‘Play’ing College Football: Campus Athletic Worker Experiences of Exploitation

Abstract

It is well-established in the literature on the economic dimensions of US college sport that it has become a site of professionalized, value-producing work that does not equitably compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for the production of value therein. Yet, while these interventions make highly compelling political economic claims, few focus on how college athletes themselves experience the system and thus the exploitation they might endure. Drawing on testimony from semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 former college football players, we aim to expand discussions of exploitation beyond debates over compensation through our analysis of the contrast between ‘work’ and ‘play’ that exists in the lives of campus athletic workers. Utilizing a non-deterministic Marxian theory of exploitation, this paper explicitly interrogates the way capitalist ideology permeates college football by centering the important tension between ‘work’ and ‘play’ that contributes to that ideology as experienced and understood by college football players.

Introduction

It is now well-established in the literature on the economic dimensions of US college sport that it has become a site of professionalized, value-producing work that does not equitably compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for the production of value therein (see, for example, Berri, 2016; Branch, 2011; Hatton, 2020; King-White, 2018; McCormick and McCormick, 2009; Murphy and Pace, 1994; Nocera and Strauss, 2018; Overly, 2005; Sack and Staurowsky, 1998; Smith, 2011; Southall et al., 2023; Southall and Staurowsky, 2013; Staurowsky, 2014). As such, US college sport has been rightly characterized as an arena of exploitation in a strictly technical and economic sense (Van Rheenen, 2012), despite the fact that its governing body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and member universities steadfastly characterize the system as a form of ‘amateurism’ (i.e. Schwarz and Trahan, 2017). In fact, as of recent polling, 67% of Americans agree that college athletes should be paid (Libit and Akabas, 2023). But compensation is not the only source of exploitation. For Marx and other Marxian thinkers (i.e. Resnick and Wolff, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2013; Wright, 1988, 2002), economic extraction vis-à-vis ratio of surplus to necessary labor is not the only source of, or modality through which, exploitation operates. As Resnick and Wolff (2004) remind us,

[C]apitalism has subjected productive labourers to probably the highest rate of class exploitation (ratio of surplus to necessary labour) in the capitalist world. Such exploitation contributes to the exceptional levels of exhaustion, stress, drug-dependency, loneliness, mass disaffection from civic life, dysfunctional families and endemic violence pervading US workers’ lives. Extraordinary exploitation yields a robust US capitalism yet also one dependent on, and ultimately vulnerable to, a working class in deep distress. (pp. 209–210)

The important point in the context of athletic work is how the effects of exploitation reign over the experiences of athletic laborers beyond simply the questions of surplus labor extraction (Resnick and Wolff, 2005). Indeed, a Marxian-informed analysis of contemporary college football illuminates the many ways through which exploitation affects athletes both in terms of questions of compensation in the profit-generating apparatus that is college football and beyond that moment of value-production and attendant (or not) compensation; that is, the working conditions that make them vulnerable to deep distress. Indeed, we might characterize the slippage from economic to non-economic forms of exploitation as a transformation in the mode of exploitation that takes place. As Resnick and Wolff (1989) implore us to consider, exploitation may take any number of different forms, including (but certainly not limited to) different ‘class processes’ that generate exploitation. We must therefore understand class to refer ‘specifically to th[e] economic process of producing and appropriating surplus or, as Marx puts it, unpaid labor’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2004: 158). However, class is not, for them, defined solely ‘by the very different matters of who owns or controls means of production, who wields broad social power, or any of the millions of other social processes that overdetermine the production and appropriation of surplus’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2004: 158) but rather, ‘individuals participate in class processes (typically more than one) and nonclass processes and in doing so take on multiple, shifting, and conflicting class and nonclass positions or identities’ (p. 159). While paying college football players a salary for their work may very well transform the exploitative process from a ‘feudal’ to ‘capitalist’ class process of exploitation, it is that very transformation that yields new modalities of exploitation that extend far beyond economic and into non-economic areas of life. We can, and likely should, therefore explore the various forms of exploitation that exist as class processes transform and change shape. This paper thus aims to expose the myriad ways exploitation is experienced in the lives of campus athletic workers to reveal how the tentacles of exploitation extend through nearly every aspect of capitalist life.

Perhaps most important to emphasize for the present intervention, however, is the simple fact that despite widespread claims and calls to the contrary, traditional compensation cannot immediately or adequately redress the exploitation that campus athletic workers experience. While compensation may to some degree moderate the extractive nature of big-time college football, it would do so in a manner that continues to primarily benefit the neoliberal university through the exploitation of surplus value for capital accumulation. This is fundamental to any understanding of the broader political economy of college athletics. Therefore, in the pages that follow, we aim to expand discussions of exploitation beyond debates over compensation through our analysis of the contrast between ‘work’ and ‘play’ that exists in the lives of campus athletic workers. In other words, this paper explicitly interrogates the way capitalist ideology permeates college football and, in particular, centers the important tension between ‘work’ and ‘play’ that contributes to that ideology as experienced and understood by college football players. In so doing, we hope to contribute to an understanding of how campus athletic workers make sense of ‘play’ on the gridiron and in the ivory tower, and perhaps more importantly, how this functions to justify worker exploitation.

It is notable that several interventions make highly compelling political economic claims, yet few (i.e. the quantitative survey-derived study of Van Rheenen (2011) and Gilbert’s (2016) media analysis of labor struggles at Northwestern and Missouri) focus on how college athletes themselves experience the system. In this article, we set out to address the question of what college football means to the athletes who participate in it. For them, is college football a form of extracurricular play, or is it a form of labor? In the article that follows, we draw on testimony from semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 former college football players. These interviews reveal that the exploitative nature of the system is self-evident for the college football players who participated in the sport. For them, this is work, albeit work that is not compensated. Derek Van Rheenen (2012), for instance, defines exploitation as ‘when one party receives unfair and undeserved benefits from its transactions or relationships with others’ (p. 553). That is, for Van Rheenen (2012), in economic terms, when value is produced through labor, exploitation occurs when that value is disproportionately distributed away from those who produce it through labor to some other party. However, looking at exploitation in this sense is suggestive of two things that we wish to (at least in part) redress in this paper. First, that financially compensating athletes would end the exploitation they experience. Second, that exploitation itself depends upon what the observer defines as ‘unfair and deserved’. Rather than approaching ‘exploitation’ in this sense, we hope to shed light on how athletes experience the extractive elements of capital accumulation far beyond compensation. In so doing, this paper adopts Wolff and Resnick’s (1987: 167–168) definition of exploitation as the appropriation of surplus labor by those who do not participate in the very production of said surplus. This is, of course, the very premise of capitalism, as Marx (1992 [1867]) teaches us in Capital. Capitalism is a form of surplus-value extraction from workers, who sell their labor for a wage and in turn produce more for the capitalist than they receive in return through the wage-form (Marx, 1992 [1867]). Thus, the prototypical example of exploitation as a concept is the value extraction from the worker by the capitalist through industrial production and wage labor—compensation is but one modality through which exploitation may take place. In other words, if college football players are to be paid for their work, there still exists space for surplus extraction and thus experiences of exploitation on the part of athletes. This paper seeks to explicitly highlight the ways in which this exploitation is experienced by campus athletic workers.

