College football is unsettled. Almost any observer of the NCAA Division I sport would agree. Skyrocketing television revenues have cracked open conferences that were once only regional and now formed massive new super leagues spanning coast to coast, separating the schools that have and the schools that have not. Meanwhile, a myriad of lawsuits have torn down the charade of amateurism—which insisted that athletes were not entitled to compensation as workers—that the NCAA had maintained for more than a century. These legal breakthroughs have opened new opportunities for college athletes to earn something from endorsers eager to capitalize on their NIL, or “name, image, and likeness.” What’s more, a related loosening of restrictions on individuals transferring between universities in pursuit of more playing time and endorsements has led to a player pool that is extremely fluid, making the recruiting of transfer students even more important for top programs than bringing in elite high school players. Such player-empowering roster dynamics have frustrated numerous coaches, who are wistful for the days when they could count on getting three seasons out of most recruits. Consequently, many began to clamor for direct payments from universities to athletes, a development unthinkable even just a few years ago, in order to create contractual restrictions on player movement. And in June 2025, in the landmark settlement of the House v. NCAA case, a new system for directly compensating players was set in motion, allowing for athletic departments to compensate their athletes via pooled NIL revenue of up to $20.5 million per year. But how that system ultimately affects the larger landscape of college sports—and the money to be made by athletes and universities alike—is still very much in question.

Amid this chaos come sports sociologists Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, bearing a provocative work of scholarship with aims so incendiary it might be best characterized as a polemic. The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game advocates, as its title suggests, for something that few football observers desire and even fewer think possible: the abolition of the sport. Resisting what they call the “academic fetish for solutions … a sort of spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down,” the authors are adamant that such exercises are futile. “College football is so foundationally harmful that it cannot be reformed,” insist Kalman-Lamb and Silva, meaning that the only truly just outcome is the “End of College Football” itself. Still, despite these absolute demands, Kalman-Lamb and Silva nevertheless offer some more sensible stopgap solutions—most notably, player unionization and collective bargaining—at book’s end.

To make their case for the wholesale abolition of college football, Kalman-Lamb and Silva rely on extensive qualitative interviews with former college football players, all of whom, under the protection of anonymity, reveal the extreme harms and toxic cultures to which they were subjected. These reveal that nearly all facets of college football culture have naturalized authoritarianism, toxic masculinity, anti-intellectualism, and physical suffering. The overwhelming effect, as I detail below, is such that the entire sport is indicted.

But is that indictment the end of the story? To a reader inclined to read this book and open to engaging both the authors’ intricate academic prose and the extensive testimonials (which often take the form of massive block quotes), Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s attempt at moral suasion is forceful. But such curious or sympathetic readers, I maintain, aren’t an audience whose agreement ultimately matters much. To reduce the manifold harms of college football, fiery calls for abolition pointed at university decision makers and public health officials won’t get the job done. In fact, for over 100 years, academics have repeatedly decried college football’s brutality and conflict with the educational priorities of a university, to no effect. With billions of dollars at stake, only a sea change in opinion among the game’s consumers will move the needle.

By pitching their argument in the key of abstract moral outrage, then, Kalman-Lamb and Silva fall short: failing to appreciate and leverage the particular athletes and on-field narratives whose exploits foster community building among fans. Damning indictments of the mistreatment of faceless players—however important their anonymization may be as a protective mechanism—don’t have the narrative specificity necessary to prompt most fans to reckon with their own complicity in the harms of the sport. Were they presented directly with the abuses of their favorite teams and coaches—their memories of on-field glory complicated by an understanding of the suffering of specific athletes—such fans could not compartmentalize such harms as happening elsewhere to anonymous others.

What is required, then, is a sustained reckoning with football’s dynamic identity-building storytelling, so as to offer a similarly potent counternarrative. Absent such attempts, the end of college football will come only for those few who were already inclined to opt out.

Labor, education, injury, race, and power: it is these five axes of exploitation that Kalman-Lamb and Silva employ to structure the first five chapters of their book. A sixth chapter zooms in on the extreme circumstances the COVID-19 pandemic forced upon “campus athletic workers”: a term the authors rightfully prefer to “student-athlete,” which the NCAA coined in the 1960s to avoid scrutiny under labor laws. Finally—despite Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s insistence that abolition is the only acceptable outcome—in the conclusion, they do offer some intermediary steps to mitigate harms while the sport continues apace.

