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

Kalman-Lamb, Nathan; Silva, Derek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469683466 ISBN 13: 9781469683461

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024

Synopsis

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 at some of the country's most prominent college football schools, 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 this 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.

About this title

About the Authors

Nathan Kalman-Lamb is assistant professor of sociology at University of New Brunswick and the author of Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport.

Derek Silva is associate professor of sociology at University of King's College and is the coauthor of Power Played: A Critical Criminology of Sport.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469683466
• ISBN 13: 9781469683461
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272