But how exactly does this understanding of exploitation apply to college football, given that the sport operates within the putatively non-profit institutions of US higher education? After all, there are no shareholders to pay out and no capitalists pulling the strings. Which is to say, does the traditional paradigm of exploitation focused on compensation as inequitable distribution of surplus value even apply? Of course, economic extraction is a central vessel through which exploitation occurs in the lives of college football players. Former player Ryan Leonard is unequivocal in this regard: ‘It’s all about money. The NCAA is about power, but the NCAA is made up by institutions, who are about money’. Indeed, as he suggests, this becomes clear with a simple appraisal of the financial logic of athletic departments. It is first necessary to understand that the ‘educational’ side of the university and the ‘athletic’ side are separate budgets. This means that the argument sometimes advanced that it is a travesty that athletic facilities are constantly being revolutionized on campuses even as libraries and other academic facilities fall into a state of disrepair is not only morally bankrupt (why should the athletic labor of college football players subsidize the academic conditions of other students), but also factually incorrect from a basic accounting perspective. Of course, universities can try to muddy these waters for strategic purposes, for instance, by soliciting donations earmarked for athletic facilities, levying fees on students to support the athletic department, or by using scholarships paid out by the athletic department to transfer money back to the academic side of the institution. It should also be noted that the branding benefits of athletics for the institution at large are significant but difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, by and large, athletics and academics are discrete budgetary units (Berri, 2016; Schwarz and Volante, 2015). For the large Power Five athletic departments, and the universities which house them, that are the primary focus of this article, revenue comes in through ticket sales, merchandising, and, most of all, mega television contracts shared with other partner institutions in their conference. Crucially, because these are non-profit institutions, that revenue must actually be spent. This is why there is so much facilities construction, as schools use the revenue they must spend to invest in infrastructure that will help them lure the best recruits and in turn produce more revenue. Moreover, as noted, all these elements that are often central to debates over athlete compensation do not immediately redress the exploitation that college football players experience. Indeed, compensation may very well alleviate some of the economic processes of exploitation, but the primary beneficiaries of such a capital exchange remain the profit-making site of capital accumulation that is the corporation, or, here, the neoliberal university.

To fully appraise the political economy of college football, we must also address another place this money lands: in the pockets of athletic department employees, including coaches and other administrators as representatives of the profit-making corporation/university. While this professional-managerial class (Winant, 2019) is explicitly not the primary beneficiary of this extraction (that remains the university itself), this is a transfer from the football playing campus athletic workers who largely produce value in the form of commodity spectacle to a parasitic class of administrative officials who would literally not exist if not for that labor. Here, we must understand the difference between class processes that are directly subject to exploitation (i.e. the players-as-workers) and the class processes that are conditions that allow the very system to operate (i.e. the coaches, administrators, etc.; Resnick and Wolff, 1989). As Oklahoma University football Coach Joe Castiglione recently (and surprisingly) acknowledged (Prisbell, 2023): ‘Let’s face it, the whole world that we revolve around is the student-athlete. Period. That is why we exist. Without them, [we] don’t need any of us’. Let us take a moment to dwell on some of the concrete financial realities of big-time college football in order to unpack why Castiglione is correct. Overall, the NCAA member schools reap US$18.9 billion in annual revenue (National Collegiate Athletics Association Research, 2020a). In 2021–2022, largely driven by football, some 42 athletic departments each earned more than US$100,000,000 of revenue (Sportico, 2023). Of those, 19 earned more than US$150,000,000, and five earned more than US$199,000,000, with Ohio State, Texas, Michigan, Georgia, and Louisiana State University (LSU) topping the list. But the real question is who directly benefits from all that revenue. The answer, principally, is head coaches, the overseers amply rewarded for the task of extracting value from players. In 2022, the 16 highest paid coaches earned more than US$5.45 million each (Vitale, 2022). Ten coaches earned more than US$7.5 million and six earned US$9.5 million or more. Notably, these coaches also often receive startling buy-out clauses that essentially pay them unimaginable sums not to work if they are fired without cause (i.e. if they are fired because they are perceived not to be winning enough games). Between 2010 and 2021, US$533.6 million was paid out to fired football and basketball coaches (Lavigne and Schlabach, 2021). In the 2021–2022 fiscal year alone, US$90.6 million was paid to fired football coaches so that they would not work at just the 52 public Power Five schools (Wittry, 2023). Moreover, it is not only the head coaches who benefit. In 2022, 10 assistant coaches drew annual salaries of US$1.5 million or more.

Coaches, employed or otherwise, are not the only financial beneficiaries of this ‘non-profit’ system. In 2021, 51 Athletic Directors earned US$700,000 or more in annual salaries, with 25 of those earning US$1 million or more (Athletic Director U, 2021). In fact, at Ohio State University, ¹ the highest revenue producing athletic department in 2022, the athletic department pays 2158 people in total as of 2022. That figure includes eight employees earning over US$1 million annually (the highest being head football coach Ryan Day at over US$8 million), 20 earning over US$400,000 annually, 50 earning over US$195,000 annually, 148 earning more than US$100,000 annually, and 351 earning more than US$60,000 annually. Any analysis of the political economy of college football must therefore account for this transfer of revenue, which is to say surplus-value, from athletes to administrators and overseers. Following Resnick and Wolff (1989), we can therefore explore all of the class processes that directly and indirectly subject campus athletic workers to exploitation. Importantly, however, expanding our understanding of exploitation beyond solely economic compensation would illuminate the ways in which the overseers of this capital extraction (i.e. coaches, athletic department staff, etc.) would continue to produce conditions of exploitation regardless of whether campus athletic workers are paid or not.

