The End of College Football - by Nathan Kalman-Lamb & Derek Silva

About the Book

"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."--

Book 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 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.

Review Quotes

"This book deserves to be read widely. . . . [T]he clarity of argument, the power of the players' quotes, and the accessibility of Kalman-Lamb and Silva's writing made the book easy to read and fascinating to think about."--Leisure Studies

"The End of College Football is a necessary provocation of the collegiate athletic system and exploitative sport systems in general. Implications from this book will be realized for years to come; however, it is critically relevant to the current environment regarding college football."--Sociology of Sport Journal

"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

"A compelling indictment of American collegiate football . . . . a serious examination of a sport that's long avoided accountability."--Booklist, Starred review

"A must read . . . . The genuinely critical and radical sociology that oozes throughout The End of College Football is desperately needed to shake up the status-quo of performance focused capitalist sport, and all the grotesqueness that comes with it."--Critical Sociology

"A necessary read."--Mid-Theory

"Bracing . . . . its catalog of injustices might make even diehard fans question their complicity in a commodity spectacle that risks the health of young men--about half of whom are Black, according to recent reports -- and earns coaches, more than three-quarters of whom are white, massive paydays."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Kalman-Lamb and Silva's most persuasive justification for college football's abolition [is] its inherent violence, and the inevitable devastating injuries that accompany it . . . . Importantly, the authors emphasize that the violence of tackle football is not only baked into its game play, it is celebrated as its defining characteristic."--Public Books

"Via raw and disturbing testimonies from former players, anonymised because these schools have a long and powerful reach, Kalman-Lamb and Silva have pieced together a compelling argument that college gridiron is not a sport but a brutal industry where young, mostly black men are chewed up and spat out . . . . this book teems with evidence that for most participants it remains a form of indentured servitude where mere lip service is paid to delivering any sort of proper education."--Irish Times

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.