Today’s guest columnists are professors and authors Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva.
College football is morally indefensible.
That is the premise of our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, based on lengthy interviews we conducted with 25 former big-time college athletes (mostly in the Power Five, now turned Power Four without the Pac-12).
While we are sympathetic to the fact that much is beloved about the sport—from its pageantry and quirky traditions to its profound cultural significance across so many regions of the United States—the pleasure it affords fans and participants is vastly outweighed by the exploitation and harm that define its practice.
Let’s start with the basics: Big-time college football is one of the most egregious sites of economic exploitation in U.S. society today. Despite recent moral panics about how name, image and likeness (NIL) liberalization is ruining the sport, the fact remains that although 42 athletic departments produced more than $100 million in revenue in 2021-2022, universities continue not to directly compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for producing that value.
Instead, they funnel the revenue produced by players into the hands of formal athletic department employees such that 36 head football coaches pull in more than $5 million per year, 66 assistants extract more than $1 million, 51 athletic directors receive more than $700,000 and even 21 strength coaches receive more than $500,000. Indeed, at Ohio State, an astounding 2,158 people are on the payroll of the athletic department. None of them are football players—a fact that the athletes we interviewed were acutely conscious and deeply resentful of.
The dynamics of this system are compounded by racial inequalities. A disproportionate number of college football players are of color, particularly Black, including 55.7% of players at Power Five schools. Yet between 2019–2020, only 5.7% of the student body at these schools were Black. This matters because of not only how much money these players generate, but also who receives the benefits of it.
Ted Tatos and Hal Singer have calculated that Black football and men’s basketball players lose out annually on a $1.2 to $1.4 billion racial transfer of wealth to white coaches, administrators and athletic department officials. And yet, the Black football players who attend these predominantly white institutions (PWIs) and are subjected to this form of egregious wage theft told us that they must also endure constant microaggressions through the insinuation of other students and faculty that they do not deserve to attend such hallowed academic spaces—a truly odious example of adding insult to injury.
Indeed, the question of academics is one that is not typically afforded enough discussion in conversations about exploitation and harm in college football. According to the logic of the NCAA system, education is, in a very direct sense, compensation for players—a wage furnished in scholarship form. And yet, our interviews revealed that the education players receive is the poorest facsimile of the pedagogical experience enjoyed by their non-sporting peers.
Ubiquitous policies such as academic clustering (steering players to supposedly ‘easier’ non-STEM classes), scheduling practice during times that limit class options, traveling during the week for games, and summer training that interferes with travel abroad and internship possibilities mean that the academic experience of college football ‘student’-athletes is shaped and constrained by athletic obligations. And that doesn’t take into account the brute reality that a 40-hour work week at football produces levels of fatigue that make classroom concentration nearly a physical impossibility. Thus, while players may be ‘paid’ in scholarship form, the educational experience they receive is not even close to resembling the one universities have been accredited to provide.
We now arrive at what is perhaps the weightiest moral argument against college football: the fact that the sport must be understood quite literally as a form of human sacrifice. Every 2.6 years of football doubles the chances of contracting the devastating neurological condition CTE. The game as currently constituted cannot be extricated from the harm it subjects participants to.
The players we spoke to described the horrors of enduring the physical violence of head injury and other forms of bodily harm in the course of their time playing football in college, harm often compounded by the demand of coaches to play through pain and the conflicts of interest that prevent medical officials from providing adequate care. Universities, as institutions devoted to the nurture and development of the young people they are tasked with serving, simply cannot be in the business of knowingly exposing them to this degree of harm. It is fundamentally antithetical to the mission of higher education.
But the players signed up for it, right?
Based on our conversations with players, we argue that this commonsensical assumption ignores the grim reality of what we and others call structural coercion: the system of racial capitalism that has produced structural barriers to accessing higher education and class mobility for so many, particularly Americans of color. College football, as a possible lever of opportunity and improved life chances in a society where such avenues are unconscionably scarce, is thus simultaneously a rational and coercive (because constrained) choice.
So, what is to be done? We offer two answers.
In the near term, we view unionization and collective bargaining as the best option and look with some optimism upon the recent efforts of Dartmouth men’s basketball. If college football players must continue to sacrifice so much for university athletic departments, they should at least have the right to negotiate the conditions under which they do so.
That is merely a palliative, however. In a very real sense, there is a moral obligation to end the damage that college football has done. Such an outcome requires concrete reparations to all who have given so much of themselves to the sport so that so many of us can experience the economic and emotional benefits. It also requires building a better society with genuine racial equity, universal access to higher education and healthcare, and more opportunities for all.
A society in which football simply isn’t necessary.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb is assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Derek Silva is associate professor of sociology and criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast and co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game.
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