This is all playing out in the context of fundamental changes to college athletics brought about by the liberalization of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) policies, adopted hesitantly by the NCAA and member institutions, to grant campus athletic workers their heretofore denied right of compensation for the use of their likeness. Do not get us wrong: the decades-long denial of NIL rights to college athletes was not merely unjust; it was a fundamental violation of a basic human right to one’s own identity. Yet, despite the changes to NIL, essentially the same fundamentally exploitative system remains in place today. In fact, it has been further enshrined in the NCAA’s most recent constitution. Why does NIL fail to resolve the exploitative dynamics of college sport? Quite simply, because universities continue to withhold payment to athletes from the revenue they generate. Economist David Berri (2016) has estimated that men’s basketball players at an elite Power Five school like Duke hold an economic value of up to US$4.13 million per year. And, importantly, the labor-coach remuneration structure in big-time college athletics seems to be inversely related to professional athletics. Coaches in the NBA, for instance, tend to earn far less than top athletes. While the forms of economic exploitation in professional athletics are worthy of their own analysis, big-time college athletics is perhaps the most egregiously conspicuous form of wealth extraction in all of contemporary capitalist sport and the revenue produced by football far outstrips basketball.

The primary beneficiary of the economic exploitation of campus athletic workers—the university—still controls the revenue generated by athletic labor, regardless of NIL. In fact, it retains complete control over the system as a whole, including the capacity to increase workload for players at will. In other words, it still controls the conditions that are necessary for the maintenance of profit; the university can, and is, still creating an environment conducive to exploitation and the alienation which the exchange of labor for a wage effectuates (more on this below). For instance, in late 2022, universities agreed to a new playoff model that would expand from four teams to 12 in 2024 (Russo, 2022). What this means is that some teams will be required to play as many as four additional football games if they advance through the tournament bracket. The incentive is clear: the new deal is worth US$450 million of additional gross revenue for universities. It will provide exactly zero additional economic benefit to the players who will play (work) the games that command such exorbitant broadcasting sums. Similarly, NIL places additional labor on the plates of players if they want to receive compensation rather than allowing them access directly to the value they are already producing. In this way, NIL ushers in a new era of gig-work for athletes while reinforcing the racialized economic exploitation of the current structure because it keeps the revenue flowing to universities while getting private enterprise to pay workers. In other words, rather than paying workers for their labor, NCAA member institutions are being subsidized by private corporations in new ways thanks to NIL.

A basic tenet of justice and fairness, and in fact predicate of capitalism itself, remains that workers at absolute minimum receive a wage for their labor. Yet big-time college football, whether or not it ultimately furnishes such a wage, is a system that produces alienation from the pleasures of the game through an extractive dynamic that benefits almost everyone except those who work to make it possible. Indeed, even as athletic department administrators, coaches, university presidents, and constituents of the entire sport-media complex enjoy the economic benefits of their participation in the world of college football, players, quite simply, do not (Brown, 2012; Gaul, 2015; Grant, 2002; Oriard, 2009; Siegfried and Burba, 2004; Singer, 2008). This fact is ideologically naturalized by a discourse that frames campus athletic workers as ‘student-athletes’ in a very deliberate attempt to obfuscate the tensions between ‘work’ and ‘play’ in the profession, making it difficult for campus athletic workers to confront the full extent of their exploitation. And yet, for most of the former college football players we spoke to, although there may have been disagreement on the precise form of compensation required, there was near uniform agreement that pay was deserved as but one part of any move to redress exploitative working conditions. In other words, many players we spoke to saw right through the façade of college football ideology in recognizing their position as exploited workers, and even that further compensation would not necessarily remediate the fact of their ongoing subjection to surplus-value extraction and thus exploitation. Indeed, lack of pay was consistently viewed as a source of significant alienation in their work, in part reflected by the sense that a transition to the NFL, although brutal in terms of working conditions, was a tremendous relief from the simple standpoint of finally receiving the bare fruits of their work. In the rest of this paper, we attempt to further grapple with the ubiquitous question of compensation in college football by focusing on the human cost of this exploitation through engagement with the experiences of the athletes who lived it. For those players, there is little equivocation about the injustice of the system, which disproportionately benefits those who do not labor and sacrifice on the gridiron to produce the commodity spectacle. As Ryan Leonard puts it,

The institution, the university, and all the staff and members are interested in profit. And for coaches and for administration, that means winning. Winning leads to the coaches getting higher salaries. It leads to administration getting bigger bonuses. It leads to the institution gaining more notoriety so that maybe they increase their student population or maybe they get better students. But it’s driven by profits.

We therefore agree with Resnick and Wolff’s (2005) assessment that ‘the point of Marx’s class analysis is to expose exploitation and its social effects’ (p. 34) and explicitly aim to do so through the voices of one of the most egregiously exploited working class groups in contemporary capitalism: college football players. In particular, we focus on how campus athletic workers themselves understand their own exploitation and the corresponding alienation that is experienced through their interaction with the big-time college football system.

Methods

This paper analyzes 25 semi-structured interviews with former NCAA football players. The interviews were conducted between 2019 and 2023, completed in person and through Zoom or Microsoft Teams, and ranged from 35 minutes to over 3 hours. We used snowball sampling to identify athletes who are, in our view, difficult to access given the structural conditions we describe in this articles (Handcock and Gile, 2011; Thompson, 2002). Through our scholarship and public work, we have built a small network of campus athletic worker confidants who were willing and able to connect us with other football players within their networks. This form of convenience sampling alleviated many of the challenges associated with accessing more difficult to reach groups (see Audemard, 2020; Dosek, 2021; TenHouten, 2017). Since we used this type of purposive snowball sampling techniques, we acknowledge that these findings are not generalizable or reflective of the experience of all college football players who have played in big-time college football.

