It is the love that is troubling: the love of violence (which fans prefer to call “physicality”), the love of an institution that invariably, though to variable degrees, maims its participants in plain sight and inflicts untold invisible damage on them in addition.
“In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands.” This is how Chris Hayes describes the US racial regime in The Colony in a Nation, but he could also have been talking about college football, a colony on campus where the rules that govern our treatment of students appear to be suspended and an entirely separate regime rules and controls athletes’ lives. In The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (University of North Carolina Press, 2024), Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva argue that the colony must be abolished, that college football must end.
The book is a polemic, unabashedly so. Co-authors Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva pursue their aim with single-minded devotion, supported by a cast of 25 anonymous former and current players who tell harrowing stories of physical and psychological abuse, of broken promises, shattered expectations, emotional manipulation, financial exploitation, subtle and unsubtle coercion—all of which take place in a racialized environment where Black players in particular watch their every word and every move.
In many regards, there is very little here we did not already know: celebrated coaches have abused players in plain view and on camera, the research on players’ severely heightened risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has been publicized over and over again, and every academic working at a football school knows that the concept of the “student athlete” is a sham, at least when it comes to the so-called revenue sports of football and basketball.
But knowing that the institution of college football is generally and pervasively terrible for any number of reasons is not the same as hearing the voices of those who have endured the harm it inflicts and explain what life is like in the football colony. The testimony the authors collected may be un-representative, but it should nonetheless be enough to call for a national inquiry into the sport’s violently destructive nature, though it is highly unlikely that any such inquiry will be launched—college football has too powerful a hold on the national psyche, and politicians seen to interfere with this particular form of ethically reckless consumption would risk the end of their careers.
The players quoted in The End of College Football speak of a dozen surgeries in a single year, of the nagging fear of already having sustained the brain damage that will not cause symptoms for decades, of walking across campus in a continuous daze of pain and fatigue, of coaches and their assistants gleefully humiliating them in front of their comrades, of being coerced into endless practice training sessions that are officially “voluntary,” of professors and fellow students who dismiss them as not belonging at universities, of academic advisors funneling them into majors considered less demanding and choosing their classes for them based on practice schedules. The players working for one of the major college football conferences known as the Power Four (Big Ten, SEC, Atlantic Coast, and Big Twelve) are aware of the vast sums of money that their work on and off the field generates, and they know they have seen none of it—their payment was meant to be an education they can barely access, the intrinsic rewards of glory, and the chance of playing for the NFL. But only a miniscule 1.6% of college players will make it to the pros. Every player knows that statistic. The remaining 98.4% will likely deal with the long-term effect of injuries they sustained without any help from the universities in whose service they were hurt.
The financial picture is rapidly changing—the NCAA has already relaxed the rules that allow athletes to be compensated for their Name, Image, or Likeness (NIL), though that change will only benefit star players. Some form of revenue sharing is meant to commence in 2025/26, though it is still unclear whether your average player will see much of it. Schools have cynically and shamefully refused to acknowledge that players are employees, making unionization impossible for years to come, particularly now that the Trump administration has taken over the National Labor Relations Board. And while the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) may well break apart soon enough, the forces that shape college football are unlikely to change in the near future: billions in broadcast revenue are at stake, university branding and fundraising heavily rely on football, the entire sports culture is built on subordinating the needs of athletes who are expected to submit to any regime deemed necessary to win, a devoted fan base appears unconcerned with players’ well-being. Those of us who do not much care about the sport are unlikely to pay attention to the suffering it entails and are thus unlikely to demand that it stop.
College football, like American football in general, taps into national myths. Like all sports, the game itself is largely pointless: two groups of men fight to move an oval ball across a 120 yard field in opposite directions. Meaning in sports, however, does not arise from the rules of the game but from the pleasure its consumption generates, the rituals that accrue to it, and the tropes it evokes: grit, masculinity, team spirit, competition, aspiration, and so on. And in that regard, football, which has been the U.S.’s favorite sport since the 1970s, reigns supreme.
Sports in general are deeply meaningful to many young Americans, for the camaraderie and group cohesion they generate, for the pure joy of play, for the rewards of an easy route to identification. Without a doubt, college football creates and sustains communities. When I ask my first-year students why they chose to attend the University of Michigan, our football team is the reason they cite most often, apart from vague pronouncements about the school’s prestige. Whenever our team known as the Wolverines lost, my son went into a daylong funk. Whenever they won, the mood brightened across campus, and alumni donations went up, as our former President told me. The university does not subsidize our team here at the University of Michigan, and our team does not subsidize us, but the indirect gains to my school are considerable, and at every Regents meeting, someone brings up the football team and everybody smiles and laughs and erupts in “Go Blue.” The football team is an immensely valuable brand here and at comparable schools, and I suspect that most of the people who could change the way we do things here would be aghast at the suggestion of anything more than superficial tweaks.
While the New York Times inexplicably insists on presenting universities as hotbeds of student activism, in my experience, the University of Michigan student body only erupts in wide-spread, passionate protest when they don’t like what the Athletic Director is doing. So deeply is the sport woven into the campus fabric at the Power Four conference schools that the core demand of Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s book—to abolish college football altogether—is bound to fall on deaf ears, as the authors know and freely acknowledge. Universities may well abolish the humanities and most of the social sciences, but they will not abolish football. This is not, I believe, or at least not predominantly, because football revenue makes some people very rich. Yes, the flagship university football coach is reliably one of the three highest paid public employees in every state, and the University of Michigan defensive coordinator alone makes $2.3 million a year, with the other assistant coaches being paid between $350,000 and $950,000. But the football program is self-sustaining, and it could be spun off from the university without serious financial impact.
