Why are Player Health and Safety Such Problems in College Football?
A New Book Sets Out to Answer the Question
This is a free online newsletter for Jason Stahl, Executive Director of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA). If you are a past, present or future college football player, I ask that you consider becoming a member of the CFBPA. For a short YouTube introduction on the CFBPA, click here. Members of the general public who would like to support the CFBPA can donate at this link or volunteer at this link.
I mentioned at the end of my last newsletter that, throughout the month of October, I and the CFBPA would be highlighting issues of player health, safety and welfare in college football. Because of some scheduling delays, and because new material is now in the works, we’re going to expand this focus to run from now until the end of the year. I kick off that focus today with the review of a new book, The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game.
In the popular imagination of today’s world of college football, players have it pretty good. They have great facilities; they are allowed to make name-image-and-likeness (NIL) money; and they have the freedom to transfer to another program if they don’t like their current situation. For those of us seeking to collectively organize college football players, this view is one of the biggest barriers to both organizing and public support. If things are so good, why do players need a players association, a union and/or a collective bargaining agreement?
Thankfully, sociologists Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva give us the answer to this question in their new book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game. Based on a trove of anonymous former college football player interviews, the authors argue that “movement to grant college athletes their NIL rights masks the profound harm at the core of elite NCAA sport, particularly in its highest revenue-generating and most dangerous iteration: football” (3). Like most athlete advocates, the authors agree that NIL and less punitive transfer rules are “necessary and beneficial” to athletes, but they “are also in no way sufficient to the magnitude of injustice, inequity, and harm that define the college football system and have defined it for decades” (194).
As someone who has spent the last four and a half years of my life organizing college football players, I am predisposed to agree with the authors’ conclusions given my own conversations with players. Nonetheless, what they have done here for the first time is compiled evidence directly from former players themselves, in their own words, which should lead anyone with an open mind to accept that coercion and exploitation are central to the current business of college football. The authors have done a great service in allowing these athlete voices to be at the center of their book. In doing so, they allow the former players the opportunity to expose the “open secrets” of college football — the human costs of the game which are known by insiders and some fans but so thoroughly normalized that they rarely get mentioned.
These human costs of the game come through most powerfully in the book’s longest third chapter, “Beyond Compensation.” According to the authors, the chapter is the longest because “although economic and educational exploitation are crucial issues worthy of much attention, the most egregious aspects of college football are those associated with harm” (112). The chapter doesn’t fail to deliver on this argument. In their own words, former players describe examples too numerous to count of the “physical and emotional harm saturating college football” (69). Players are constantly told to play through injury. When injuries are finally treated, they are pushed to do so through compromised in-house medical staffers with an “inherent conflict of interest” who merely provide the “veneer of medicalization” (82, 81). This leads to many unnecessary and/or botched surgeries and medical files for players which are inches thick. Players or their families, because of the complexity of the private health insurance situation in the United States, sometimes become saddled with much of the cost of of this health care — especially if it is done after their playing days are over.
To cope with the physical and emotional pain brought about by their participation in college football, players often become addicted to pain medication, alcohol, marijuana and/or harder street drugs. While “mental health” discussions have become all the rage in athletics departments across the country, the authors show that what we should be discussing is “workplace health” given that the deteriorating mental health of college football players is directly tied to their unhealthy workplaces. In the authors and my own conversations with players, discussions of player suicide and suicidal ideation are not uncommon. As we see in the chapter “Beyond Compensation,” the reason for the high suicide rate among college athletes is clear—their work is destroying them. For anyone who claims to want to understand what life is truly like for many college football players, chapter 3, “Beyond Compensation” should be read in isolation.
After this, readers should then read the other stand-out chapter in the book, Chapter 5, “They Signed Up For It: Coercion and Consent in College Football” in order to understand how the harm described in chapter 3 is so commonplace. The first half of the chapter title is taken from the rhetoric of those who understand the hidden human costs of the game described in chapter 3 but argue that it is fine given that players supposedly “signed up for it.” Of course, as the authors show, no player willingly signs up for any of what is described in chapter three—they and their parents assume that their needs will be cared for in the ways described when they’re recruited by all programs around the country. What they come to find out, though, is that once you sign onto a program there are new “constraints on player agency” which mean that “the concrete reality and defining feature of this world is coercion” (142).
In this chapter, the authors argue that coaches can, if they choose, exercise all sorts of coercion over players leading them to “choose” behaviors against their best interest merely because coaches have near total control over their livelihoods and workplaces. They control their scholarships, their playing time and their future economic potential. Given this, players will often “choose” to submit to obviously exploitative working conditions. Among these conditions described in chapter 5 are bullying and abusive behavior by coaches; punishment workouts leading to dire health circumstances; constant surveillance in all areas of a player’s life; weaponized drug testing; forced medical retirements; and out-of-control practice environments leading to injury. According to one player, current and former players who challenge these conditions and “don’t toe the line [are] ostracized” (145). Thus, “the power monopoly held by coaches over much-desired forms of social and economic capital compels players to yield to exploitative conditions they might otherwise reject” (175).
At this point, many readers might object and say that these working conditions and possibilities for coercion have been undermined by new player rights to monetize their NIL and transfer to a new program whenever they choose. And it is true that some highly-sought-after players do have new individual power. Also, as the authors suggest, this view of football “will not be shared by all current or former players” (12). However, my own now wide-ranging organizing conversations suggest that the lack of independent medical care and unregulated practice environments described in chapter 3 are problems most places. Additionally, other college-football-wide problems which exist everywhere and are described in other chapters of this book will be encountered no matter where a player goes. For instance, chapter 2 , “Failure to Educate,” focuses on the devalued scholarship education offered as “payment” for players at nearly every university.
In addition to these problems which can’t really be escaped there are ways in which NIL money and new freedom to move to other programs create new problems of their own. For instance, in chapter one, we see how “NIL places additional labor on the players if they want to receive compensation rather than allowing them direct access to the value they are already producing” through their labor as football players (22). Additionally, in my own conversations with players, I have seen the way that coaches have near total control over the money flowing from boosters to players through NIL collectives. These monies are then used as another coercive tool to control players. Finally, as we saw at Colorado football a couple of years ago, many coaches now use the transfer portal to their own advantage as another mechanism of coercive control.
So, what is to be done? As the title of the book suggests, the authors want, quite simply, to abolish the sport as “the prevalence of coercion and harm makes any movement to simply reform college football likely to fail” (174). I disagree and the authors at least acknowledge that abolition is unlikely to happen any time soon. The reason I disagree, though, is that we do appear on the verge of full professionalization of at least the highest levels of college football. This then has the potential to lead to new wealth and rights finally flowing to those who make the game possible: the players. Now is not the time to end the game but rather for the players to organize and make the game a fully professionalized endeavor like the NFL. Players need to push for collective bargaining agreements which make the game safer and balance the power dynamic between players and coaches/administrators.
To their credit, the authors see this as the next best path. Throughout their book former players who also played in the NFL describe the working conditions there as much better for players. Practices were healthier, injuries were taken care of and players were obviously paid directly by those who they labored for. This was all true because of collective bargaining agreements negotiated between the league and the NFLPA. College football players need the same and the only way to get there is to come together and create these changes for all players. Given that our Platform for Change addresses how to lessen the problems at the center of this book, we hope players choose us to organize with.