Postscript: Violence, Consent, and Coercion in American Football

Last week, the press focused on what the press repeatedly characterized as an “ugly” fight between American college football players that broke out after the University of Michigan beat The Ohio State. But another story received less attention. Medrick Burnett Jr., a 20 year old from Southern California was playing his first season as a linebacker with Alabama A&M University when he sustained a head injury during the annual Magic City Classic against in-state rivals Alabama State University on Oct. 26. A month later, Burnett died. Today’s Postscript features two prominent scholars of sports raising questions about the hypocrisy of blaming players for a fight yet downplaying the death caused by playing by the rules. This remarkable conversation includes an unpacking of the “consent” to physical, psychological, and economic impacts, insight into the Foucauldian elements of discipline, punishment, and surveillance, and concrete reform suggestions for all people who watch football and/or work at universities. This nuanced conversation is for those who love or loathe football as a college sport.

Dr. Nathan Kalman-Lamb (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick and Dr. Derek Silva (he/him) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at King’s University College at Western University. They are co-authors of The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game published by UNC Press in 2024 – and their public-facing scholarship appears in outlets such as The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. They are the co-hosts (with Johanna Mellis) of The End of Sport podcast.

Mentioned:

• “The hypocrisy of shaming college football player brawls,” Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, LATimes
• “A player’s foreseeable death raises existential questions for college football,”Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, The Guardian
• “Alabama A&M football player dies a month after suffering a head injury in a game,” Pat Duggins, Alabama Public Radio
• Paul Knepper’s New Books Network interview with Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva on their 2024 book, “The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game”
• Dr. Jill A. Fisher’s Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials (Rutgers University Press 2008)
• Dr. Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (University of California Press, 2020)

On the University of Missouri football team’s successful threat to strike if the university president didn't resign see

• "The Power of a Football Boycott,” Jake New, Inside Higher Education,
• The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports:
• Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely acknowledged. How did we unlearn what we once knew? Ingfei Chen, The New Yorker

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