Transcript

[00:00] [AI Sports Announcer Voice] All right, folks, here we go. Three seconds on the clock. The quarterback scanning the field, sweat pouring into his eyes as the pocket collapses, lineman grunting, cleats scrambling for traction. He gives a little fake, rolls right, dodges a defender. The crowd is holding its breath. One more second. He sees his man breaking free downfield, plants the foot, shifts the weight. He lets it fly. A tight spiral cutting through the night air. Touchdown, touchdown. He’s got it. The stadium absolutely erupts. Oh, what? I see athletic trainers are rushing to the sideline now. Looks like a lineman’s hobbling off, grabbing that knee. He yanks off his helmet. I can see his chest heaving. Looks bad, folks.

Alejandro Echeverria (AE) [00:37]: This is the theater of college football. Fast, violent, emotional. Bodies collide, crowds erupt, and futures are made and broken in seconds. Football in America is often described as a spectacle, dramatic, visceral, symbolic, but it’s more than just a game. It’s also a national ritual, staged alongside flag ceremonies, and military flyovers, embedded in campus iconography, and a space of discipline and loyalty, where ideas about race, masculinity, citizenship, and belonging are rehearsed week after week. Hello, and welcome to AnthroPod, the Podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. I’m Alejandro Echeverria, and in today’s episode, “More than a Game: A Black Feminist Look at the Anthropology of Sports,” we explore how anthropologists are rethinking the meaning of sport in American life through the lived experiences of Black college football players whose bodies move through systems of power, profit, and care. Although sport has been often overlooked in mainstream anthropology, it has long been a site for examining embodiment, social structure, and meaning-making. Early anthropologists like Marcel Mauss explored techniques of the body, showing how culture shapes how we move, train, and discipline ourselves. Later, Pierre Bourdieu theorized sport as a form of cultural capital tied to class, taste, and habitus.

[02:04] By the 1970s and ’80s, as anthropology turned towards everyday life, sport emerged as a serious site of analysis, especially in relation to gender, nationalism, and identity. More recently, scholars working in critical race theory, Black feminist thought, and political economy have examined sport as a powerful cultural arena where racial capitalism, embodiment, and inequality collide. From college campuses to national media spectacles, sport is a space where broader institutions like education, media, and state ideologies are made visible on and through athletic bodies. In the current landscape of college football, where branding, long-term bodily damage, and substantial revenue are at stake, questions of care, risk, and opportunity have gained new urgency.

[02:55] In this episode, we will explore these questions with Dr. Tracey Canada, assistant professor of anthropology and author of Tackling the Everyday. Her work focuses on the everyday lives of young Black men in college football and how they navigate institutions that depend on their labor and bodily sacrifice while sustaining relationships of care and hope both on and off the field. Drawing on long-term ethnographic relationships with players and their families, Dr. Canada also reflects on the success, bodily health, and lives of Black college football players that support this large-scale industry.

[3:30] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

AE [03:44]: Hello, Tracy. I hope you’re doing pretty well. And I would like to say thank you for joining us today and sharing a little bit yourself and your work.

Tracie Canada (TC) [03:53]: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to talk more about football and sports in general, but specifically with an anthropology audience. That’s a really cool way to get my work out there. So I’m looking forward to it.

AE [04:06]: Yes. So before we get into the deeper things about your work and the book, can you share with us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

TC [04:18]: Sure. So to position myself quite literally, I’m an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. And when I tell you what I work on, the fact that I work at Duke is going be much more interesting, I think, because I’m actually quite excited about the place where I get to work and do the research that I’m doing. So I describe myself as an anthropologist who uses sport to think about lots of different ideas, specifically race, gender, kinship, care, violence, labor, and performing bodies, specifically, how the US is a particular type of place for the sport that I study. Because I write about college football and American football in general. And so as someone who’s pretty deeply invested in what our U.S. investment in college sports is, also sports in general—we’re very interested in a variety of sports in the U.S. and ways that don’t actually happen in other countries. I’m fascinated by our fascination with sports. And the way that I think about sports also is that it mirrors society. I’m not the only one who says that, but sports are an interesting mirror for what’s going on outside of sport, what's happening in the real world. And so they actually reflect back on each other a lot. And it’s that dynamic that I’m quite interested in. So it’s not necessarily what’s happening on a football field that is most interesting to me during a literal game, during a literal practice. But what are the dynamics that surround those spaces? What are the dynamics that surround the people who participate that actually means something much more outside of the three hours of a football game, the two hours of a practice that might happen every day?

[06:04] Because I think that without looking more deeply at what’s actually happening on these playing fields, we actually lose a lot. We lose a lot of the texture of what’s happening with certain groups of people if we don’t focus on these spaces, which are seen as trivial or they’re seen as pop culture. They’re seen as quite literally play, which means that they can’t be serious. But I think that these are very serious spaces. So once you start— least the way that I think about it, once you start to really take seriously what’s happening with American football in this country, then you can say something very specific about experiences of Blackness, lived experiences of Blackness in this country. You can say something about what it means to be a young person at this time or at previous times. You can say something about protest and activism. You can say something about gender dynamics. You can say something about how we treat labor and potentially how we exploit people’s labor. All these things come through, just like, to me, a simple study of American football, and that’s what makes me really excited about the work that I do.

AE [07:07]: I love how you said that sports is a mirror of our society or U.S. society. This thing can really allow us to see these other complex issues and these experiences, especially of race and gender. I really like that aspect. And I think that’s what drew me to your work. And so I like how you open up the book with this dramatic description of what is happening, this split second of making the decision before a tackle or before a ball is passed. I wanted to ask you, what inspired you to write that dramatic opening, that moment before the tackle? What made you start there? And what did you want the reader or the listener to feel in that moment?