All participants have been given pseudonyms and identifying information has been deleted from their responses. When we refer to ‘the power five’ conferences, we mean the five-dominant revenue-generating football conferences in the Football Bowl Series (FBS)—the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big Ten, Big 12, and the PAC-12.

In terms of analytical approach, we take a grounded theoretical approach to axial coding and have met numerous times to reflexively engage with the data before inputting them into qualitative data management software NVivo to code based on a number of important themes, which were then examined through the principles of critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA has a long-standing history of use within the field of sociology and enables researchers to explore how power relations are reflected in text vis-à-vis transcribed interviews (Fairclough, 1992, 2013). Proponents of CDA posit that one can study the ways in which discourses in the form of textual interview data are structured and situated in such a way as to reflect certain organizing and structuring forces in social life. Close interview analysis through resulting transcripted text, then, can be conducted to highlight some of the ways in which language works to structure social realities. To accomplish these objectives, the authors coded central themes and noted the discursive and socio-linguistic strategies used to give meaning to those themes. We then analyzed the patterned text associated with each theme on the basis of understanding the cultural messages being adopted by readers through the tenets of CDA and grounded theory.

The authors, with research assistance, input all interviews into either Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or qualitative software package NVivo and coded line-by-line based on principles of open-coding and grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1997). Each interview transcript was read in detail by the authors and several themes emerged which we in turn operationalized as codes. All transcripts were then coded on the basis of this open-coding process, whereby the most emergent set of concepts and their properties informed and integrated with the theoretical imperatives discussed in the article (Glaser, 2016).

To be sure, race, geographic location, age, scholarship status, and position have profoundly shaped the lives and experiences of the campus athletic workers who took part in this study. Indeed, there are likely vast differences in how each athlete experienced their participation in college football, their institutions, and the broader society in which they live. As unapologetic ‘small-n research’ (Hatton, 2020), we by no means seek to convince the reader that they are reading generalized findings that exist at the population level. That said, given the difficulties associated with accessing college athletes who have the desire and ability to report their experiences within an incredibly repressive and coercive system, we suggest readers take the testimony provided by the folks in this article as an invitation to think critically about the lived realities of ‘playing’ college football.

Findings and Discussion

Playful Work

There is no question that football, like all forms of athletic labor, is in some ways distinct from other forms of work because it is labor born of play in the sense that the actual activity that produces a commodity is also, fundamentally, a game. We can and will explore the ways in which the violent nature of football tempers and distorts the game’s playful impulses, but the core idea that football is a game matters when engaging with the question of whether players experience it as work or play. And so, it should be no surprise that some of the players we spoke to highlighted the playful elements of their experiences working in college football.

For instance, when asked if he felt like he was playing or working, Steven Summers explained,

I would say that during practice, lifting, and [going to] meetings and stuff, that’s working. That’s like: I’m showing up to work, this is a job. And you know, I enjoy it. It’s not just, like, I love the games, I love the grind too. But that’s the work, and then the play is Saturday. That’s fun. That’s when it’s time to come out like ‘hey, this is what we’ve been working for’, this is the reward. To get out here and compete . . . I would relate it to when you show up to work every day, and you’re busting your ass, you’re working hard, you’re showing up, doing what you’re told, putting in the extra work. And then you get the reward, you get the payday at the end. You have to do the work first for it to be fun.

Although the tendency throughout this article is to suggest that college football is a site of exploitation, we would be remiss not to underline and acknowledge the fact that for many players, there is visceral pleasure to be found in the sport, and that this pleasure is a significant motivating factor in participation and serves as a benefit even when other benefits may not be equitably distributed to them. Indeed, from the standpoint of pleasure, the argument can be advanced that the exploitative dynamics of college football actually detract from the pleasure and enjoyment that might otherwise be found in the sport. This is something players directly and explicitly articulated. Josh Hansen explained,

I love the game . . . but you’re also dealing with what you have to endure, will it actually get you where you want to go? So then, the kind of inherent exploitation of the game takes the fun out of the game . . . It’s like, you do all these things to make these coaches rich, you don’t get paid for it.

Campus Athletic Work

If we are to reckon with the question of exploitation in college football, an important consideration is the extent to which the players engaged in the practice perceive themselves to be involved in a form of labor, as the act of labor and the attendant value it produces are preconditions for any coherent economic discussion of exploitation. Again, there is a quantitative dimension here to the distribution of value that stands outside of the experience of players per se. But Marx (1994) also invites us to consider the qualitative or phenomenological experience of doing work within capitalism and the ways in which it distorts and corrupts the very actions that define us as human (beyond compensation alone). While the two players discussed earlier highlighted the pleasurable elements of their time in college football, the vast majority of those we spoke to characterized college football as ‘work’ rather than ‘play’. In putting it in these terms, players can be understood to be framing their time in college football as alienated from the playful dimensions of the sport, an additional aspect of exploitation beyond the extraction of the value they produce. In other words, the athletic laborers experience the effects of value extraction from their work in other spheres of life beyond remuneration.

If college football is sold to prospective players as an opportunity to subsidize the cost of college attendance through the enjoyment of play, the reality often looks quite different. As Michael Thomas explained, when confronted with the question of whether the sport was ‘play’ or work’,

When you look at it, you’re playing but also it’s work. You have to be dedicated to the gym, up early, going to practice, leaving practice, going to classes, leaving classes, going to study hall, going to dinner, going home, doing the same thing over again the next day . . . And, you know, a lot of kids, they don’t really understand that until you get into those situations where it’s like, ‘Aw man, I didn’t come here for it to be like a job’.

The oft-rehearsed justification for the college football system is that it is something that players ‘sign up for’. It is instructive, then, to hear from athletes like Michael Thomas that the practice of college football was so different than what was promised and that the actual experience was defined principally by work. For Ronnie Exeter, there was little equivocation when asked whether he was playing or working: ‘Oh, working. Most definitely working. Everything is mandatory, and that could start as early as 4:00 AM’. Jalen Rice saw it similarly:

At some point it was like, am I being compensated enough just because I’m getting a degree, like, is that degree as beneficial to me being up so early, practice, like, sometimes you gotta get there at six in the morning, then you’ve gotta go treatment, meetings, meetings, meetings?. . . At some point this is becoming more so a job than just playing.

