The End of College Football & Author Interview
The 2025 College Football Season is set to begin August 23rd. I won’t be watching. Here's why.
The 2025 College Football Season is set to begin August 23rd. I won’t be watching. I didn’t watch the 2024 season either. Nor the NFL or the CFL (despite the success of the Philadelphia Eagles and the Toronto Argonauts). The primary reason I stopped watching professional football can be traced back to a book entitled Game Misconduct, authored by Nathan Kalman-Lamb, one of the co-authors of The End of College Football.
Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport by Nathan Kalman-Lamb
I don’t consider myself much of a sports fan these days. I grew up on hockey; there were only the original six NHL teams when I was a youngster. One either cheered for the Leafs or the Canadiens. If you were lucky, you had a hockey sweater of your team; maybe a cap or toque.
Subtitled “The Human Cost of an All-American Game”, this book picks up on and expands upon the dialogues that Game Misconduct brought forward, namely the injuries incurred by so-called “amateur” athletes (or, more properly, “campus athletic workers” as the authors prefer to call them). Also, racial capitalism as these campus athletic workers are predominately Black, lending to the overall “Plantation Dynamics” (Chapter Four) that exist throughout the college football system.
“Although economical educational exploitation are crucial issues worthy of much attention, the most egregious aspects of college football are those associated with harm. The fact that college students bear all the risk of harm in the production of the commodity spectacle of college football makes the whole system morally indefensible.”
Strong words. But as I made my way through this book, more and more issues as to how the whole system is indeed “indefensible” come to light. An eye-opener to me was the fact that while being unpaid, attending mandatory weekly practices and workouts and travelling to away games, they are still expected to carry the same caseload as an academic student. This, of course, leads to physical and mental issues, which linger long after their college playing days end.
I contacted Mr. Kalman-Lamb via his Bluesky social media account (@nkalamb.bsky.social) to request an interview with him and Derek Silva. This was accomplished by email.
Tell us a little of your background, education, present employment, etc.
NKL: I study the social theory and the labour of sports. I did an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in English and History, and then got both an M.A. and Ph.D in Social and Political Thought at York University. I taught for six years at Duke University in the Thompson Writing Program, where I led writing-intensive seminars on social inequality and the labour of sport, often to classes filled with NCAA athletes. Since 2022, I have been an Assistant and now Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick.
DS: I am predominantly a sociologist of sport who sometimes blends that with critical criminological theory and cultural studies. I did my undergraduate degree in criminology at Ontario Tech University (then UOIT), before getting an M.A. in sociology at Carleton University and a Ph.D. in the same at the University of South Carolina. While at USC, I taught introductory sociology as well as sociology of sport prior to becoming an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College. Since 2021, I have been Associate Professor at King’s.
As a young person, how “into” sports were you?
NKL: I was *so* into sports as a kid. I was an avid subscriber to Sports Illustrated for Kids and then Sports Illustrated proper and would read them cover to cover every time. I certainly played and watched a whole range of sports obsessively, but as a young child I used to even play out entire seasons of college sports in my basement, acting out both teams and then assiduously chronicling results in schedules I would work out by hand. I was obsessed with sports, even Canadian university football—we would attend the Vanier Cup in Toronto every year!
DS: As a kid and teenager — and even young adult — sports were a major part of my identity (both as a participant and as a fan). If I was watching TV, chances are it was TSN or Sportsnet (the two main sports channels in Canada). I played mostly soccer growing up, but my family was very much into hockey as well. My dad worked as a shipper for a major Canadian military industrial complex aerospace company and one of their customers would periodically gift him tickets to Toronto Maple Leafs’ games. These are perhaps my fondest memories with my father. This fandom followed me well into adulthood and I would say wasn’t “broken” until I started studying sport as a profession. I am still a “fan” of certain sports — and mostly athletes therein — but I would say it is far less influential in my life.
Please tell us at what point did you come to the conclusions you have published about the harm(s) of college and professional sports?
NKL: As I pursued my dissertation work on the harms of high-performance hockey (which would ultimately become the book Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport), it became undeniable to me that elite sport in general is a site of exploitation and harm. Given that I was still an avid fan of college sports, I could not fail to see that these conclusions applied even more aptly in that context. However, it was not until I took up my position at Duke that these issues became my research focus. Having students in my classes who were experiencing such brutal working conditions produced a sense of imperative for me to make that the focus of my work.