TC [07:59]: Yeah. So the way I open the book, to me, actually reads as different than the other information that’s in the book. I wanted a reader to come into the book and be familiar with the place that I was writing about, the place and space of college football. And I think what is most familiar to people, whether you love it or hate it, whether you watch it or you don’t, there is always this dramatic scene. Are they going to win or are they going to lose? Is he going to make the tackle? Is the ball going to be caught? Is he actually going to be able to throw the ball? There’s something, there’s a tense moment, usually, in sports, and it’s always quite emotional if you buy into it. And there’s pleasure and pain involved. There’s wins and losses. There’s all of these dynamics that are at play, especially at the end of the game, if it’s a tight game. And that was something that happened to me while I was doing research. One of the games that I went to for the team that I was following, they almost won, but they lost this game in a pretty heartbreaking fashion. And it was not the first game that they had lost in a couple of weeks. And so there was a lot riding on this game. And I wanted to open the book that way because I think that, one, again, people are familiar with that scene of a game. Two, I really adore sports fiction. So shows, specifically shows just about sports, but then also sports documentaries. And I like the way that these different genres visualize what happens on a field. And so while I was writing that opening scene, trying to bring a reader in and be really smooth about how I was going to then go into the other things that I was going to talk about, because I actually don’t spend that much time in the book on a football field. I was really inspired by the show Friday Night Lights and the way that Friday Night Lights visualizes these experiences of the heartbreak of you lose the game or the excitement when you win it, or it seems like time stands still when you’re waiting for something to happen.

[10:05] And I think Friday Night Lights actually visualizes that beautifully. And so I wanted to do that in writing. So that’s the second reason why I did that. But then the third reason why I opened it that way was because, like I just mentioned, it was an easy way for me to, I think, get a reader on board with me, because it is something that’s so familiar, that once that scene ends, it actually then pretty quickly moves on to the people that are involved. And I wanted that to be really clear early on. I don’t even know how many pages long the scene is in the book, but I wanted it to be clear pretty early on that yes, this is a book about football, but it’s also primarily a book about the people who play football. And so pretty quickly that scene moves away from the field. And now we’re talking about the player who happened to make the mistake that caused them to lose the game. We’re talking about the ways that the other players rally around him. Specifically. I’m talking about his parents, because I went and found his parents after the game and started to talk to them about how they were responding to the game itself. It moves on to what he’s then going to need to eat in order to refuel, how they’re going to be watching film, how he’s going to need to go to class in the next couple of days. There’s a lot that happens in the first, I would say, ten pages of the book that seem to really be about this game of football. But actually, it’s about the people, the people that drive it, because the way that I think about it is that you can’t have football without the people who play. And that seems like such a simple, silly, expected thing to say. But I actually think that sometimes that gets lost. And so I wanted my book to really focus on and center on the players themselves, and specifically the black players who really drive this sport, without whom we wouldn’t have it. And so if we start with where they’re playing and how they’re playing and the excitement and the devastation of losing this game, then we can get to, okay, now what’s it really like for this relatively young person who’s at the center of all of this? And that’s what I hope a reader will take away from this intense moment that opens the book.

AE [12:13]: Okay, so those are the risks, right, that you were talking about—the pain and the unexpected, the wear and the tear, I guess, as some anthropologists would say, that’s often overlooked or not deeply interrogated or seen in the behind-the-scenes of who’s involved, like the parents.

TC [12:30]: I’m glad that that came across, and actually Friday Night Lights, the show, which is my favorite version of it, is the third version of this thing. So Friday Night Lights started out as a book that was written by a journalist, and then it was adapted into a film that was based on the book, pretty closely based on the book. And the book is, I would describe it as ethnographic because it is written by a journalist, right? He did spend a season with a high school football team in Texas. And so the film follows. The film is fiction, but it follows the stories and the way that Bissinger writes them in the book. But then the show itself, it has a life of its own. It goes way beyond what the book is because it’s a show and it’s had multiple seasons. And the thing that I really appreciate about the book is what you’re saying. Friday Night Lights is clearly a book about high school football, but it gets into these really intricate dynamics in this town, which are really placing why football matters so much to this Texas town, how people are placing so much pressure—this is the way that I read it, at least. They’re placing so much pressure on the shoulders of these high schoolers. And I thought that it was fascinating what Bissinger was able to do and how he was able to write about this, but then the way that that was adapted in the show, because the show does take it into these different arenas, and it does a lot with it, and it moves in these interesting spaces throughout the seasons.

[13:58] But while I was in grad school, the thing that I was consistently motivated by was writing an ethnography about college football that read in a similar way that Friday Night Lights read to me when I first read it. And so how can I get—this is to go back to the opening scene—how can I get people interested in this thing? Because I’m going to talk about a whole bunch of other stuff. This is not a book that’s going to tell you about the X’s and O’s. It’s really going to get into what it means to play the sport. That’s not really what I’m interested in. So how can I get people on board? And I think Bissinger also does the same thing in a really cool way of getting people interested in the topic, but then moving beyond and say, Oh, you thought this was going to be this one thing? Actually, it’s something completely different. Friday Night Lights, in its various iterations, has been the guiding, has been an interesting guidepost for me as I’ve been doing this work because of the impact. I mean, it’s a cultural impact. It’s a pop-culture thing, but because of the impact the Friday Night Lights has had.

AE [14:57]: It seems like you put a good fast maneuver on us from your playbook.

TC [15:01]: I tried to. I hope it came across.

AE [15:05]: No, yeah. I want to ask you a little bit about anthropology, specifically the anthropology of sports. In our last conversation, you argued that anthropology has many powerful things to say about sports, especially in a space like college football in the United States. You noted that this topic is mostly dominated by sociology. So I wanted to ask you, what is the value of taking an anthropological lens on this topic?