Terry Davis had a similarly full schedule:

You are reporting to a facility in the morning for meetings and workout in the morning and then going to class and then reporting to that same facility for your afternoon meetings and then practice and then going to your study hall for your classes in particular, and you are reporting home as late as 10, and then 11 o’clock at night after you got everything done. You fulfill your obligations for the day, only to wake back up at 5:30 in the morning for your six o’clock workout, right?

The sheer quantity of the demands placed on college athletes is enough to distort even the most pleasurable enterprise into something quotidian, instrumental, and, in effect, alienated. Brock Adler put this experience in particularly stark terms:

I was working more than I was playing. I played maybe 12 snaps total [in] my college career. And that was in trash time, when it didn’t matter, in the last two minutes of the game or so. Every day felt like it was a slog . . . like ‘why am I coming into the building?’ It felt more like a job than it felt like a career. I felt though that I was getting, essentially, paid to go to school. I wasn’t able to enjoy all the benefits because I was a slave to football’s demands. I mean, our academic staff would always have to tell us what classes we could and couldn’t take, on the basis of football practice. Some guys couldn’t take classes. They even tried to do it in my last year before I told them I was leaving. ‘I can’t take this class because of football’. It just felt like I was working. Every day. Not like working hard, but, as in, I was part of a labor force. And I was seeing no benefits, there was no upward mobility.

Adler underlines the feeling of college football as ‘a slog’ that left him ‘a slave’ to the team’s demands. The combination of drudgery and unfreedom in this account does not align with the discursive construct of college football as a site of pleasure and play.

For Kevin Brown, this laborious character of college football was best understood by comparing it to high school football on one hand, and his later experiences in the workplace on the other hand. In answering the question of ‘play’ or ‘work’, he replied,

It’s a job, man. A few weeks ago, I actually had the opportunity to go speak back to my high school football team and in the comments I made to those guys is, ‘hey, cherish these moments, because you’re playing football’. You know, that joy of the game, this similar sensation of when younger kids are playing out in backyards and having imagination, ‘oh, I’m in the Super Bowl’, that’s that same sensation of the play. And once I stepped foot at [redacted college], it’s all business . . . The fun was sucked out of it the first day you’re there.

Similarly, Galen North also made the comparison to high school:

High school is a game. You go to school, you go to practice for a couple hours . . . But, when you get to college, I mean, your day is at least eight hours purely on football . . . from 6am to roughly 11pm at night, your day is pretty much scheduled for you involved around football. So, it’s definitely much more of a work environment than anything else.

For Brock Adler, understanding college football as work rather than play meant acknowledging not only the fact that football itself was evacuated of pleasure, but also that participation in the work of football precluded the possibility of experiencing other pleasurable aspects of college life:

A couple of us guys, we were playing Super Smash Brothers on Nintendo Switch in the locker room one day. It was after morning practice. [Redacted current head coach] appears behind us and says, like, ‘oh, you guys should be watching film. Why are you playing video games?’ Like, not even letting us have lives.

Chris Andrews also felt like he missed out on the campus experience:

I think about the opportunity cost of being a football player where, you know, I would walk through the middle of campus on my way to the stadium for practice and see all this vibrant social life and just everything going on on campus, and I felt like I was forgoing all of that because I needed to go up to the football facility and get ready for practice. So, I felt like there was a tremendous trade-off in terms of the college experience of giving up what most other kids experience in college versus what I was experiencing as being a football player.

That football required ‘forgoing’ ‘this vibrant social life and just everything going on on campus’ is materially significant given that the compensation received in return for the work of college football is the scholarship, or, framed differently, access to the campus experience, widely acknowledged as the primary justification for skyrocketing tuition costs at US institutions of higher education today (i.e. Bogost, 2020). For campus athletic workers like Chris Andrews to be denied that experience by the very athletic work that is supposed to provide it is to get to the heart of the exploitative dynamics of college sport.

In the end, the frame of ‘work’ rather than ‘play’ for college sport was nearly universally agreed upon by the athletes we interviewed. Kurt Weiss put it perhaps most succinctly: ‘So, yeah, I think if the student who’s working at the dining hall is an employee, the student who’s working on the football field is an employee’. Or, as Jeremy Jones put it

‘The more I’ve come to learn about it as a player . . . the more I’ve come to think that it’s way more like work. I’m way more of an employee than a football player and the coaches are my fucking boss’.

‘Team Over Me’: Exploitation as Unfairness

Fundamental to the concept of exploitation is the issue of justice or fairness. Marx (1992 [1867]) ultimately indicts capitalism precisely because it systematically takes the value generated by working people and distributes it to others who are not actually responsible for its production (see also Wolff and Resnick, 1987). So, while it is evident from the above section that players experienced college sport as alienating in that it transformed something most of them had once found fun into something that they defined as onerous work, this in and of itself does not mean that they experienced college football as unjust, which is to say, unfair–exploitative. But, when asked directly, it becomes clear that this is exactly how most players we talked to experienced it. This is not surprising when one considers that the work of college football, according to the NCAA’s own data, self-reported by athletes, involves a median of 40 hours per week of football-related activities (in addition to all academic responsibilities; National Collegiate Athletics Association Research, 2020b).

Brock Adler explains that the general attitude of players was that they were being exploited by the team:

They get their hooks in you, psychologically, to where you’re constantly thinking about the program, and you’re constantly thinking about what to do for the team . . . They made these t-shirts called ‘team over me’ and our joke was on the team is that ‘yeah, fuck me. The team over me’.

For Jalen Rice,

Nah, it’s definitely not fair. You’re just out there putting your body on the line each and every day and they’re making so much money, they’re televising you but the schools are getting all the benefits . . . and they’re just like, ‘get your degree, and that’s about it. We’re gonna get the next batch of kids in here and do the same thing to them’.

