In this book, Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America's favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players at some of the country's most prominent college football schools, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation. Through the stories of those who lived it, the authors examine the ways in which college football must be understood as a site of harm, revealing how players are systematically denied the economic value they produce for universities and offered only a devalued education in return.

By illuminating the plantation dynamics that make this a particularly racialized form of exploitation, the book makes legible the forms of physical sacrifice that are required, the ultimate cost in health and well-being, and the coercion that drives players into the sport and compels them to endure such abusive conditions.