TC [15:34]: Yeah. So just the first thing that I’ll say is that I focus specifically on Black football players, right? And I also don’t use the terminology of “student-athlete” in my work, which we can get to later, too, if this is interesting to you, but it is much more a question about labor, of why that’s not what I call them. But I say that I focus specifically on football players because there are so many athletes on a college campus, right? There are so many sports that are being played on college campuses across the country, which I think is a really important thing to point out here.

[16:02] And because there are so many people who participate in sports in general, but then also in football in specific, something that comes up for me, and it has become even more clear now that the book is out, is to say that I work on something that’s quite interdisciplinary. I could be considered someone, and I am considered someone who contributes to sports studies. And there are sports studies folks who are sociologists. There are people in history. There are people in anthropology. Sports management is its own thing, like, higher ed studies. You could have people in American studies. There’s so many scholars and academics who are writing about sports, and that could be college sports or not. College, professional, youth, whatever. There are so many people who are writing about sports. We have to also keep in mind that we are writing about something that the public is incredibly interested in, that this is not just kept in the ivory tower. Actually, there’s probably way more people outside of academia who are interested in this topic, who are interested in athletes, who are interested in famous coaches, in records, in quantification of the people’s stats. There’s so many people that are invested in this. And to know that that is what it is that I’m working on, I think that it is really important to highlight that there is something very specific that anthropology can add to this still. Even though there are so many people who are writing about it, theorizing it, pontificating about it, like commenting on it, participating in it. Anthropology has something very specific to add. And specifically through my own work, I think that I write about college football in a pretty anthropological way. Meaning I deal with really old school anthropology topics in the work that I do.

[17:54] I write about kinship. I write about a ritual. I write about spectacle. I write about myth. I write about these things that are the cornerstones of the discipline. The one that also cannot be forgotten is that I write about race. If you look at old school anthropology, if you look at old school anthropologists, a lot of what they were doing in the U.S. was trying to write about race, sometimes in a very racist way, but writing about race for the public so that people could better understand what was going on. I consider myself pretty deeply indebted to a very particular genealogy of anthropology. But if we’re thinking much more broadly about what anthropology can add to these various conversations that are being had around sport, anthropologists do—or culture anthropologists, because I think that it’s important to highlight that I’m a cultural anthropologist who is very deeply committed to what it means to do ethnography with people who are driving the thing that I’m writing about. Anthropology, as I’m sure a lot of the listeners here know, helps to account for the super mundane, or the everyday, and then connects that to systemic, to then extend beyond just what’s happening on this random day at this random time to make these much larger arguments that are contextualizing all of these things that are happening. I think that that’s something that’s always been interesting to me about anthropology, to say that I could, if I wanted to, take one person’s story and write an entire book about that, to really focus in on what is happening with this one person at a particular point in their life, and then connect that to these much larger issues, much larger questions that potentially are within the nation or without. I think that it’s always been really exciting to me about the discipline and also what ethnography can add to it. I think that that’s the approach that I take, and that’s what I think that anthropology can add. All of these other disciplines are talking about sport in the ways that their disciplines know how to do that. You can have archival contributions. You can have contributions that are based solely on interviews. You can have things that are really thinking about the history to connect it to the present.

[19:58] You can think about the mechanics of what it means to play a sport. So the bodily mechanics of what it means to play a sport, what happens to the body in a very real serious way. But for me, I think it’s really important to say, what is going on with the person who’s participating? Who is this person that’s at the center of this? To recognize that their humanity and their personhood and their lived experience actually really contributes to their participation in the sport I think is really important. When you have an ethnographic lens and an ethnographer who takes seriously ideas—like race matters here, gender matters here, ability matters here, sexuality matters here, to then add that to studies about systems, to add those to studies about physical health and movement and what has been happening in the past. We have these archival accounts. There’s something really different that I think comes up there. I think that that is something that anthropologists can add in a way that other disciplines and other scholars can’t, quite honestly. I think that we are better equipped to do some of that stuff. Then if you take it more broadly, I’m talking from a cultural perspective, but you know in anthropology we have, we’ve got the four fields, the four main fields. If you add the other things in, if you’ve got a cultural analysis, if you’ve got a linguistic analysis, you’ve got a biological analysis, you’ve got a material analysis of what’s going on with this thing that is so popular and so many people care about and so many people are writing about. The thing I also say, too, is that you either love it or you hate it. But even if you hate it, you’ve got something to say about football. So what happens when we broaden this perspective to include all four fields of anthropology to say something about football? I think that there’s so much potential there. And again, I’m saying something specifically about football, but if we broaden that to just sports in general, if we broaden that to sports outside of the U.S., what do these things, these things that we’re participating in at these high rates, what are they doing for the people that are living in these places?

[22:03] I think that because of the ways that cultural anthropologists immerse ourselves in the places where we do work, we’re really interested in how people are theorizing their own lives, how they’re seeing their contributions to what’s going on around them. I think that that’s a really interesting perspective to add to a study of sport, because this is something that is global. This is something that a lot of people are invested in. I say invested because it could be time investment. It could also be money investment. And so as scholars, we have something to add to this conversation for sure.

[22:34] [Marching Band Bright Victory Instrumental by Lion Free Music]

AE [22:43]: Going back how you said that you—especially, one of the main tenets of anthropology is to center the lives of people, these individuals, to the systemic. Is that why you noted that you use the term “Black football players” rather than “student-athletes”? Does that have to do something with that?

