The End of College Football

On the Human Cost of an All-American Game

Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781469683461, 9781469683454
• eBook ISBN: 9781469683478
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Exploitation and Harm in the Ivory Tower and on the Gridiron
• Chapter One. “Play”-ing College Football
• Chapter Two. Failure to Educate
• Chapter Three. Beyond Compensation
• Chapter Four. Plantation Dynamics: Racial Capitalism through College Football
• Chapter Five. They Signed Up for It: Coercion and Consent in College Football
• Chapter Six. The Normalization of College Football during a Global Pandemic
• Conclusion: Cancel College Football
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index