As an unabashed anticapitalist intellectual, Nathan Kalman-Lamb has experience applying Marxist critiques to the sports world, as he did in an ice hockey context in his 2018 book, Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport. Alongside Derek Silva, Kalman-Lamb now extends the frameworks of coercion and exploitation he mapped onto Canada’s foremost professional sport across the border to include the United States’s pre-eminent “amateur” obsession.

Given the changes outlined at the outset, most especially the rise of NIL rights monetization—a meaningful economic opportunity that lessens the urgency of the injustice for college athletic workers—might college football be reforming itself? Absolutely not, assert Kalman-Lamb and Silva: such payments do not constitute “direct access to the value [athletes] are already producing,” as collectively bargained contractual agreements would; as such, NIL constitutes “a new era of gig work [in which] private corporations are subsidizing NCAA member institutions.” Furthermore, since athletic departments are part of nonprofit universities, the revenue generated by campus athletic workers and not paid to them must be spent on something. In addition to ever-more-luxurious facilities, that revenue is largely spent on what Kalman-Lamb and Silva term “the parasitic class of administrative officials” who, like the coaches, are disproportionately white, compared to the majority Black pool of players. Thus, they posit, whether NIL monies flow or not, the absence of a collectively bargained method for distributing athletics-related revenues to players in the form of salaries amounts to a “racial transfer of wealth from Black Americans to white Americans.”

in all too many cases the player’s body is understood as a weapon, and the violence and pain is primarily mediated via the tip of the proverbial spear.

The imbrication of race and power are equally important in Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s critique of a “free education,” the benefit that, for so long, was cited as the reason the players need not be paid. The players’ academic trajectory is shaped and severely limited, they explain—as many have before—by the prioritization of football, marked by “the physical and emotional rigors of an often-forty-hour workweek of punishing labor, restrictive practice schedules, and pervasive academic clustering practices steered by athletic departments.” This exploitative paradigm utterly depletes the value of a college education, the very thing that, supposedly, justifies the presence of the game at universities in the first place.

But Kalman-Lamb and Silva take things further by arguing that the false promise of that education is most significant as a form of structural coercion, especially for Black players and their families. Because of the continuing legacies of chattel slavery, segregation, and anti-Black racism writ large, the authors explain, “Black people more likely face restricted opportunities for class mobility, and access to institutions like those of higher education that can leverage it,” allowing American universities to benefit from “systemic pressure placed on individuals to participate in college football because they are otherwise denied economic and educational opportunities.” The Black players interviewed for the book “understand college football to be a white supremacist institution within a white supremacist society” and that the education provided is cheapened by the extreme demands of the sport. Nevertheless, these same interviewees feel they have no choice but to participate if they have the requisite athletic skills. “If football ceased to exist, then … a lot of poor Black people wouldn’t have the chance to get any sort of education,” admits one such interviewee. “But football is absolutely the worst sport ever created.”

Consequently, college coaches understand the tremendous leverage they wield over their players (thanks to the combined class-climbing promises of a “free” education and the necessary training they provide those lucky enough to go on to make big money playing in the NFL). But to fully empower themselves and protect themselves from liability for the direct and incidental abuses they impose on the young men in their charge, college football’s power brokers also need the players’ consent. Though this consent comes “only in the most formal sense”—via the rushed signing of legal documents the players are discouraged from actually taking the time to read—it is absolutely essential in undergirding “the single most popular and pervasive rhetorical defense for the current college football system … ‘they signed up for it.’” Once this insulating justification is in place, the coaches often carry out any number of abuses—verbal, corporal, psychological, even sexual—of which Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s anonymous interviewees provide damning examples.

“What I found was that the street, the monsters, the gang leaders, the drug dealers,” bluntly states one player, “they have more compassion than our coaches have. They are more human than our coaches are.” Given that some of the coaches’ monstrous abuses are meted out as corporal punishments related to players’ poor performance in the classroom, the authors also condemn “the academic side of the university [for being] recruited into complicity with abusive athletic practices.”