TC [23:07]: Yeah. So I think that the language that we use is really important. And I think that in the space that I work in, there are often terms that are used to gloss over histories that are actually really important for the present, right? And if you dive into the history of the term student athlete, the hyphenated term “student-athlete,” which is often how people in college who play sports are described, that is a term that’s pretty top-down. It comes from the NCAA, which is the bureaucracy that organizes all of college sport in the US. And it’s repeated by universities; it’s repeated by teams. It’s used as a recruiting tactic to say that you’re going to come to this institution and you will be treated as a student-dash-athlete, which allegedly means that the student will be put first. Because the thing that’s really important about college sports in this country is that it’s the only country, really, that unites academics and athletics at this level. And college sports are meant to be amateur. That is their foundation. That is their history, to say that this is an amateur system of athletics rather than a professional system of athletics, because we already have that, and we're trying to make a distinction between the two.

[24:28]: And so with this term “student-athlete,” we’re trying to hold on to this history. What is problematic about this history is, if you know where the term came from, we see it starting to be used in the 1950s. Actually, the first director of the NCAA has written a memoir about—he’s written a memoir, and then he describes how actually, in this, he wishes he didn’t come up with the term. Because the term, which was instituted in the 1950s, one of the first instances of it was used by the NCAA in a court case because there was a football player who passed away while he was playing the sport. He was married. And so his widow sued the NCAA for workers’ compensation rights. Because her point was, my husband was killed while playing the sport, and I deserve something from it. And the NCAA came up with the term “student-dash-athlete” to protect itself from these types of cases, to say that this person was not a worker at the institution. This person was a student-dash-athlete. And so he did not deserve any type of worker compensation rights because that’s not how he was categorized at the university.

[25:37] And so when it worked in that court case, then it was constantly repeated. And so now we have its current iteration of—it’s on websites. Again, it’s used in recruiting. The NCAA talks about it all the time. It’s alleging that we care about the student before the athlete, but actually it’s using the term to protect itself from any potential blowback if something happens. And in the way that I write about football, it’s not really if something happens, it’s when something happens, because it’s also a very violent, dangerous game that is doing a lot to the bodies of the people who are participating in it. And so it is quite likely that things are going to happen to players as they play football. And the NCAA, since the ’50s, has been protecting itself from any financial repercussions for that by using this term. And so I am very clear, and I hope at the beginning of the book, it hopefully becomes clear, too, in the way that I write through the book, that I don’t use that term. I don’t use it in talks. I just call them “college athletes,” “athletes,” “football players,” because that makes it much more specific to the sport that I work on.

[26:39] But I think it’s important to know the history of the terms that we use, especially when you’re dealing with a system that, in the way that I describe it, is quite exploitative and quite extractive. And so you have to question the language that they use, because I don’t think you can trust them. And so if we’re going to take seriously what the NCAA is doing in the way that I’m analyzing it, then you need to really pull apart everything that they’re saying, all of the messaging that’s coming from them. And I think it all really starts with this term “student athlete.”

[27:09] [Marching Band Bright Victory Instrumental by Lion Free Music]

AE [27:23]: You sort of expressed that you want individuals to really understand the life of these individuals who drive this system, drive this industry, right? These very young, 20-something-year-old Black football players. That’s one of your main goals, is to convey the everyday life, the mundane, right? Going back to what you said earlier, can you walk through us a moment or a day that captures this reality? And what’s often invisible to most people when we talk about this sport or these individuals?

TC [27:57]: Yeah, so I’ll briefly go back to this topic of terminology, right? The book is called Tackling the Everyday, and I use “tackling” in the title, partially because it’s cute play on words, but because I think the word “tackle” can do a lot here. I write about it in the book. Most generally, I’m interested in how Black college football players navigate their everyday lives. And “tackle” can be a synonym for navigate in the way that I'm writing about it. And it just so happens to work out that the sport that I write about thinks a lot about what it means to tackle. And so if I’m going to break down this idea of tackle, one way that this comes up, is that a tackle is very violent. A tackle involves two bodies coming up against each other. And a tackle is meant to stop one person from moving forward. But on the other side of it, I’m also being met by a tackle, and I’m trying to break the tackle to go past. So it’s very violent coming together of people. There’s also a tackle piece of equipment that is used in football, and that is something that is used in practice that people run up against to mimic a person.

[29:18] But the ways that players would often describe their relationships to these tackles, the noun “tackle,” was that they often felt like tackles. Sometimes during practice their bodies were used in the same way that these pieces of equipment were used, which is a very unfortunate way of thinking about your own body. It’s just being used as a piece of equipment for someone else to practice against. And I think that, as people were describing that, it was really interesting that they were getting at some of the dynamics that I was interested in, even if they weren’t using explicit academic theoretical language.

[29:53] But for them to say that “I felt like a piece of equipment,” to me, that’s signaling a feeling of exploitation that I think is noticeable to players. But again, whether or not they’re using that language is, I think, what my job is as a researcher, to actually parse what it is that they’re saying. The other thing that I think is really important about the term “tackle” is that in order for you to verb “tackle” another person, it’s not just violent, it’s not just two people coming up against each other, but there is a intimacy to that. It’s two bodies that are coming up against each other. And because of the inherent nature of the sport, it’s two bodies of young men that are coming up against each other. And so that intimacy and the dance of a tackle, the choreography of a tackle, was really interesting to me, too. So I’m trying to, at least in the book, break apart what this word means in the different ways that it’s being used, primarily to say they are going through their everyday lives and what does that look like, the different terms, the different ways that the term “tackle” is used, specifically in football.