The fact that college football is a political economy producing enormous economic benefits did not elude players like Jalen Rice. They could clearly see that this is a business, one that involves not only the sale of commodity spectacle, but also commodities proper like jerseys and other merchandise. Moreover, it was equally self-evident to him that this value was being produced entirely by the labor of players—that it could not exist without them—and thus that they were the deserving beneficiaries of its fruits. He was also under no illusion whatsoever that a degree, an educational experience, or however one wants to frame it, is commensurate to that value being produced. But importantly, that perception of exploitation extends far beyond any reference to compensation; the exploitation experienced in this case would not be redressed merely by remuneration for work. Nor was it for Jeremy Jones:

You can’t tell me there is no value in 18–22-year-old football players when all over the country stadiums are fucking packed and ESPN shows every game. The money is there and yet we gotta hide getting like free drinks or a plate of tacos or some shit. The biggest shit that gets me pissed is when people say we get paid enough. That, like, we get paid with our education and that’s like ‘priceless’ or whatever shit they say. That’s a fucking joke, bruh. Like, first off, the value I am bringing as a football player is worth way fucking more than college tuition and cutting me a check for rent. Do history majors fucking sell out [redacted stadium]? Do fucking computer scientists get 80,000 people out to watch them fucking code? [Laughs] . . . it’s fucked that coaches drive around in Range Rovers and shit and make millions of dollars and I can’t even get a plate of tacos without hiding it or getting in trouble. Ain’t nobody telling coaches to be grateful for the opportunity of coaching us, but we are somehow so special that we get to play football in front of 80 thousand fans for an education.

The experience of playing college football is thus the experience of knowingly being exploited. Or, as C.J. White put it, ‘The guys aren’t really getting anything out of it, not necessarily not getting anything out of it, but from a financial standpoint, from a money standpoint, you’re not really getting anything’. The seductive ideological work of ‘amateurism’ as a discursive construct is evident not only here but throughout the testimony of players, who often hedged their answers as if they did not want to seem ungrateful for that which they have received (‘not necessarily not getting anything out of it’). But, despite the conscious and very costly work of the college sport system to ideologically interpellate campus athletic workers into ‘student-athletes’, it is apparent that the sheer blatancy of the inequity of the system makes this ideological process much less seamless than it might from the outside appear. C.J. White continued,

With all the revenue and everything that they generate, I feel like college athletes should receive some type of payment . . . with all the things that you go through as a student athlete . . . it’s a high demand. I think that there should be some things that kind of grant student athletes benefits other than just saying that ‘yeah, we just granting them a free education’. It’s more during that time, because you don’t get that diploma till 4, 5, 6 years later, and in all that time, there’s something those student athletes need to show that they’re being appreciated for what they’re doing.

What shines through here above all is the clear contrast between the ‘high demand’ of the labor of college football and the feeling that there is a complete sense of not being materially ‘appreciated for what they’re doing’, which is to say the work they are performing for the university as primary beneficiary.

Although he played in a slightly earlier era and very different part of the country, Chris Andrews had a similar sense that there is a fundamental injustice related to compensation at the core of college football:

It probably wasn’t for a few years that I realized that, man, you know, there’s a whole lot of money in this and I’m [laughs] I’m not really getting any of the money that’s involved with this big business. I went to [specific faculty] as an undergrad and my [faculty] is literally across the street from the stadium and so we talked about the importance of a free market economy and then I would walk across the street right after those classes and you would start to realize that there’s something that’s not quite right here. . . . If you’re gonna generate revenue, I think the split should be, part of that revenue should go to the labor force.

Galen North agreed,

From a compensation standpoint, I think it’s heavily unfair . . . . you sign away your right to your likeness, you sign away all of these things that people should be able to receive income for. I mean, your picture, your name, it’s posted all over the place . . . It’s also unfair from the aspect of you don’t get health insurance, which today blows my mind. Once you’re done playing, any issue you have, tough shit. They’re your own problem now. You have something that flares up down the road from the football injury? They don’t have to do anything . . . From the amount of time you spend doing it, you are not fairly compensated for what you bring in. . . . You’re not fairly compensated for the things that are done. At all.

Central to the issue of unfairness is the fact that players acutely felt that they were not receiving the compensation that they needed and deserved during the course of their time as campus athletic workers. What that meant is they were left with the feeling at the end of their careers that all the effort they expended—and the harm accrued to their bodies—was for naught. Jalen Rice told us,

And it’s like, all I’m getting at this point is a degree while all the coaches and the university is getting everything from me. Because, when you look back on it as a college player, especially if . . . you don’t make it to the league . . . all I have now is I’m a hometown hero, I have my college jersey, I have these college trophies, all I can do is go back to college and do autograph signings and that’s about it because other than that, all I have is my degree to put up on the wall, now I’ve gotta find a job.

Of course, the situation is perhaps even more bleak for non-scholarship walk-on players. These players are vital to the function of the team, as they provide a crucial role in practices preparing the more highly-valued scholarship players. So, in effect, they work the same hours as scholarship players with none of the compensation. One might wonder how they are able to survive. The answer, as for so many students, is, as Ross Nielsen told us, ‘I relied heavily on my student loans’. In fact, even some scholarship players ended up in debt. Ryan Leonard told us that despite being promised a full-year scholarship at the school he was transferring to,

I was only given a single semester of scholarship, and I had to pay for my next semester, despite having played at [elite power five school] in front of 80,000 people live, in front of 4.4 million viewers . . . I had to pay for my last semester, and ironically, I got a student loan bill coming up next month.

For some players, the financial experience of being on scholarship required them to engage in alternative methods of scratching out the means of subsistence. Charlie Rogers, for instance, had to resort to stealing food to survive while on scholarship:

That was probably the most crime I ever committed in my life. I was just stealing food. Because I was just starving the whole time. . . . me and my friend would just go to Safeway. And that was back when they had the hot bar, where you could make your own plate with the pre-made food, just go in there and walk out. You know, no chase policy. And, you know, we had a meal for the day.

Ryan Leonard saw teammates also have to resort to crime in order to support themselves and their families. He recounted the story of a teammate/roommate who had to take out loans to send back to his family who could not afford their rent. That roommate also supplemented those loans by selling acid out of the house Ryan Leonard lived in. On one occasion, that roommate and a couple of other teammates decided they could make some money by robbing a drug dealer they would buy marijuana from. He explained,

They watched this drug dealer leave, go pick up the safe, wheelbarrow the safe out and bring it to our house, and they took a blow torch to it and opened it up. Well, it wasn’t full of weed at all. It was full of probably 12 guns, 15 guns ranging from AR-15s, handguns to shotguns.