DS: The “change” in my approach to college football occurred while I was a graduate student at USC. To be honest, part of the draw of going to USC was to experience college football because I was a fan of the sport. While I was there, however, I began seeing the business for what it was. Not only did I have some brilliant athletes in my class and I could see first-hand how education was secondary — importantly, not *for* the athletes — but for the entire political economy of the sport. In other words, I started to see how the corrupt system of college football made it literally impossible to get the education that athletes were promised. The very barrier to them receiving such an education was the fact that they had to simultaneously endure a strenuous, violent, and physically and mentally damaging full-time job while pursuing their education. This first-hand realization made me question everything I thought of about the sport previously. The other, which was an intimidating encounter with an assistant coach of the football team, is outlined in the preface of the book, so I urge folks to read that for the full account!
How did you go about recruiting (or getting volunteers) to speak out about their college football experiences? Were you specifically looking for players only, or coaching staff members as well?
NKL/DK: Our focus in this project was entirely on the experiences of athletes. There is no shortage of opportunity to hear from coaches in the mainstream media—they are the primary sources drawn on by most journalist who cover the sport. However, what we hear from players tends to be a highly censored version of the truth given the status coercion they face (something we document in the book). The advantage of anonymous academic interviews is that players are afforded the protections they need to tell the truth. That was entirely the focus of the project.
Now, the question of recruitment is a good one. The bottom line is that it is hard to recruit elite athletes for academic studies. We were fortunate to have made a number of connections through our public writing about college football during the pandemic in 2020. The work we did at that time both brought us in contact with a number of players we wouldn’t otherwise have been acquainted with and essentially proved our bonafides by showing prospective interview subjects that we meant it when we said that our project was genuinely critical of the sport and supportive of their positions.
How is The End of College Football being received? Have you experienced any pushback on social media, in the press, etc?
NLK: As expected, the response to the book has been mixed—and that’s what we want! We have been incredibly gratified by the reception of the book from those who study and take a critical approach to college athletics. It has received glowing reviews in Critical Sociology and Sociology of Sport Journal, a starred review in Booklist, and a favourable review from the San Francisco Chronicle. We are genuinely delighted with how it has landed in that sense.
DK: At the same time, it is abhorred by those who are deeply invested in the exploitative dynamics of the sport. Amazon reviews and the like tend to be five stars or one star. Again, that’s how we like it, because we are trying to be polemical and provocative. Nathan was denied entry into the United States for a book event we were holding in Washington D.C. and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the book itself was responsible.
Please tell us about the End of Sport Podcast, how did that begin, and when did you both cross paths to collaborate on the book and the podcast?
NLK/DK: We first became acquainted with one another on social media in about 2018. The podcast is a project we began in 2020. We had discussed doing something together in 2019, when we first met each other in Virgina Beach at the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport conference, but the pandemic was a catalyst for us as for so many people. In our case, it was partly because the issues we focus on in our academic work about sport, health, and harm were manifesting in such an overt and disturbing way as a consequence of the virus. Nathan had begun working on the book in 2019. However, the collaboration on the podcast was so successful that it became a natural fit for it to spill into the book as well. We are very fortunate to have an exceptionally symbiotic working relationship that makes it feel entirely natural for us to work together on a whole range of projects.
What’s next for you both? It would be fascinating to have a documentary based on your book, similar to the way Game Changers was for getting people to get off the North American diet and go plant-based.
NLK/DK: Good question! We are interested in expanding the work we have done in this book to try to examine some of the cultural and ideological forces that make football in the United States and hockey in Canada so popular throughout the life course—and, of course, to deconstruct the harm and exploitation that occur as a consequence. As always, this will involve speaking to former players. We are particularly interested in thinking about how we might conceptualize child and youth versions of these sports as forms of child abuse and child labour.
I personally wish to thank both Nathan & Derek for taking the time to answer these questions to accompany my thoughts on their book. - James M. Fisher
Book Details
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8346-1
Published: November 2024Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8345-4
Published: November 2024E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-8347-8
Published: October 2024