But all of these vectors of injustice—damning as they are to the structure of commercialized university-based athletics and its pre-eminent organizing body, the NCAA—are not distinct to the game of football (though there certainly is plenty of evidence that they are more pervasive and pernicious in that context). As such, they are a mere prelude to Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s most persuasive justification for college football’s abolition: 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; “Deeply embedded in football culture and practice is a foundational acceptance and rewarding of heteromasculine physical violence and its consequences even from the youth level.” (The increasingly popular and formalized game of flag football is notably not presented as a viable alternative.) The devastating and often life-long injuries that result are “not an accidental and unfortunate consequence” of the game, they insist, but rather a form of “sacrifice [that] is a nearly universal feature of NCAA football.” As in the other chapters, anonymous player testimonials power their demonstration of this dynamic, to devastating effect.

The athletes attest to the culture of playing through often-crippling pain, the widespread dispersal of pharmaceuticals by training staff, the players’ additional self-medication with alcohol and cannabis products, and a compartmentalization of risk that insulates players from worry about the long-lasting consequences of broken bones and torn ligaments. Since Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s interviewees are not current but former athletes, they have become acutely aware that the pain continues once the games have ended. As one posits, “even though I was on a scholarship … I will pay for that education every day for the rest of my life. Every day I will pay that price. Every day I will fight pain, I will fight the urge to take painkillers.”

Devastating though such a grim recognition of lifelong pain may be, it is not the most sinister of the game’s cascading impacts for those who participate. That dark distinction goes to the lasting effects of traumatic brain injuries (or TBIs) and their most famous incarnation, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE). In the last 20 years, widespread media coverage of the harms of such disorders have meant that almost no one can claim complete ignorance of the long-term mental health risks of repeated hits to the head. The 2015 Hollywood film Concussion, starring Will Smith, figures prominently in The End of College Football, as the interviewees relate the manner in which coaches actively discouraged them from seeing the movie—part of a larger regime of collective gaslighting around the potential future severity of TBIs.

But the interviewees also relate a pervasive exchange of gallows humor among players: “if you had like a spacey moment, like, ‘Oh it’s that CTE kicking in.’ … Maybe not the most respectful to people who actually suffer from that condition, but yeah, not really any serious conversations about it.” Using humor to deflect from their obvious underlying concern that they themselves will become “people who actually suffer from that condition,” the players attempt to manage what Kalman-Lamb and Silva term “the emotional load” of CTE, leading them to “question every small change in their subjective well-being.”

In concert with the NFL, NCAA, and helmet manufacturers, the players are provided with the latest safety equipment technologies to help mitigate the risks of continual head contacts. But, lest the observer be inclined to view this better-health-through-science narrative charitably, Kalman-Lamb and Silva take pains to position it as little more than an enabler of further violence:

Our interviews made clear that coaches not only normalized head-to-head trauma, they often encouraged it. Thomas Rycliff [a pseudonym] recalled being explicitly told to target a teammate’s head with his own, even referring to it as an uncontroversial request: “He pulls me aside, he says, ‘See, I don’t give a fuck what you do. You bring the plastic.’ And so he just wanted me to go hit this guy in the head as hard as I can, which is great because that’s like my best move.”

Beyond the conventional framing of masculine toughness, the anonymous coach’s exhortation to “bring the plastic” reveals his “uncontroversial” understanding that the helmet’s material is not primarily protective, but, rather, inflictive. This meaningfully reflects findings from my own research into football helmet history and culture: in all too many cases the player’s body is understood as a weapon, and the violence and pain is primarily mediated via the tip of the proverbial spear.

Such an objectifying and militaristic framing of player personhood undergirds what is without question The End of College Football’s most controversial moral argument: that it is not merely the coaches, athletic administrators, university officials and other salaried participants in the college football industry who are complicit in this devastating regime of bias and harm, but the fans themselves. As Kalman-Lamb previously argued in his hockey book, Game Misconduct, the authors assert that the potential for injury is in fact an essential dynamic in forming fan attachment—“central to the political economy of meaning in high-performance spectator sport” —because it elevates the stakes of the competition and therein the potency of the narrative. The things that are conventionally understood as the stakes of wins and losses in college football—bowl game and playoff appearances, player and coach awards, a feeling of happiness in triumph and sadness in defeat—are not enough to sustain the fervent level of interest that college football has built up over the last two centuries, they argue. Rather, it is knowing, consciously or not, that the bodies of fellow human beings are under threat of grievous injury that elevates fan identification to a fever pitch: “The life-altering and sometimes life-ending trauma is inextricable from the sport as it is now played, which means that college football is built on a form of human sacrifice.”