A couple of months later, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives law enforcement came and arrested all three athletes. Leonard noted,

I remember these guys had no idea what was going on, and all of them lost their scholarship. This is what poverty, even as athletes, drives them to do, they drive them to go to commit crimes to try to make money elsewhere because they don’t have enough to subsidize their living or do what they want to do off of a athletic scholarship.

Meanwhile, for Josh Hansen, the solution was multi-level marketing:

5Linx is like a work from home opportunity. It’s like, financial services, like everyday services like energy and television, and you’re trying to get people to sign up for 5Linx or whatnot, and every time you get somebody to sign up, you get like, $100 or $200. And so, that was to get money in our pocket . . . It was a couple of my dudes, on the team. They were like, ‘hey bro, we’ve got this joint that we’re doing, and y’all need to get on’. So, everybody tried to get on as many people as possible.

Terry Davis found his own methods to get by:

I cook my own food, I do my own shopping, I stretched my meals and I find things that other people want around me. So I used to buy clothes and sell clothes for teammates and things like that. My closet was a shopping store basically for the basketball team and football members.

If the entire experience of college football amounts to the performance of unpaid labor—that requires additional work on the side to make ends meet, there is something particularly galling about overtime football demands. One such demand is the bowl game, often held up as something for college football players to aspire to since it signifies a successful season and some minor material rewards like corporate swag. But, for the athlete, it also means many additional hours of football work. Chris Andrews figured this out over the course of his career,

After I got older, you know, I started to realize that boy [bowl games] are pretty big time commitments. There’s a lot of money involved and we get like a shiny watch and a couple of t-shirts for the time and effort that we put into this. That’s not really commensurate with the level of work that we’re putting in . . . so I really do think that it’s exploitation of these college athletes that don’t know their worth, and then as we get older we start to figure out our worth but we don’t really have much of a way to act upon or to change the system we’re in the midst of being a college athlete.

The dynamic described by Chris Andrews is more rule than exception in the world of college football: although there is no paycheck, there is also never really a vacation from the work. Kurt Weiss explains,

We played in a bowl game every [December]. I didn’t celebrate Christmas from freshman year of college through my rookie year in the NFL. . . I would go back [home] for the first two weeks of January, after the bowl game. And then, like a week and a half between the end of spring semester, and the start of summer training. So, there were no holidays or family time. I’d see my family when they came to games. So, there’s no, ‘I’m gonna miss Christmas’, like you’re gonna miss every holiday for however long you’re here. No Thanksgiving. None of that. So, that’s just something you accept early on . . . . [The bowl game is] a party for everybody but you. It’s for boosters and fans.

While players viscerally and materially experienced exploitation as a feature of their time in college football, they were hardly oblivious to the fact that the coaches who exhorted them to perform were also being lavishly compensated. This was unquestionably a key element of their sense of injustice and exploitation. As Brock Adler very directly put it,

You think [college football is] about playing. But really, it’s about money. It’s about a lot of coaches making millions of dollars off the backs of your own labor and your body, and you breaking down, and your mental health too.

At times, coaches even flaunted this dynamic. Wallace Bell explained, ‘I’ve had coaches say, “I can release all of you mother effers.” You know what I mean? “They’re paying me, they’re not paying you.” So there’s definitely a real thing that you face’. In other cases, it was slightly less obvious but no less frustrating, as for Kurt Weiss,

So, I was naive to that stuff. I didn’t know coaches had agents. I didn’t know as a freshman that the program made $60 million a year. So, that was the bind. But when players came to visit and I spoke with them, even if ignorant of some of the broader context, college players know viscerally, like, ‘I don’t have enough to eat and the coaches are driving Mercedes or Corvettes around’. So, we’d talk and joke about that, but you have no recourse.

And yet, brutally, coaches often made it clear that they would not be available to help players financially once their careers ended. Terry Davis ‘saw it, when other guys didn’t get drafted, [famous head coach] would say shit like, “Don’t come back around with your hands out asking for help”’.

Given the economic challenges and pervasive feelings of exploitation, it is small wonder that for players who had the opportunity to ultimately move on to the NFL to continue their careers, there was a profound sense of satisfaction and relief to finally draw a paycheck for the labor of football. For, Jalen Rice,

When you get a big check into your account, you’re like, ‘this is much better. I really like this way more’. I’m getting food at other times, I’m getting different deals off the field, trading card deals, they send me a check saying you’re getting compensated for your jersey sales. You’re getting paid for everything that you do . . . There’s so many more benefits to it. It’s like, yeah, I would rather do this than be in college playing football, most definitely.

As a consequence, Jalen Rice felt no compunction about saying that he appreciated his time in the NFL more than college, a narrative that provides a sharp rebuke to the apologistic mantra of college sport that it offers a more pleasurable experience than the pros:

I feel like playing college football is more so enslavement at that point in time, like, you had no life to yourself, you had no summer, you had no time off . . . . So, you just do whatever the coaches tell you, your academic advisors, your teachers, and that’s about it. Versus the NFL, you come in, you don’t have to listen to the coaches, you don’t have to listen to anybody. This is truly your job, like, either you’re gonna do it or not, because we can find somebody else to do it. So, it’s a big difference.

C.J. White echoed this sentiment: ‘Going to the NFL, getting paid for your work, it kind of brings, not saying money brings joy, but it brings some kind of satisfaction knowing that now I’m playing the game and I’m getting paid for it’. Likewise, for Chris Andrews,

I did think that it was a surprise to sign a six-figure contract to essentially do less than what I was doing in college. In college I had to remain eligible, go to class, and do all these different things and now I was getting a paycheck for just being a good football player.