[30:58] And I think that centering that, specifically in the lives of Black players, for me as a Black feminist, for me as a cultural anthropologist, for me as someone who is much more interested in the relationships between players rather than in what’s happening on a field, that exposes a lot about the sport that people don’t often talk about. And so what I ended up writing about is a book about kinship and care, which is not usually how football is talked about. You don’t often hear people have these really in-depth conversations about the care that these young Black men have for one another, the care that they have for their mothers, the ways that they are multiply expressing masculinity, not in this hegemonic, expected, stereotyped way. You don’t often hear about how close they are to each other and how kinship in the way that we think about it as anthropologists in the various ways that we thought about kinship over time, how it’s actually being played out on a field.

[32:00] That’s not something that often comes up. We don’t often, and this is in the literature, this is also sports media talk, we don’t often think about where women come up in this conversation. And so there’s a whole chapter in the book about Black moms and how moms are taking care of these young players. And I think that it’s really important to center the labor and the work that they’re doing as well, because the way that I argue, what I argue in the book is to say that football can’t exist without them. And so it’s like, to use the word “tackle” is getting me to a lot of other, what I think are hidden aspects of the game, or aspects of the game that are not often highlighted by other scholars, by other writers, by other journalists. But it’s also a way to expose sides of the sport and sides of the game that I think add an interesting nugget to it. Because we have these stereotypes of what it means to play. We have these stereotypes of the people who play. We have these stereotypes and assumptions about who that player is in a classroom, especially for college professors. We have these just assumptions and assumed ideas about how they’re going to behave, what they’re actually interested in, who the people are around them, the language that they often use. And for me to use the theoretical orientations that I have, but also to take seriously this idea of moving through an everyday, not focusing on Saturday, which is the thing that is often focused on for football, for college football, at least. What else is going on here? Then you can expose the quite intimate relationships that players have with each other, the ways that they are caring for each other, the ways that they are, I think, pretty well aware of this exploitative system that they’re a part of. But it’s hard to verbalize that. It’s sometimes not safe to verbalize that. Sometimes you need a little bit of distance from it. You need to be able to reflect on it, to be able to really recognize what was happening to you at that time as you were participating in this exploitative, large, big money system.

[34:06] But the ways that care and kin, primarily for me, factor into these experiences for young Black men who you don’t stereotypically think of as having really close relationships with other men, who you don’t stereotypically think of as really holding their moms to this really important place in their lives, who you don’t often think of as having pretty deep theoretical ideas about what’s happening to them and their bodies and their situations and their experiences. That’s what I was trying to make visible to people in the book. And so if it’s a moment or if it’s a day, really what I’m trying to do is shy away as much as I can from Saturday and really be like, well, what’s happening on a Tuesday? What happens when you have to wake up really early and go to practice, but practice is only a couple of hours of your day. And then you have to feed yourself. And then you have to go to class because you can’t participate in football if you are not also a student. So you have to go to class. And then you have to feed yourself again because you also just burned a bunch of calories in the morning.

[35:17] So you have to keep eating all throughout the day. You need to make sure that you’re staying hydrated. You have to get on the bus to go from one side of campus to another, or you need to get a scooter to move from one side of campus to another. Hopefully, along the way, you get to talk to your friends, or you call your mom on the phone, or you plan for something that’s going to happen this weekend. But of course, not on Saturday, because I’m busy all day Saturday, but can we make plans for another day? Eventually, they’re going to have to go to tutoring. Eventually, they’re going to have to check in with their coaches. Eventually, they’re going to have to go to a dinner that they are mandated to go to because they have to check in. They’re being surveilled at all of these times. Eventually, I’m assuming they’ll go to sleep, but really, there’s not that many hours in a day. So when is all of this happening? That’s what I was most interested in, rather than what ESPN is going to tell you, which is sometimes, at least the way that I read it, it’s a pretty feel-good story of a winner and a loser, sure.

[36:10] There’s always going to be that hierarchy. But a particular person that’s at the center of the story and how he’s overcome hardship and he’s working really hard and he wants to make it to the NFL. That’s the story that is often repeated, and that is a story. But also what’s happening to everybody else is really what I was most interested in. I think that, again, using this terminology, using particularly a Black feminist lens that thinks about my own positionality as a Black woman, as a young Black woman, as a Black feminist, someone who’s also interested in relationships of care and how those actively play out in people’s lives. I think that all of those things are actually making visible a lot that is not often visible, specifically in this sport.

AE [36:55]: No, yeah. I know what you mean. When I go work out at the gym, they always have ESPN playing somewhere. Some student-athlete or some player, and they’re talking about their injuries, or they’re comparing the current season to past seasons. Not those day-to-day interactions, right? Those details that you just noted out. That’s not important. Those things are important because without those, the game is not supported. But the whole industry cannot function without those daily things, those relationships and the care and the kinship. All those things are necessary.

TC [37:39]: It’s not even all of those things. It’s in addition to all those things being necessary, that, like you said, the sport can’t exist without it. This is not a sport where Saturday is the only day that matters. There’s actually so much that goes into it. I think what’s also really important to highlight again here is that because I am working with people who are in college, quite literally what’s happening every other day of the week really matters because that’s when they go to class. So the fact that classes happen during the work week, this quote-unquote “work week,” even though they “work,” quote-unquote, on the weekends. This quote-unquote “work week” is quite important in the life of a college football player because that’s when they go to class. That’s when they’re interacting with professors. That’s when they are doing group projects. That’s when they have to do their homework. That’s when they have to go to tutoring. That’s when all of that stuff happens, which is not the same for a professional football player. That’s not an aspect of his experience that’s going to matter in the same way. And so it really is important to think about what’s happening in this, I mean, I would argue Sunday to Friday. But in this work week, what’s happening for a person and with a person who we only ever really talk about what’s happening on Saturday.

