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

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.

Author: Nathan Kalman-Lamb,Derek Silva
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 11/19/2024
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.62d
ISBN: 9781469683461

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 11/01/2024 pg. 15
Choice 04/01/2025

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.