Name, Image, and Likeness

The liberalization of name, image, and likeness rules in college sport has significantly changed the terrain in terms of compensation. Nevertheless, it must be underlined that new NIL policies do not change the fundamental dynamic of college sport in terms of universities refusing to compensate the players who produce them revenue; that universities remain the primary beneficiaries of the extraction of athletic labor. What it does now mean is that players are able to find new economic opportunities that will not compromise their eligibility. In effect, they are now permitted to perform additional promotional labor in order to be compensated by third parties, allowing universities to claim that college sport is a site of compensation without having to actually bear the expense of labor costs. In other words, NIL does nothing to redress the fact that universities benefit from the appropriation of surplus labor even though they do not participate in the production of that very surplus (Wolff and Resnick, 1987). This was Jeremy Jones’ point:

Guys have been doing side hustles forever, but it was always like you get caught and you’re fucked. But now that shit’s legal and it’s about time . . . you know? It’s long overdue. But at the same time . . . . It’s fucked because it’s everyone saying ‘yeah these guys can get paid now’ but we aren’t getting paid for football or the value we bring through football. We are getting paid for a side hustle that we have to seek out. It’s just like another student going out and getting a job . . . I’m out here hawking chicken for a little bit of cash and coaches be rolling up in Land Rovers. Coaches are paid by the university, right? The university always be talking about ‘investing’ in the football team but that investment is always buildings and paying coaches to come. But when it comes to the players, the men who actually play and bring in people to buy shit, you gotta go out and get some other job doing promo work or signing autographs and shit. That shit takes time, right? You think anyone wants to spend their time after practice showing up to a car dealership to sign autographs? Bruh, nobody wants to do that shit. So, don’t get me wrong, it’s better than nothing . . . but it’s just another fucking thing we gotta add to our plate when we should just be able to get some of the pie.

Kurt Weiss, who played prior to the NIL era, had a positive view of the change:

I’m all for it. I can remember before it passed, there was a very paternalistic comment I think from [the athletic director of a Big 10 school] about wanting to protect these kids from exploitation. And I was just thinking, you want to protect your exclusive right to exploit them. . . . Their previous deal was as bad as it gets: zero. So, you know, if you sign a bad deal and make $5000, better than zero.

Ryan Leonard saw it similarly: ‘It is a step in the right direction, but it is a half measure upon a half measure than what should be done’. Indeed, for most players, the benefits are minimal. Steven Summers explained,

I had one with Body Armor, the sports drink company [shows bottle]. They do a program for college athletes. It’s not a monetary deal, they basically just send me Body Armor and I do Instagram posts and stuff like that. And then this company called Brighton Smile that’s a teeth whitening thing. I signed up with them, where I’m basically like a brand ambassador, so they give me a discount code that then, if people buy the products using my code, then I get like a 25% kickback from the profits. It’s like, small stuff, you know. I think I’ve only made . . . like a couple hundred [dollars] . . . . And like, my mom was one of the people that bought one [laughs] . . . . I would say that’s most people’s experience. Some guys have reached out to some company that they like, and they’ll just send them a package just for an Instagram post or whatever. Little stuff like that.

Charlie Rogers was thus fairly cynical about NIL:

This might sound a little harsh, but it’s just as good as painting Black Lives Matter on the street or passing that Stop Asian Hate bill. Because, in reality, the government did a Stop Asian Hate bill, yet lynching is still not outlawed, and has been repeatedly rejected over decades. And people are painting all these signs and all that shit. Yet, you know, a lot of Black people still can’t get the services they need, and still have to resort to committing crimes in the environment that was not created by them. So, pretty much, NIL, it only benefits star players. If you’re a walk-on, or if you’re on scholarship, but you’re not getting playing time, you’re still going to have to stretch $400 a month, while your teammate got a million dollar deal with somebody . . . . it only benefits those who get on the field . . . If you’re not making any money, you’re pretty much worthless.

Wallace Bell was similarly blunt: ‘The NCAA is basically relying on other organizations outside of them to pay the players instead of them paying their players for themselves’.

Conclusion

Of course, it is a basic tenet of justice that, even under the most advanced capitalist systems, workers should receive wages for their labor. Although the scholarly literature on college sport has reached relative consensus that the industry is a prime site of exploitation—understood in both normative and strictly technical economic senses—little of that scholarship has addressed how college athletes themselves perceive their playing/working conditions, particularly the football players who perform the most value-intensive labor. Few have even explored the potential question of how equipped (or more likely, ill-equipped) college football players are to see their work as work (and corresponding exploitation as such) in part because of the very tension between ‘work’ and ‘play’ in their profession. In asking the players in our study whether they consider college football a form of extracurricular ‘play’ or a form of ‘work’, we found that while some might consider aspects of football playful and enjoyable, campus athletic workers are largely resolute in their conclusion that big-time college football is labor—uncompensated (or at the very least under-compensated) work. Indeed, this tension between ‘work’ and ‘play’ was experienced by college football players, highlighting the ways that big-time college football relies on ideological mystifications to obfuscate and thus effectuate the reproduction of exploitation. Remarkably, many athletes saw through the façade of football as ‘play’ in their understanding of their working conditions and were thus able to recognize their position as an exploited working class. While the lack of pay was consistently viewed as a source of significant alienation, in part reflected by the sense that a transition to the NFL, although brutal in terms of working conditions as well as statistically improbable, was a tremendous relief from the simple standpoint of finally receiving the bare fruits of their work, our interviews also revealed that even if compensated, campus athletic workers will continue to experience the extraction of surplus from their productive process and therefore remain, as all workers in a capitalist enterprise, exploited and alienated in a very real sense. Based on these findings, we thus argue that we cannot consider college football principally from the perspective of play for the very fact that it masks not only the racialized exploitation of participants, but also the myriad beneficiaries who are able to benefit materially, culturally, and symbolically, off of the work of campus athletic workers.

In the end, from the elite player under-compensated for his production to the walk-on, from the NFL-bound star to the player who suffers a career-ending injury, college football is defined by exploitation. This is a system that produces alienation from the pleasures of the game through the extraction of value that benefits so many others above those who work to make it possible. Although there are legitimate questions to be asked about the moral viability of US college football from the perspective of the racialized nature of its exploitative structure (i.e. Hawkins, 2010), the demands it places on the educational experiences of players (i.e. Lanter and Hawkins, 2013) and the inherent physical sacrifice required to sustain the sport and its attendant political economy (i.e. Mez et al., 2017), what is clear from the testimony of former players is that the only legitimate pathway forward for the commodity spectacle that is college football is a formal acknowledgment of the employment relationship between player and university and the requisite compensation (and, ideally, collective bargaining rights) that follow from that. To offer Ryan Leonard the final word,

If you look at it critically and without the propaganda that has been spewed, if you look at it from a clear value given, value received relationship, it is an employee-employer relationship. We provide a service, a phenomenally valuable service to an institution and yet they have limited the amount of value that we can receive in return.