[38:53] Because there are relationships that are being cultivated in those other days, but there are also activities that have to happen in those other days. And those activities that have to happen in those other days actually matter for what’s happening on Saturday. Because if he doesn’t participate in that week, he can’t participate in Saturday. And so I think we have to focus on these other days, too.

AE [39:14]: That really puts things into perspective, really. There’s a holistic approach that a lot of anthropologists use. I noticed—it’s really interesting to talk about school, right. Most anthropologists work and live, unfortunately, at a university as well. And most anthropologists have students like these Black football players in their classroom and teach and mentor them. But sometimes, as you notice, sometimes these stereotypes come into play when interacting with these individuals. And I wanted to ask you, what are some insights or understandings that you wish fellow professors or anthropologists might have or realize after reading your book, what are some insights that you are trying to convey?

TC [40:08]: Yeah, I really appreciate this question because I often get asked who I imagine the audience to be. And there’s often several audiences that I list, but one that always comes up are my colleagues—my local colleagues, but also just colleagues in general, other professors, other people who teach anthropology, other people who teach athletes in general. I write specifically about Black college football players because I think that they are very particularly harmed by the college football system. That is not to say that all of the people who participate in football are not harmed by this. Everybody can suffer an injury. Everybody has, I would argue, devalued degrees because they spend so much time on their sport that they are not allowed to spend as much time working on school stuff. They quite literally don’t have to because the NCAA sanctions that they can miss classes, that they have to be excused. And so there might be days where they just won’t be there, which then means they have to make up work, which then influences their relationships with professors, influences their relationships with their classmates. This is happening to everybody. Other things that are also happening to everybody is that there are often majors that they are encouraged into, which means that they could come into college with an idea of what they want to do. And football says, you don’t have the time for that, or that interferes with the schedule that we have set for you.

[41:35] So you need to pick a different major. So they might be pigeonholed into certain majors that they just don’t want to participate in or they don’t know what they are, because that’s not what they anticipated for themselves. Because of how much time they spend on football, they have limited opportunities for internships. They have limited opportunities for extracurricular activities, which means that they are not interacting as much with their classmates, again, not interacting as much with their professors or with other staff on campus who could then do something for their careers post-college, because it is statistically impossible for everyone who plays college football to go pro, so they’re going to have to do something else. But so much time is spent on college football that they have limited opportunities to explore these other avenues for themselves. This is something that’s impacting all football players while they’re in college. I focus specifically on Black football players because of the fact that we live in an anti-Black world. That doesn’t just affect their experiences in football, which can happen in a myriad of ways—to say that they are encouraged into certain positions, and those certain positions on the playing field are ones that have higher rates of injury. That is to say that their bodies are stereotyped in a particular way that their white colleagues’ are not. So there is the assumption of what it means to be, we would call it a skill, to play a skill position, which is separate from a from a cerebral position, which is the conversation about...

[43:04] An example is the conversation around quarterbacks, why you don’t often see as many Black quarterbacks as you do white quarterbacks. And it’s because of the assumptions of what it means to be a Black football player to say that we value for your body, but not for your brain, the way that you’re able to see the game. But we know that you can run, and we know that you can catch the ball. So it’s assumptions about their bodies. Black players, there are so many unfortunate aspects of it. Black players have the lowest graduation rates of any college athletes on a campus. So Black football players have the lowest graduation rates of any college players on a campus. And these are all just things that are happening to them on a college campus. These assumptions about their intellect, these assumptions about their bodily ability, these assumptions about why they’re in college to begin with.

[43:57] Stereotypes around all of these as well. Black players are particularly impacted by this in a way that their white colleagues are not. But then we take them away from a college campus. We take them away from a football field. And now you have a young Black man who lives in a larger-than-life body, larger than the norm body because of what is needed by football. Football is a sport that requires a very particular body to participate in it. And so you have to be tall, you have to be strong, you have to be fit. You’ve got to have muscle to be able to protect yourself, actually, from the things that are happening on a field. And that is good on a field. And then the second you take those bodies outside of helmets and pads and you put them in the real world, now you have a young Black person who is, again, being stereotyped as threatening, as dangerous, as more adult or older than he actually is. All these things that we are hearing about culturally, socially, politically, about the experiences of Black people, specifically in the U.S., but this is also a global experience, of what it means to live in an anti-Black world and the ways that specifically Black men are impacted by that.

[45:13] We are now putting that on a young football player who lives in a body that is larger than the norm, which then means that these experiences are exacerbated in a particular way. And so a lot of these dynamics are what I’m trying to make clear to audiences that are reading my book, because I don’t think that they’re all put together all the time. I think that often these conversations are having in silos. And so you might be aware, around this conversation around white and Black quarterbacks. You might be aware of a conversation about state-sanctioned violence against Black people. You might be aware about a conversation dealing with graduation rates for athletes on a college campus. But until you put all of them together and actually realize that Black college football players are quite central to this conversation, it doesn’t make sense as a holistic understanding of their experience, of their everyday life, which is my goal, not to focus on what’s happening on a football field, but to again say, what’s happening on a Tuesday? What is their experience in a classroom? What’s their experience while they’re playing? What’s their experience as they’re walking through the world? What’s their experience as they’re trying to get a job that doesn’t have anything to do with sports, if that’s what they want to do? What’s their experience as they are trying to interact with people that don’t play sports on their college campus? How are all of these dynamics that we know exist outside of this world impacting their very real social worlds on a daily basis? And I think that until we make all of those dynamics more clear for professors, then that can also impact their experiences in our classrooms.

