.”—Chen Chen, University of Connecticut