The main reason college football will not be abolished is the fact that people love it deeply and dearly, and they simply do not want to hear of its dark side. When I told one of our Regents about this book, he snapped at me: “Football is good and Americans like it.” Not caring about the details of life in the colony is not that different from not caring about how the meat we eat or the smart phones that rule our lives are produced. They are good and Americans like them.
The stories at the heart of The End of College Football that leave me most troubled are not about profit motives; those are ubiquitous in American society, and they have rendered so many other workplaces sites of pervasive inhumanity—Amazon warehouses generate far more money than college football ever will. It is the love that is troubling: the love of violence (which fans prefer to call “physicality”), the love of an institution that invariably, though to variable degrees, maims its participants in plain sight and inflicts untold invisible damage on them in addition. It is a love that allows universities, of all places, to place at the center of their campus culture a practice that destroys the brain, and not even in secret.
A study published in JAMA Neurology found that 41% of the donated brains of former amateur football players (both high school and college) showed the signs of CTE. Another one looked at the brains of professional players only and found that a full 99% of them were affected—it is important to know that CTE can only be diagnosed in an autopsy, and that the brains of players who exhibited symptoms of CTE are more likely to be donated. Those caveats do not change the fact that these figures ought to have raised screaming alarms on campus and beyond. Yet, we have carried on as we were, even though any college teacher who treated her students the way coaches treat athletes would be fired on the spot.
As Kalman-Lamb and Silva discuss, a common retort to football’s critics is that players “sign up for it,” and that they are aware of the risks and undertake them freely. The authors are correct in pointing out that “consent” is a shaky concept here, for so many reasons: players are inducted into the culture of football in high school, as children; while college players on average do not hail from underprivileged socio-economic backgrounds, many individual ones do and often see the football scholarship as their only ticket to a valuable college degree and a route to support their families; the authoritarian structure of football programs makes dissent near-impossible once they have arrived and signed contracts they are frequently not given the time to read.
I do think, however, that the authors do not sufficiently take into that account many, perhaps even most, players (unlike, say, Amazon warehouse workers) share the love, partake in the myth, venerate the coaches that reign like absolutist monarchs over their lives and surveil every move they make, adore the roar of 80,000 or 100,000 fans cheering a touchdown or an interception, and believe that this kind of glory is worth almost any amount of suffering.
Every decision we make is made under economic and ideological constraints, and we should, I believe, be careful to respect athletes’ choices even while we are mindful of the limits of consent. Elite athletes incur horrific injuries in almost every sport, without any profit motives involved—just talk to horseback riders, ballet dancers, BMX riders, and, of course, hockey players, whose risk of CTE may well be even higher than that of football players. Conversely, as Elizabeth Anderson has shown in great detail in Private Government, the American workplace is a brutal site for many workers whose autonomy, dignity, and safety are compromised by design every day. Sport is a mirror of society, and in many regards, college football may well be little more than the most brightly polished one, its larger effect the normalization of submission to any and every boss and any and every work condition the boss imposes.
At the same time, we have placed some choices beyond consent. If you cannot legally sell your vital organs, for instance, no matter how many people would eagerly do so and how many people would line up to buy them, universities should not allow young men to sell their future health for a tuition rider, some spending money, and the gratifying roar of the crowd. In fact, it is hard to fathom why this is even controversial.
Kalman-Lamb and Silva scoff at the idea of reform in their book—they want to see college football banned, and they do not entertain solutions that would not require broad societal change: “[W]e are firm in our stance that the only way to redress the harms inherent in college football is to fundamentally reshape both college athletics and the higher education system that is increasingly subordinate to it.” While those would be nice, needless to say, maximalist goals will not help any of the players currently performing push-ups on jagged rocks or spending 40 rather than the NCAA-sanctioned 20 hours a week on practice and play.
As a life-long social democrat, I am personally partial to reform, regulation, and proper oversight, and I think there are a number of reforms that could meaningfully improve matters. First, enforce the 20 hour rule by strictly banning “voluntary” practices during the term, so student players actually have time to go to class, read the books, do the work. One player quoted in the book asks: “Professor, my hands are bleeding from the rope pull but you want me to grab a pencil?” Second, employ independent monitors who supervise random practice sessions unannounced and who have the power to remove abusive coaches and assistant coaches. These monitors cannot be under the purview of Athletic Department. Third, at a minimum, change the tackling rules of college football to those of rugby, which minimize tackles to the head. Rugby is sadly quite similar to football with regard to general injury rates, but the impact to players’ heads is both less frequent and considerably less forceful (an average g-force of 63g in football versus 21g in rugby). Fourth, their contract must include life-long health insurance coverage for the long-term effect of any injury they incur as a result of playing college football. Fifth, and most importantly, perhaps, universities must voluntarily concede that players are employees and let them unionize, and we should collectively seek to shame them into it.
None of these ideas are panacea, and in order to even get this far, we would need a ground-swell of faculty, students, staff, and regents who would prioritize the well-being of our players over the benefits of a system that harms so many of them so deeply—a parallel universe right in the middle of campus. It is very sad to think that the chances of such a shift are slim, but The End of College Football is a necessary read, not a cheerful one.
Silke-Maria Weineck is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at the University of Michigan. She is currently writing a book about the football coach as mythical figure.
Thumbnail photo by Maize & Blue Nation