[46:55] Because these assumptions are then going to enter for colleagues who are teaching players. The assumption that, oh, you fell asleep in my class because you don’t care. It’s like, no, he might have fallen asleep in your class because he’s been awake for twelve hours already. Because his day started at four o’clock and you just don’t know that. He might be asking you to not, or asking, telling you that he’s not going to be in class on a Friday, and you have an assumption about what that means, when in reality it means that he has to get on a plane on a Friday and travel somewhere across the country in order to play a game on Saturday, and he’s just going to have to miss your class on Friday. But now you’re annoyed by the fact that you need to come up with make-up work or you need to work with him in order for that to still qualify as him being present. There has to be some type of activity for him to be counted as present. You might get annoyed by something that always happens. You might be annoyed by the fact that athletes sit together in a class. I’ve always seen this on a consistent basis. They often sit together. If it’s in a lecture class, they’ll be in the same row. If it’s in a seminar class, they’ll be grouped together at the table.

[48:01] That always happens to me, at least. And you might be annoyed by that. But what is actually going on is because they have these really deep relationships with each other, and they spend so much time together. And when they leave your class, they’re going to go to a touring and talk about your class. And so it’s easier to be closer together. These dynamics that if you’re not really piecing apart why it’s happening, if you are on the other side of this in a classroom, it can seem strange. But in the same way that we need to give grace to all of the students that in our classes, that come from different experiences, that have different backgrounds. We’ve got first-gen students. We’ve got students who play other sports, who are not as visible in ways the football players are. We’ve got students who are taking part in tons of other activities on campus. Often, they also ask to miss class because there’s this protest going on. I need to give this speech. I need to prepare for this. Often, they’re given a certain type of grace that these football players are not. That’s what I’m trying to get at, is to say that this is an added experience that they have that not only is adding to all of the demands that are placed on their time, but we also have to recognize that these are semi-famous people, depending on what school you’re at. These are semi-famous or just straight-up famous people. And so what does that also mean for a relatively young person who everyone has access to in a certain way because he’s on TV every weekend and they can access him through social media and his DMs are open. And if he makes a mistake, he’s going to be inundated with all these comments from people who quite literally hated his performance, and now he has to deal with that. So there’s also a mental health aspect to this that is often forgotten. And so all of these dynamics are what I’m really trying to highlight for people who are in a position like mine, to say that, yeah, you might have these people in your classrooms, and you might not be familiar with what’s going on.

[49:53] But if you just spend a little bit of time better understanding what their daily life is like, then I think it will help make sense what’s happening potentially in your classroom, which then can help you work with them and to better understand where they’re coming from and to also teach them better so that they can actually learn something. You can use that to your advantage. I use it all the time in classes. If you end up teaching athletes, this is in general, their embodied experiences are so incredibly valuable. So use that. But if you’re discounting it, if you’re saying that it’s actually a bad thing, then that does not lead to positive interactions in the classroom, I think. And so that’s what I’m really trying to make clear for people as they’re dealing with these multiple dynamics all at the same time, again, as really young people, too.

[50:38] [Marching Band Bright Victory Instrumental by Lion Free Music]

AE [50:46]: I really appreciate all these practical insights that you have expressed right now. And it seems like a lot of the issues that you had on face or tackle was putting all these dynamics together into a conversation. You’re talking about embodiment, you’re talking about space and place, right? And across certain relationships or boundaries, right? All these things you’ve put together. And I like how you package it. These are some things that we can learn from these stories, these narratives. So it could become better educators, better professors, or better anthropologists.

TC [51:27]: Or to also say that there’s plenty of other projects here. I would love if my work actually influenced a whole group of grad students or upcoming grad students who are interested in the experience, the lived experiences of athletes. Not just to say something about sport, but what’s it like to be an athlete? And that can be whatever sport, that can be whatever level. But to really get into what it means to be an athlete now at this moment, I think is a really interesting question that, like I said before, I think anthropology can say something really important about that, it can say something about that that other disciplines can’t because of the way that we’re able to connect all these different levels, all these different systems, how we can see it all at the same time in ways that other scholars can’t. But if we put at the center, the category of person is “athlete,” what does that then look like? I think it’s actually really exciting.

AE [52:24]: I want to ask you, what do you see the future of the anthropology of sports, or specifically, how do you see the future of football, especially at the college level? Do you have any insights of any possible futures?

TC [52:37]: I mean, that’s a really big question. And part of the reason why I say that’s such a big question is because the research that I did for my book is based on the 2017–18 college football season. And then it’s also impacted by observations from the first pandemic season of play, which was the fall of 2020. And since I did the research for the book, that is what the book is based on. But since I did that research, the landscape of college sport looks completely different. And we’re not even ten years out from that work. And part of the reason it looks completely different is because of NIL, which stands for name, image, likeness. That is something that came into being July 1, 2021, which means that college athletes now have access to their own name, image, likeness rights, which they did not have before. So that has changed the landscape in a particular way. Athletes now have access, mobility, agency in a way they didn’t before because of something that’s called the transfer portal, which means that they can move from university to university every year if that’s what they want to, if there’s another school that wants them to be there.

[53:45] They did not have access to that mobility before. There are tons of lawsuits now in the works and also some that have finally trickled out. We know what’s happening with them, but one of the other things that’s happening is revenue sharing, right. So universities are now revenue-sharing with athletes because of all of the money that there is in college sports. This is a billion-dollar industry, a multi-billion-dollar industry if you take all of the sports. And athletes were not paid. They’re still not paid directly, but before had no access to any of this money and now are gaining access to this. The more recent changes in the college sport landscape, which are really driven by college football, because football pretty much makes all of the decisions for college sports on a campus, has, I’m sure, meant that the sport itself is quite different—not how you play, but what these changes mean for the players, which, again, is what I’m most interested in. They have to have completely different experiences now. I will also say that there are many more conversations around athletes unionizing. There are many more conversations that athletes themselves are driving about the need for their mental health to be addressed.