This claim is clearly designed to inflame, a sort of invitation to the American right wing media complex to hate-read and therein publicize the book. Even so, Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s statement is meaningfully supported by the evidence they provide.

Damning indictments of the mistreatment of faceless players don’t have the narrative specificity necessary to prompt most fans to reckon with their own complicity in the harms of the sport.

But few readers with even an ounce of sympathy for the charms of college football will weigh that evidence with much seriousness. Because the disciplinary conventions of sociological research require that the players, coaches, and universities associated with the book’s testimonials are anonymized, the potential for outrage and a re-examination of priorities among football fans is almost totally depleted.

Far more than harm, the factor that “provides the scaffolding for a community of ‘we’ and the possibility of ephemeral and illusory triumph that can temporarily alleviate the affective strains of capitalist life” in college football, and any sport, is narrative specificity. Almost no one save a few journalists follows college football in the aggregate: favorite teams, players, and fond feelings for one’s alma mater power fan affiliation, from the most casual spectators to the rabid alumni donors. Were such fans to understand that the devastating testimonials provided by the players specifically indicted their own coaches, administrators, and universities, their reactions would doubtless be intensified, whether or not they were inclined to believe the whistle-blowing players. As it is, every fan from every fan base can blithely assume the abuses detailed in The End of College Football are contained to other programs, should they be predisposed to do so. Thus, though the players involved are anonymized for good reasons—both methodological rigor and whistleblower protection—the force of their accounts is, unfortunately, blunted by the same safeguards.

Another related reason for the limited impact of Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s indictment of the game has to do with something that few fans themselves are yet willing to admit: football need not be, and increasingly is not, a contact sport. Youth participation in tackle football among boys may have numerically rebounded since dropping to an all-time low during the pandemic. Even so, despite its overwhelming present success and obscene profitability, the football industry is obviously still concerned for its future livelihood. And the most significant way that the NFL, in particular, is addressing this concern is by promoting the flag version of the game, notably among girls and young women. Factor in the rising prominence of the seven-on-seven non-contact version of football played in spring by high school boys in Texas and other football-crazed states, along with the strategic emphasis on the passing game over running the ball at all levels.

As such, it is not hard to imagine a non-contact future for football. It will not come soon enough for Kalman-Lamb, Silva, and many other concerned observers, including this author. Still, the violent action that powers most moral objections is not, I would argue, actually inherent to an evolving game.

Finally, Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s call for college football’s abolition ultimately doesn’t satisfy the authors themselves. Even widespread adoption of “basketball on grass,” as the flag version of the game has been dubbed, wouldn’t satisfy them: ultimately only change “at the level of the political economy of racial capitalism more broadly—through radical reforms like universal access to higher education, Medicare for all (health care), and, ultimately, the abolition of capitalism itself” will do. Whether or not one agrees with these goals, they are so far beyond the scope of reasonable expectation for a book on college sports they raise an eyebrow. Yes, Kalman-Lamb and Silva recognize that the world’s economic system will not be transformed anytime soon. As such, they conclude the book with a list of more immediate-term measures to alleviate college football’s harms, like the creation of a players’ union.

But their call for transformative global change as the only “true” solution for what ails the game—like their assumption that anonymized player interviews will be morally affecting—ignores the power of narrative specificity in determining most people’s attachment to football, and, indeed, any sport. Connecting with family and friends around their fandom for a particular team is the bedrock of most people’s attachment to the game. Such fans are either not thinking about the game’s harms or are able to compartmentalize them (much like the players themselves) when they are presented in the abstract: as, indeed, Kalman-Lamb and Silva have done. The dynamic stories of college football form meaningful community building blocks for millions of Americans, and asking fans to give that up on the basis of invocations of broad frameworks for injustice like “racial capitalism” (if they’re even willing to recognize that it exists) will not be effective.

Instead, the communities that make up college football fandom should be presented with compelling popular narratives, which present the moral calculus of the game in relation to direct harm done to specific young men whose athletic exploits have powered their own pleasure. Until then, the end of college football will remain a goal as seemingly unattainable as the “abolition of capitalism” itself.