Tracie Canada

College football, with its prestige, drama, media, and money, is a core feature of the sporting landscape in the United States. However, the promises of an amateur system that offers a “free” education contradict the reality: college sport is a billion-dollar industry driven by plantation logics, in which players’ uncompensated labor generates enormous wealth for others and their physical health is prioritized over mental health and overall well-being. My work describes how college football particularly harms the Black men who are demographically overrepresented on gridirons across the country, given this violent sport is also exploitative and anti-Black. Drawing on long-term immersive engagement with Black college football players, my book, “Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football,” and other complementary writing projects tell how these athletes tackle the systems that structure their everyday lives, and who helps them do it. I explain the practices, bonds, and forms of care that allow them to occupy this fraught nexus of sport, race, profit, and play. Although coaches claim to support their players through a football family, my work reveals that Black players form brotherhood to support each other under the constant care of their mothers, on and off the field.