[55:02] There are conversations about the fact that, for the sport that I work on, but also for other sports, the wearing-down of the body, the impact on the body. I’ve written with a colleague named Chelsey Carter about weathering in sport, the way that sport, particularly, weathers the Black body. It’s quite literally what it sounds like. All of these dynamics are now impacting bodies in a certain way. So we have generations of people whose bodies are very directly impacted by their participation in this sport. A lot of people are speaking up now about what that means in the long run for them. We’ve got conversations about brain injury and concussions and potential for CTE, all of this stuff. It’s not that this has not been part of the discourse, but it’s much more public now and more people are having the conversation, and there have been actually really solid moves towards something in the last ten-ish years. And so all of that is to say that I don’t know what's going to happen with football. I don’t know what’s going to happen with players. I’m sure, though, that the stuff that’s been happening in the last several years has definitely impacted the relationships that they have with each other. It’s impacted the relationships that they have with coaches. It’s impacted relationships that they have with their mothers, which is the population that I often write about. And these are things that I think no matter what time, period, or context, or moment we’re talking about, these are narratives that are often lost by sports media. They’re often lost by ESPN, that are often lost by Sports Illustrated, right? Because they want—often, these are written by journalists who are looking for a story, or you need a package, you need a two-minute package before the game. And so there are certain people that they talk about, there are certain people they go to, there are certain stories that are always repeated. But that’s not really where my interest has been.

[57:02] My interest will probably never be in the same place that theirs is. I think that all of these changes to the college sport landscape only add to why, sometimes academic, but just different perspectives are needed on this thing that so many people are invested in. And the way that I consistently think about it, and I think that this also would matter in the current moment, is to say that if we shift the frame away from success, which is really what ESPN is always going to be concerned about—and success in the stereotypical way of, you played when you were young, you got recruited to a college and you got a scholarship, you got drafted, you make it to the NFL for however many years you play—that is the stereotypical, pretty linear experience of success for a football player. What if we shift the frame of success away from that success to say, instead, you had fun while you played college football. You had good relationships with the people around you. You got your degree. You graduated, and you have solid post-graduation prospects for what you’re going to do with your life. You made great friends. You have great stories from that experience that you had. Your body is, hopefully, in a way, sort of taken care of. What if that’s success? And I think that if we shift the frame of success to those things, then there are different stories that come up. And again, this doesn’t matter the moment, because I think that this moment is actually a much more needed moment to think about success in that way. Because success now could stereotypically look like, who has the biggest NIL deal, could stereotypically look at athletes who have, which is actually quite helpful, athletes who have pushed back against coaches in a way that they couldn’t before.

[59:04] It could look like the person who gets the biggest contract when they’re drafted to the NFL. But what about all those other people? And I think that if we center that, then what’s happening now makes a lot more sense. And I don’t know if we can predict where it’s going, but it can make a lot more sense. And it can actually speak to these historical issues with the sport. It can speak to issues that people are still very aware of and trying to speak out against and trying to fix. And it can also, I’m always pretty consistent in saying this, I think that if we look at these different perspectives, we can also try to make it better for the people that are playing. Because there is a lot that’s wrong with college football. I don’t want it to go away. I understand why people play, but I also want it to be better for the people that play. And that can mean in a lot of different ways. And so if we take seriously what’s happening across the board for people who are participating, then I think we have a better chance of making it a better system for the people that are there.

[1:00:09] And again, because of where my work is focused, the people who are disproportionately there are Black men. And so then by nature of this, we can make Black men’s experiences in a sport that depends on their labor, we can make their experiences better, which then inevitably makes the entire thing better, too. I think just the last thing that I like to—if you’re interested in the work, I wrote a book called Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football. It is written by an anthropologist. It is an ethnography. It is a Black feminist take on college football, which is not often the theoretical lens or even the theoretical or practical lens that’s taken to talk about a sport like football because of the assumptions that are made about the men who participate. But I will hope that readers find something being different in what I’ve written about football to say that these are very unique people who participate. And these Black men, these young Black men, have very unique relationships with each other. And we always have to hopefully put at the center that these are young people who are experiencing these aspects of what it is that I’m talking about.

[1:01:21] And so there’s the assumption that, oftentimes there’s the assumption that they don’t deserve to be in college, that they’re not smart enough to be there, that they shouldn’t be paid, that they need to just—in a more practical way that has been a term that’s been used recently, they just need to “shut up and dribble,” just play the sport and keep it moving. I always like to highlight for people that this is a group of young people who have a lot riding on what it is that they’re doing in college, but also these are college students, right? And so they are playful and fun and joyous and silly and ridiculous, right? And they just happen to play football, and they just happen to be on TV every Saturday. And so if you’re interested in what that experience is like, that’s what the book is about.

AE [1:02:14]: Thank you so much, Tracie. Thank you for being here. It was a pleasure talking with you and hearing a lot about your work and some of your insights. It was a pleasure.

TC [1:02:22]: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

[1:02:25] [Marching Band Bright Victory Instrumental by Lion Free Music]

AE [1:02:37]: Thank you for joining us on today’s episode with Dr. Tracie Canada, who reminds us that sport is never just a game. As we reflect on the everyday experiences of Black college football players, we’re asked to rethink the human lives that make football possible and profitable in the United States, and to consider who bears the cost of a system built on spectacle, discipline, and hope. You have been listening to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Alejandro Echeverria. I also had the pleasure of reviewing it with my fellow contributing editors, and I want to offer a special thanks to Clara Beccaro and Adwaita Banerjee for their valuable contributions to this episode. You can also find a full transcript of this episode in the show notes at culanth dot org. That's C-U-L-A-N-T-H dot org. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

[1:03:33] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]